Firefly Aerospace’s roller coaster ride could soon send the rocket startup to the public market via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, a recent filing with the FCC suggests, TechCrunch reports.
Aerospace private equity firm AE Industrial Partners (AEI) announced last month that it had reached an agreement to acquire a “significant stake” in Firefly after its largest shareholder, Ukrainian Max Polyakov, was forced to sell his shares over national security concerns. A recent FCC filing provides new details of the deal, including that it involves a special purpose acquisition vehicle.
The new FCC filing, which relates to a proposed launch of Firefly’s second Alpha rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this spring, adds that the acquisition involved “the majority of Firefly Aerospace’s equity” and was by “special purpose acquisition vehicles controlled by AE Industrial Partners.”
The move would not be unprecedented for AEI. In 2020, the private equity firm that specializes in aerospace, defense and power generation bought Deep Space Systems and then combined it will a previously acquired company Adcole Space to form the space infrastructure company called Redwire. AEI took Redwire public last September via a SPAC merger. Read more.
