This is

CVS, I am the world.

Behind the Black.

I'm John Bachelor.

I welcome Bob Zimmerman.

It is Happy Birthday Behind the black, 14 years, the anniversary, and your subscriptions

and donations are welcome and much appreciated to keep Bob going, watching for the extremely complicated story of commercial space.

Space ports, boosters, recoverability, SpaceX of course, and Mr. Musk's's ambition but there are a lot of other

ambitious characters and then there's big space to watch especially says Bob the

Chinese Communist Party's big space.

Bob, a very good evening too.

We're going to start with commercial space.

What is Firefly?

Good evening, John.

Firefly is one of the rocket startup companies that have been developing in the U.S. and

worldwide actually in the last four, five years.

All after NASA and a lot of government agencies in the West decided to stop building things themselves

and instead hire private companies to do things.

It's all following SpaceX, which forced the whole change in the whole industry.

And Firefly had launched a bunch of times with mixed success, but they had been launching.

There have a rocket called the Alpha Rocket. Well this past week, the

evening before July 4th, July 3rd, they did a successful launch. This was a launch paid for by NASA. It carried eight small

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