“Look around,” Piedmont wrote. “American missiles fly every few days, with perfect success. It's revolutionary. Although there is still a need for more providers in certain market segments, those opportunities are decreasing. To succeed in such a demanding endeavor as scaling up an orbital launch program, you need deep motivation around your mission and potential impact, from many stakeholders. As the launch market matured, those motivations became thinner and our path to making a major contribution as a commercial launch company became significantly narrower.”
Over the past fifty years, three American companies have credibly competed to develop rockets in the 1-ton class in terms of lifting capacity. ABL competes with Relativity Space and Firefly to commercialize its rockets. ABL never got off the ground. In March 2023, Relativity reached space on the Terran 1 rocket, but failed to reach orbit due to problems in the second stage. Within weeks, Relativity announced it was shifting its focus to a medium-lift rocket, Terran R. Since then, the California-based launch company has moved on, but there are persistent rumors that it is facing a cash crunch.
Of the three, only Firefly has had success. The company's Alpha rocket has reached orbit multiple times, and this week Firefly announced it had completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. The 1-ton rocket wars are over: Firefly has won.
Focused on defense
Just as Relativity turned away from this class of rockets, ABL will now also shift its focus – this time in an even more radical direction.
US defense spending on missile production and defense has skyrocketed since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and ABL will now look to tap into this potentially lucrative market.
“We have made the decision to focus our efforts on national defense, and specifically on missile defense technologies,” Piemont said. “We will have more to share about our roadmap and traction in this area soon. For now, suffice it to say that we see significant opportunity to leverage RS1, GS0, the E2 engine and the rest of the technology we've developed so far. to enable a new kind of research effort around missile defense technologies.”
