AUSTIN, Texas — NASA selected Firefly Aerospace to launch a trio of Earth science smallsats that will study the formation of storms.
The agency said March 4 that it awarded a task order through its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to Firefly to launch the three-satellite Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) mission. NASA did not disclose the value of the task order, a practice it has followed on other VADR awards.
The INCUS satellites will launch on a Firefly Alpha rocket from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA did not disclose a launch date in its announcement but Firefly, in its own statement, said the launch would take place as soon as 2026. The INCUS mission is working towards a launch in October 2026, according to its website.
INCUS will fly three smallsats, each weighing about 100 kilograms, using a Blue Canyon Technologies bus. The satellites will be equipped with Ka-band radars to study cloud convection to better understand the formation of storms. One of the spacecraft will also have a microwave radiometer to track larger-scale weather conditions. The spacecraft will fly in formation, with the second spacecraft flying 30 second behind the first and the third 90 seconds behind the second to help scientists measure vertical transport within the storms.
“We strategically built our one-metric-ton Alpha rocket to support dedicated missions like INCUS,” Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said in a statement. “This allows our customers to place their satellites in the exact orbit they need and use their mission-critical resources to immediately begin conducting research and making advancements in science.”
Firefly said it will launch the mission from Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, which has been used by Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket and will also be used by Alpha and the future MLV rocket. Adam Oakes, vice president of launch vehicles at Firefly, said at a conference in January that the first Alpha launch from Wallops was projected for early 2026.
Oakes said at the same event that Firefly was planning five Alpha launches in 2025, all from Vandenberg Space Force Base, the site of all the company’s Alpha launches to date. The first of those, carrying a Lockheed Martin LM400 satellite, is expected to take place in about two weeks, Kim said during an interview March 2 after the successful landing of the company’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander.
“We’re going to launch more than once a quarter this year,” he projected, moving into “double-digit” launches of Alpha next year. The company has large contracts with L3Harris and Lockheed Martin for the vehicle, along with a contract last month from the Space Force for the Victus Sol responsive space mission.
