Firefly Aerospace ($FLY) Stock Hub 2026: Q2 Results on August 11, the Lock-Up That Expires the Same Day and the Two Backlog Numbers

01 Next scheduled event: second quarter 2026 results on August 11, 2026

This is the only confirmed date on the near-term calendar. On July 15, 2026 Firefly announced that it will release financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2026 after market close on Tuesday, August 11, 2026, and will hold a conference call the same day at 4:00 p.m. CT / 5:00 p.m. ET. A live webcast and a replay are to be posted in the Investors section of the company’s website; the results release goes under “News” and the supporting materials under “Events & Resources”. No dial-in number was published in the announcement, which points investors to the webcast instead.

Direct links: the earnings-date announcement of July 15, 2026 · Firefly investor relations · events and resources · Firefly filings on EDGAR.

02 Executive summary

Firefly Aerospace is four businesses stapled to one balance sheet: Alpha small launch, the Eclipse medium-lift vehicle being co-developed with Northrop Grumman, the Blue Ghost lunar lander and Elytra orbital vehicle line, and SciTec, the missile-warning and defense-software business acquired in October 2025. The company listed on Nasdaq on August 8, 2025 at $45.00 per share and has spent the twelve months since demonstrating that the engineering works and that the economics do not, yet.

The operating record is genuinely unusual for a company of this size. Blue Ghost Mission 1 achieved the first fully successful commercial landing on the Moon and ran fourteen days of surface operations. Alpha returned to flight on March 11, 2026 after an April 29, 2025 anomaly and an FAA mishap investigation. Full-year 2025 revenue reached $159.855 million, up 163% on 2024, and Q1 2026 set a quarterly record at $80.879 million.

The financial record is equally unambiguous in the other direction. Firefly lost $298.340 million in 2025 and $96.676 million in Q1 2026 alone. Free cash flow was negative $237.750 million in 2025 and negative $78.890 million in Q1 2026. Cash and short-term investments fell from $892.974 million at December 31, 2025 to $551.626 million at March 31, 2026, though $260.0 million of that movement was the repayment of the revolving credit facility rather than operating burn. The June follow-on added about $181.9 million of net proceeds to the company and $365.8 million to the pocket of the sponsor that sold into it.

Three categories need to be kept apart when reading anything written about this company, because commentary tends to blend them: what is contracted and funded, what is a ceiling on a vehicle that may never be used, and what is an announced intention with no disclosed economics. Firefly has real items in all three columns. The $981 million NITE-STAR figure, the $151 billion SHIELD ceiling and the $3.2 billion Golden Dome pool all belong in the second. None of them is Firefly revenue.

03 Market Data And Peer Comparison

Price and performance figures below are based on the completed session of Friday, August 7, 2026. Float, ownership, short interest, average volume and the consensus target are from Finviz, pulled on the same date. Company financial figures come from SEC filings and company releases, each carrying its own reference date.

Peer comparison, all figures at the August 7, 2026 close

Two prices belong beside the market data. The August 2025 listing was priced at $45.00 and closed its first day at $60.35; the June 2026 follow-on cleared at $48.00. At the August 7 close of $26.71 every share sold in that follow-on is below its issue price, which is the plainest available description of what the twelve-month decline of 55.74% has meant for the holders who funded the company.

On analyst coverage the honest position is a narrow one. The consensus target above is a Finviz aggregate of third-party estimates pulled on August 7, 2026. Individual houses, ratings and note dates were not verified for this update, so no coverage table is presented. A consensus figure without named notes behind it is a market-data point, not research, and it is neither a company figure nor a Merlintrader forecast.

04 Verified developments up to August 4, 2026

The U.S. Space Force announced a pool of fifteen companies for the National Space Test and Training Complex Innovative Technology & Engineering – Space Test and Range program, known as NITE-STAR. The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicle carries a ceiling of up to $981 million and covers two five-year periods. Firefly Aerospace is one of the fifteen, alongside Amentum Technology, BAE Systems, Boeing, CACI, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Pacific Crest Alliance, Parsons, Redwire Space Missions, Rocket Lab, Sierra Space, Viasat and York Space Systems. The program is run by Space Systems Command’s System Delta 81. Firefly has issued no press release on the selection and no task order has been disclosed.

