Fast Five With Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim

Early in his career, Jason Kim, a former Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and U.S. Air Force program manager, joined Millennium Space Systems, which was then a 20-person satellite component manufacturer. He became Millennium’s CEO in 2020, two years after it was acquired by Boeing. Millennium won a U.S. Space Force contract to demonstrate a tactically responsive space mission known as Victus Nox in partnership with launch provider Firefly Aerospace. When Firefly’s CEO position opened in July, Kim left Millennium to lead the Cedar Park, Texas, company. As Firefly prepares to enter the lunar and in-space services markets and expand its family of launch vehicles, Kim spoke with Aviation Week editors Vivienne Machi and Irene Klotz.

What brought you to Firefly? I was in the Mission Operations Center with Firefly for the Victus Nox launch, and if you see a video of me, I’m just in shock. The only time I experienced this is when I had my firstborn child. I had never seen such a flawless launch and second-stage deployment and then final spacecraft deployment. I was so excited about coming over to Firefly because of the people who made that happen. That’s the secret sauce at the end of the day—the people.

What I want to bring to Firefly is the creation of new missions, new capabilities, new services, new technologies that people haven’t even thought of yet but which Firefly is going to implement and execute.

How do you see the services and products that Firefly has made available to the commercial and civilian space sector aligning with national security space missions? The future is going to be a blend of all three capabilities. We’re seeing a lot of high-tech companies needing a ride to space. But we’re also seeing a lot of growth in commercial payload services, such as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program at NASA. A lot of the services that are going to be provided on the Moon are going to be revenue-generating someday.

Cislunar space also is the ultimate high ground. National security is always trying to get ahead of our adversaries. We know that there are other countries that are exploiting the Moon, and we are staying ahead of that threat. Having the capability to take technology from commercial customers, NASA or from national security missions and leverage that so every one of those markets can take advantage of that new tech, business models and capabilities is the future.

What percentage of Firefly’s current business is commercial, civil and Defense Department? The majority is commercial just because of the sheer number of Alpha rocket launches. We have more than 50 Alphas backlogged. Going forward, it’s going to be more 50-50 because we have not only the Alpha vehicle, but [also] a new medium-launch vehicle (MLV) for commercial megaconstellation-kind of launch services and the National Security Space Launch program, which needs more capacity in 2026 and beyond for the 16-metric-ton capability that MLV provides. On top of that, Firefly’s Blue Ghost program is mainly for NASA, but it is part of the CLPS program that encourages commercial capabilities to ride on the lunar lander itself.

Finally, we have Elytra [a flexible, in-space services and hosting spacecraft]. That’s something that commercial, NASA and national security space can take advantage of, but I see more of a need for dynamic space operations and multipath communications from the national security side of the fence. I think we’re going to be a 50-50 commercial/government business in the future.

What are the opportunities for Elytra once it is launched in 2025? Elytra is multimission. It’s got a lot of fuel, a lot of payload-carrying capacity. In the next five years, I think it’ll be a big part of the revenue generation and the end-to-end mission capability that Firefly provides in the future.

It’s perfectly sized to launch as an addition to an Alpha launch. If you get to a certain orbit and you don’t want to expand your own vehicle’s delta V or propulsion, you can have Alpha deliver you to an even more mission-specific, unique orbit so that your vehicle can extend its own mission duration or carry more powerful payloads on the vehicle by using Elytra as another stage.

What is next for Firefly? The Blue Ghost lunar lander is our next big mission. It has successfully completed all of its environmental testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and it has returned to our factory in Cedar Park.

The next step is to ship it to Cape [Canaveral], and then it will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It’ll be 60 days after launch to transit to lunar orbit and then land. We’ll have two weeks to perform all of the science missions from the lander’s payloads. We’re going through a lot of mission rehearsals and simulations, as you’d expect, so we can increase the probability of sticking the landing.