Firefly IPO: Stock Pops 34% in Trading Debut

Commercial space company Firefly Aerospace is launching an initial public offering. (Courtesy Firefly)

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander successfully touched down on the moon in March. Now, Firefly faces another big challenge: Trying to turn its stock into the next IPO moonshot. It looks like it might succeed.

Firefly opened for trading Thursday at a price of $70 a share, 56% above the initial public offering price of $45 that was set after the closing bell Wednesday. That was higher than the expected range of $41 to $43 a share, which was already an increase from a previous range of $35 to $39.

Shares ended the day just above $60, up 34%. They reached a peak of $73.80 at one point before pulling back. At Thursday’s closing price, Firefly is valued at $8.6 billion.

Firefly also boosted the size of the IPO. It will raise nearly $870 million from the stock sale. It is selling 19.3 million shares, up from an original proposal of 16.2 million shares.

Created with Highcharts 9.0.1Firefly AerospaceStock ticker: FLYSource: FactSetAs of Aug. 8, 3:59 p.m. ET

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The stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol FLY.

The company isn’t profitable, and revenue is relatively small. But it has a backlog of $1.1 billion and is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. It announced in late July that it just received another a $176.7 million NASA contract to deliver five NASA-sponsored payloads to the Moon’s south pole in 2029.

Firefly also has contracts with big defense contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, L3Harris Technologies, and Northrop Grumman, which has invested $50 million in it.

The company works with the government’s Space Force military division and has a partnership with Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-backed space exploration company.

Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in an interview with Barron’s Thursday that the company is planning on annual Blue Ghost missions to the moon with NASA in addition to more launches with Space Force and commercial customers. Kim added that Firefly is also targeting the first launch of its reusable 16-metric ton rocket, Eclipse, for late 2026.

Firefly and several other start-ups are looking to capitalize on a resurgent IPO market in the past few months. Medical imaging company Heartflow and data center operator WhiteFiber are also set to debut this week. Heartflow increased the size of its offering late Wednesday and raised its price range. It could begin trading on Friday.

WhiteFiber priced its IPO at $17, the high end of its range, and raised the size of its stock sale. But the stock ended the day down more than 4.5%.

The healthy debut for Firefly follows the successful IPOs of design software firm Figma, drone maker AIRO, stablecoin company Circle Internet Group, and Nvidia-backed cloud/artificial intelligence leader CoreWeave. All have soared from their IPO prices.

There is increased fascination with space and defense companies in general. “We’re seeing a potential banner year for space and defense tech when it comes to venture capital,” said Ali Javaheri, emerging technology analyst at PitchBook, in an email to Barron’s. Private space tech companies HEO, Impulse Space, and True Anomaly have all raised substantial amounts in VC funding this year.

“Public markets are reflecting this momentum too,” Javaheri added. “The Firefly IPO is very much in line with this trend. With rising geopolitical tensions and soaring defense budgets globally, investors are clearly betting on space and defense as growth sectors.”

Firefly will join a growing list of publicly traded firms with ties to the business of launching rockets, such as smaller Firefly competitor Intuitive Machines, plus Karman Holdings and Voyager Technologies, which both went public earlier this year.

“Everyone understands the value of space for defense security. So that’s a business opportunity,” said Micah Walter-Range, president of space consulting firm Caelus Partners and a contributor to the S-Network Space Index, in an interview with Barron’s. Asset management firm Procure uses the index to manage its passively run Procure Space exchange-traded fund, which trades under the cutesy symbol UFO.

“Firefly has been delivering on some of its ambitions. It’s a good time for them to go public. It makes sense,” Walter-Range added. “If they use the money from the IPO wisely, they can capitalize on government and commercial opportunities.”

Walter-Range noted that Firefly likely wouldn’t be added to its index until a semiannual rebalancing later this year. But Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest has a Space Exploration & Innovation ETF, too, while VanEck has a Space Innovators ETF that also has a gimmicky ticker: JEDI.

There also is a SPDR S&P Aerospace & Defense ETF. All four of these space ETFs currently own shares of Intuitive Machines. So it seems likely that they may eventually invest in Firefly.

Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com