Firefly announced that second quarter 2026 results will be released after the close on August 11, with the conference call the same day at 4:00 p.m. CT / 5:00 p.m. ET. This is the company’s most recent press release of any kind.

A Form D filed with the SEC reports a total offering amount of $22,000,000, all of it sold, in equity securities issued “in connection with the acquisition of all of the outstanding shares of Space-ng Inc.” The date of first sale is given as June 23, 2026 and there were eighteen investors. The filing states a dollar value, not a number of shares, so the exact dilution from the acquisition is still not public.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory awarded Firefly a $13 million subcontract to manufacture, test and deliver the aeroshell, meaning the backshell and heatshield, for the SkyFall Mars mission, which is targeted to launch in late 2028 and would deploy three Mars helicopters. Firefly describes it as the first award coming out of its Gloworks innovation lab, with manufacturing at the Rocket Ranch in Briggs, Texas.

NASA awarded Firefly a $144 million Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract for a near-side mission targeted for 2028 carrying three NASA instruments. Firefly calls it its sixth contracted lunar mission and says it intends to design, build, test and deliver it in roughly two years, about half the time taken by Blue Ghost Mission 1. This is a funded task order, not a ceiling.

Firefly and SSC Space completed the initial infrastructure at Launch Complex 3C at Esrange Space Center: launch control center, payload processing facility, vehicle integration building, tracking and control systems. Final pad construction is under way and the first Alpha launch from Sweden is targeted for 2028. The regulatory path rests on a Technology Safeguards Agreement and a memorandum of cooperation signed between the Swedish National Space Agency and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in April 2026.

Firefly announced the acquisition of Space-ng Inc., a Littleton, Colorado developer of AI-powered vision navigation and autonomous guidance founded in 2024. Its software was used on Blue Ghost Mission 1 to determine position and attitude, detect hazardous terrain and perform two autonomous hazard-avoidance maneuvers during descent. Co-founder Ethan Rublee joined Firefly as Chief Engineer of Software. No purchase price was disclosed in the announcement itself.

Reuters reported, citing a document it had reviewed, that Firefly was expected to secure a $110 million U.S. Export-Import Bank loan with a twelve-month availability period and a ten-year repayment term to fund spacecraft production expansion in Texas, with a board vote scheduled. Firefly has not announced the loan and it does not appear in any SEC filing to date. It should be treated as reported, not as closed financing.

Stockholders elected Jason Kim and Kevin McAllister to terms expiring in 2029 and ratified Grant Thornton LLP as auditor for the year ending December 31, 2026. Kim received 90,751,983 votes for and 6,123,118 withheld; McAllister 88,953,164 for and 7,921,937 withheld.

Twelve million shares changed hands at $48.00: four million newly issued by Firefly and eight million sold by entities affiliated with AE Industrial Partners. Firefly received $182.88 million before expenses and about $181.93 million net; the selling stockholder received $365.76 million before expenses. The underwriters’ 30-day option on a further 1.8 million secondary shares does not appear to have been exercised, as no Form 4 reporting such a sale has been filed.

JPL awarded Firefly $75 million to deliver four drones to the Moon’s south pole no earlier than 2028 using an Elytra Dark vehicle configured to carry 1,000 kilograms. JPL builds the drones and manages the mission and NASA sources the launch vehicle, so Firefly is a subcontractor, not the prime.

Record quarterly revenue of $80.879 million, full-year guidance of $420 million to $450 million reaffirmed, and disclosure that SciTec had been selected to support the space-based interceptor program under Golden Dome. The Space Force awarded twenty other-transaction agreements worth up to a combined $3.2 billion across twelve companies for that program; Firefly has not disclosed the value of its own agreement.

Revolving commitments were increased by $45.0 million to $305.0 million and the interest spread rose by 0.25%, to term SOFR plus 3.25% or an alternative base rate plus 2.25%. The amendment removed the minimum free-cash-flow maintenance covenant and set a minimum liquidity covenant of $381.3 million tested on the last day of every calendar month from April 30, 2026. Debt issuance costs of $1.0 million were incurred.

