The American company Firefly Aerospace expanded its production campus in Texas and opened a new innovation laboratory. Now it is preparing for serial production of lunar landing modules and orbital vehicles.
The newly created campus is intended for assembly and testing of devices, mission management, production of avionics and components, engineering and business operations. It is twice the size of the company's previous facilities. The campus is located less than 50 kilometers from Rocket Ranch in Briggs, where the company has six test stands and more 20 000 square meters of buildings for development, production and integration of launch vehicles.
A key part of the expansion will be a new clean room, the area of which will be four times larger than the existing one. This facility will be used for the flow production of Blue Ghost lunar landers and Elytra orbiters. Blue Ghost already confirmed its reliability back in March 2025 year, when the device successfully landed on the moon and fulfilled NASA's science program. Now the company plans to turn this landing module into a serial product, capable of supporting several lunar missions per year as part of NASA's Lunar Base Initiative.
An innovative laboratory called Gloworks became a separate object of the new campus. It is focused on the rapid development of technologies in the areas of propulsion systems, carbon composites, robotics and 3D printing. The laboratory is equipped with 3D printers, in particular for working with titanium, plasma cutters, equipment for the production of composite materials, welding machines and automated milling machines. According to Firefly CTO Shea Ferring, Gloworks develops solutions for fundamentally new tasks, from the survival of vehicles during the moonlit night to the controlled deorbiting of spent space vehicles.
In parallel, the company continues to modernize Rocket Ranch. Recently, two new mezzanine levels were installed there, that added close 2 800 square meters of production and engineering areas. in addition, Firefly upgrades the Eclipse engine test bench to test multiple engines simultaneously and increase the pace of inspections. The Alpha rocket stage stand is also being upgraded to simplify operations and improve the reliability of ground systems.