Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to the Rundown, interview edition. Today, we are talking to Jason Kim, the CEO of Firefly Aerospace. Firefly is one of the up-and-coming space companies that has gotten a lot of attention lately.
Chapter 2: What is Firefly Aerospace and its significance in the space industry?
They IPO'd last year, they became the first commercial company to successfully land on the moon. But Firefly isn't just a moon company, they also build rockets, they're building defense tech for the US military, including software that's already being used in active military defense.
So in today's conversation with Jason, we get into everything, what Firefly actually does, what he thinks the next wave of growth is coming from, their recent partnership with NVIDIA, and the best and worst parts of being a CEO of a space company. This was a really fun and insightful conversation. I think you guys are going to really like it. So let's get into it.
Jason Kim, welcome to The Rundown.
Hey, nice to be here, Zaid. Appreciate you having us and recognizing Firefly.
I'm super excited. I really appreciate you giving us the time. Really excited for today's conversation. Before we talk about Firefly, you know, you guys are hot right now. Space is hot right now. Before we kind of dig into the space industry, I want to learn more about your background. How did you go? What was your background like and how did you end up running a space company?
Well, I mean, I have a background growing up in Texas, went into the military. There's a school called the Air Force Academy that I attended and I wanted to be a fighter pilot. And because of eyesight and such, I wasn't able to do that. But I still learned electrical engineering and that engineering curiosity really drew me into engineering. you know, doing, you know, technology.
And so my first job out of the Air Force Academy was running, you know, uncrewed aerial vehicle programs. And so it was amazing because I saw how technology can really help, you know, defend our nation. And so that was really, you know, before UAVs were popular. And then you saw what happened during 9-11 and the UAVs just proliferated.
And so I got to see how innovation happens at a very fast pace. And then I got transitioned to L.A., Los Angeles, and I got to go and do spacecraft programs, small sats and rockets and ground systems. And really got to learn about that industry through that job and met with every single company out there. and really just fell in love with space.
And after that assignment, I decided to go into industry and I worked at great places like Northrop Grumman and Boeing and Raytheon. But one of the jobs that I had was I became CEO of a company called Millennium Space Systems and it was there where we were building a bunch of national security satellites, that I was a customer of Firefly. And I got to launch my satellite.
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Chapter 3: How did Jason Kim's background influence his role at Firefly?
And even in the recent conflict in Iran, first 30 days, it was capturing 1,000 missile messages to keep our people safe and our allies safe. So we're very proud of that part of our company. And that really made us a full hardware and software stack company. We have the end-to-end ecosystem.
to launch our satellites, build our satellites, operate our satellites, put processing on our satellites where SciTech AI algorithms can do applications from orbit. And this is all the way from Earth to low Earth orbit to medium Earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit, all the way to the moon. And then beyond. And so we're very complimentary with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
We buy some of their rockets. We host some of their payloads on the moon. And we want to do more and more because the future is going to be interoperable. The future is there's no one single company that can do it all. And we want to work together. And those that know space, they want to work with Firefly.
So how we see the future is we're lighting the path to a bold space ecosystem that's expanding humanity's future. And that's everything from what we do processing all the data from space on Earth, on orbit, Leo, Mio, Geo, all the way to the moon and beyond.
So that's very interesting. You don't just see yourself as like a rocket launch company. You're also doing like the full stack experience down to the software. So I guess I want to kind of dig into that a little bit because, you know, I think the flagship product for Firefly was the Alpha Rocket. Like you mentioned earlier, you were customers of theirs early on.
And I think that's focused on launching smaller satellites. But that's a pretty crowded arena. So how does Firefly kind of stick out in that crowded arena? full stack control?
Yeah, I mean, if you look at our revenues from 2025 from our last earnings call, you'll see that 20% of our revenues were generated from our launch side of the business and 80% was from our spacecraft side of the business, which includes SciTech.
And so you could see that even from the financial data, we're not just a launch company, but I will say launch is something that is very, very it's necessary to do everything in space going forward. It's almost like a moat. If you don't have launch, then you can't launch your own things into space, and then you can't operate and generate revenue by providing services from space.
So having an end-to-end full stack hardware and software capability of launch, landing, orbiting as well as operating in space, it really puts us in a really unique position to do more and more missions from space. And so I think that's kind of, you know, where we're going, you know, we see a future where We're processing more in space.
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Chapter 4: What recent achievements has Firefly Aerospace accomplished?
You know, I got to say, I mean, running a space company, being the CEO of a space company sounds really cool, a lot of cool stuff like you just talked about. What's the most stressful part about doing it? Because, I mean, I got to imagine, like, you know, especially for rocket launchers, I know you guys had some trouble ā
early on with some of your alpha launches and you're probably thinking like, oh my God, now what is the stock price doing? The investor base, like, is that the most stressful part? Because like one failed launch and then who knows what the stock price is doing and people are asking questions and the sentiment just changes, you know, just like that.
Yeah, the thing that keeps me up at night is the world is contested. Space is contested. There's a lot of threats. And being a veteran myself and having the defense background, I want to make sure that our company is doing everything we can to keep our nation and our allies safe. And so how do we deliver our rockets?
How do we deliver our lunar landers and our spacecraft and our AI processing so that we can keep our U.S. and our allies safe and then continue to expand humanity's future by having all this innovation? That really is stressful, is making sure that we keep ahead of the threats. But when it comes to delivering on cost and schedule, we have an amazing team here.
And the things that reduce that stress is we come up with a plan, we execute it, we adapt, we continue to innovate, and we become more productive, and we steadily increase our capacity year to year. That's what keeps the stress away. But there are certain things that are out of our control, like the threats that are out there.
Do you ever feel like a part of your job has to be controlling investor expectations, the public's expectations? Because, you know, I think one of the concerns that investors might have is like, hey, the space industry, it's really hot right now. A lot of you guys are doing some really cool stuff. Firefly is doing some really cool stuff.
Maybe the valuation has gotten too rich or like maybe the business model fully isn't figured out yet and the profitability might not be there. So do you feel like you have to kind of control expectations from the investor base or just the public at large?
You know, I think it's not controlling. It's more educating. And once we educate, you know, the public about how important what we're doing is, you know, I'll give you an example. 18 months ago, no one cared about the moon as much as they do today.
Yeah.
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