Firefly Aerospace has been awarded a fixed-price NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract for a dedicated Alpha launch of the agency’s Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) mission from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
As part of NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder program, INCUS is a NASA Earth Venture-Mission with three satellites that will study why, when, and where tropical storms form to help advance climate change models.
Once deployed, three INCUS satellites will fly in tight coordination to study the behavior of tropical storms and thunderstorms, including how storm systems form, evolve, and dissipate. According to NASA, each satellite will have a high frequency precipitation radar that observes rapid changes in convective cloud depth and intensities. One of the three satellites also will carry a microwave radiometer to provide the spatial content of the larger scale weather observed by the radars. By flying so closely together, the satellites will use the slight differences in when they make observations to apply a novel time-differencing approach to estimate the vertical transport of convective mass.
The INCUS mission will launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad 0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility that supports both Alpha and Firefly’s Medium Launch Vehicle. INCUS will be Firefly’s third Alpha launch for NASA – the first launched successfully last summer and the second is scheduled from Vandenberg Space Force Base for NASA QuickSounder in 2026.
Firefly’s Alpha rocket is the only commercially operational launch vehicle dedicated to serving the one-metric ton satellite market. The flight-proven vehicle provides responsive, reliable, and cost-competitive launch services directly to customers’ preferred orbits.
“Firefly offers our customers responsive operations and mission flexibility with launch sites on the East and West Coast of the United States and internationally,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace.
“We strategically built our one metric ton Alpha rocket to support dedicated missions like INCUS. This allows our customers to place their satellites in the exact orbit they need and use their mission-critical resources to immediately begin conducting research and making advancements in science.”
About Firefly Aerospace
Firefly Aerospace is an end-to-end space transportation company with launch, lunar, and on-orbit services. Headquartered in central Texas, Firefly is a portfolio company of AE Industrial Partners (“AEI”) focused on delivering responsive, reliable, and affordable space access for government and commercial customers. Firefly’s small- to medium-lift launch vehicles, lunar landers, and orbital vehicles provide the space industry with a single source for missions from low Earth orbit to the surface of the Moon and beyond.