I'm John Batchler. I welcome my good colleague Bob Zimmerman. He keeps the website behind the black. Space engineering,

Firefly, ready to go. Bob, a very good evening to you. Remind, what is Firefly?

Firefly is a rocket startup. They also have a lunar lander, which is successfully landed on the moon.

They're the only private company ever to successfully do that.

That's called Blue Ghost.

Their rocket, the Alpha Rocket, had launched seven times previously with a very mixed bag of results.

The last launch back in April of last year, almost a year ago, had been a failure.

The upper stage didn't do what it was supposed to do.

There was a problem during stage separation.

So the company spent actually the last year reworking the Alpha Rocket extensively.

And this past weekend, this past week, they finally successfully launched Alpha again on a test launch, no payload. And this test launch was actually

the last launch of this older version of Alpha. They used this launch to test

a bunch of the technology they're going to be used in an upgraded version that will be on the next

launch. And it was successful launch for them. This was a breakthrough. This is getting them

past the problems they've been having with their rocket. The next alpha launch later this year, I hope, will be with the upgraded, more powerful alpha

with all of the fixes put in to prevent the problems they had with the first version.

So that was a success, John.

Starship Super Heavy, Boko Chica.

What's the date, Bob, for the launch?

All right.

So there's been, it's been a while since the previous, the 11th test flight of Starship Super Heavy.

And now, SpaceX has had a few problems along the way or issues they've had to deal with.

...