Just over two minutes after liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Thursday, September 2, Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket exploded, bringing its first test flight to a fiery and abrupt end.
In a statement released by Firefly — which is one of the most recent in a wave of New Space industry companies launching medium-level rockets to space — the Alpha rocket experienced an “anomaly resulting in an early end of the mission.” The company added that although the mission was terminated, there was much that was successful about the launch.
“While we did not meet all of our mission objectives, we did achieve a number of them: successful first-stage ignition, liftoff of the pad, progression to supersonic speed, and we obtained a substantial amount of flight data.”