Overview
- Firefly announced Wednesday that it has signed a commercial agreement with Starcloud to carry the company’s SC-1L AI processor on its Elytra orbital vehicle.
- The Starcloud payload is slated for Firefly’s third lunar mission, a flight targeted for no earlier than 2028 that company statements describe as a demonstration rather than a completed deployment.
- Elytra will first act as a transfer and communications relay for Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander at the Gruithuisen Domes and then remain in lunar orbit for up to five years to host Starcloud’s demo and other customer services.
- Onboard processing will connect Starcloud’s SC-1L to Firefly’s Solux vision system and use in-orbit compute (Firefly also partners with NVIDIA for Jetson processing of Ocula imaging) to reduce the amount of raw data sent to Earth.
- The announcement triggered a roughly 5–6% rise in Firefly’s stock and highlights growing commercial interest in space‑based data centers, though company materials warn the plan is forward‑looking and faces technical and schedule risks.