$FLY (+5,38%) is the most expensive way to believe in the wrong theory, and at the same time the cheapest way to believe in the right one. Which of the two is true depends on a single program that won’t take flight until 2027.
The current operational picture: Revenue in the first quarter of 2026 was $80.9 million, up 45 percent year-over-year, and about $6 million above analysts’ estimates. The non-GAAP loss per share was $0.46, six cents better than expected. Firefly is thus clearly in the scaling phase, but still far from profitability—which should come as no surprise for a company with only a single established launch vehicle.
That launch vehicle is Alpha, a small-lift vehicle that completed exactly one orbital flight in 2025. By comparison, Rocket Lab’s Electron achieved 21 launches in the same year with a 100 percent success rate. That is the core of the problem the market is pricing in for Firefly. A launch cadence of one is not a launch business; it is a prototype with customer contracts.
What makes the name relevant nonetheless is Blue Ghost. With Mission I in March 2025, Firefly achieved the only fully successful private lunar landing to date, including complete fulfillment of the mission profile on the surface. That was enough for NASA to engage Firefly on a recurring basis. Ten payloads on the last mission, a new $75 million contract from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for four drones to the lunar South Pole as part of the MoonFall program, plus a $109 million Space Force engineering contract. At the moment, Firefly is less a launch company with a lunar business and more a lunar business with launch ambitions.
The real driver of its stock price lies elsewhere—namely, with Eclipse, the medium-lift program in an exclusive partnership with Northrop Grumman. Market entry is not expected until 2027 at the earliest. Until then, any valuation of Firefly is essentially a bet on a program that hasn’t flown yet, with a partner handling the technical heavy lifting while Firefly gains commercial access to the medium-lift market without bearing the full development burden. This is structurally sound, but it also shifts part of the value creation to Northrop.
Valuation: P/S ratio at around 26x, making it cheaper than Rocket Lab (around 33x) and significantly cheaper than SpaceX (around 115x since the IPO). The IPO itself took place in August 2025 at $45, followed by a drop in the share price by about half after an explosion on the test stand during development. The stock has since traded mostly below the offering price, which is more normal than alarming for a company at this stage of development.
The sober assessment: Firefly is not a substitute for Rocket Lab, but a different bet. Investors holding Rocket Lab are buying into a diversified business that is already closer to generating cash flow, albeit with integration risks stemming from the Iridium acquisition. Those who buy Firefly are essentially buying two warrants in one stock: one for Eclipse starting in 2027, and the other for a continued NASA lunar program. The valuation is lower because the proof is yet to be provided. This is not a contradiction; it is the price for the risk.