By Paul R. La Monica

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander successfully touched down on the moon in March. Now Firefly faces another big challenge: Trying to convince Wall Street that its stock could be the next IPO moonshot.

Firefly will price its initial public offering after the closing bell Wednesday. Demand should be strong. Earlier this week, Firefly boosted the price range of the IPO to $41 to $43 a share from a previous range of $35 to $39.

Firefly would be valued at more than $6.1 billion at a price of $43 and will raise nearly $700 million from the stock sale at that price. Shares 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, 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 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. This 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 of 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

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August 06, 2025 13:45 ET (17:45 GMT)

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