Alpha Flight 7, “Stairway to Seven”, launched from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Space Force Base on March 11, 2026, completed all stated mission objectives, validated Block II subsystems and deployed a Lockheed Martin demonstrator. Eight days later Firefly reported 2025 revenue of $159.855 million, up 163%, and issued the 2026 revenue forecast of $420 million to $450 million.

05 The numbers behind the story

Every figure in the five charts below is taken from Firefly’s filings with the SEC or from its own results releases. Where a quarterly number is not disclosed directly, the derivation is stated in the caption.

Quarterly revenue, Q1 2025 to Q1 2026 (US$ millions)

Source: Firefly quarterly and annual filings. Exact figures are $55.855M, $15.549M, $30.778M, $57.673M and $80.879M. The shape of this series is the point: Q1 2025 was inflated by the completion of Blue Ghost Mission 1 for a single customer that represented 90.7% of that quarter’s revenue, and the collapse to $15.5 million in Q2 2025 shows what a milestone-driven revenue model looks like when no milestone lands. Second quarter 2026 revenue, due on August 11, is measured against the $15.5 million bar for the year-on-year comparison and against the $80.9 million bar for the sequential one.

Gross margin by quarter (percent of revenue)

Computed as gross profit divided by revenue from the same filings: $2.220M on $55.855M, $3.995M on $15.549M, $8.490M on $30.778M, $15.961M on $57.673M and $17.461M on $80.879M. Bars are scaled to the highest value in the series. The record revenue quarter was also the weakest margin quarter of the last four, which is the single most important thing the Q1 2026 print said about mix. Full-year 2025 margin was 19.2%; full-year 2024 was negative 18.7%.

Backlog versus remaining performance obligations (US$ millions)

Source: the 2025 Form 10-K and the Q1 2026 Form 10-Q. Backlog is a management-defined measure that includes the full expected revenue of awarded contracts and the deferred revenue already collected. Remaining performance obligations is the audited ASC 606 measure of the transaction price allocated to unsatisfied obligations. At March 31, 2026 the second number was 50.5% of the first, and both fell in the quarter. Of the backlog, $344.8 million relates to executed multi-launch agreements for which no mission has yet been scheduled, and that figure has been unchanged at $344.8 million at all three dates shown.

Cash and short-term investments (US$ millions)

Source: the 2025 Form 10-K, the Q1 2026 Form 10-Q and the capitalization table in the June 1, 2026 prospectus, which shows $733.556 million on an as-adjusted basis giving effect to the offering as though it had closed on March 31. The pro-forma bar therefore contains no operating cash use after March 31 and the real June 30 balance, to be disclosed on August 11, will be lower. The final bar is not a balance but the $381.3 million minimum liquidity that the April 3, 2026 credit amendment requires the company to hold at the end of every calendar month.

Share count, actual and fully loaded (millions of shares)

Sources: quarterly and annual filings for the historical counts, and the June 1, 2026 prospectus for the award and reserve detail as of April 30, 2026. “Plus awards” adds 14,212,815 options at a weighted-average exercise price of $1.32, 5,188,484 restricted stock units and 646,464 warrants exercisable at $21.1725 to the 164,235,217 shares outstanding after the offering. “Plus plan reserves” adds a further 19,644,816 shares reserved under the 2025 Plan and 3,215,000 under the employee stock purchase plan. None of these figures includes the shares issued for Space-ng, whose count has not been disclosed. The jump from 13.2 million to 148.1 million is the August 2025 IPO, at which 105.8 million preferred shares converted into common stock and 22.2 million new shares were sold.

06 What the company actually does

Firefly reports revenue in two lines only: Launch and Spacecraft Solutions. In Q1 2026 Launch produced $13.252 million and Spacecraft Solutions $67.627 million, so more than 83% of revenue came from the non-launch side. A year earlier the split was $5.170 million and $50.685 million. Anyone valuing Firefly primarily as a rocket company is valuing the smaller sixth of the business.

Headcount was 1,409 full-time and nine part-time employees at December 31, 2025, and the company reported no revenue and no material property outside the United States for Q1 2026 despite the Swedish and offshore launch ambitions. Everything international is still cost, not yet income.

07 Financial position and what to watch in the next print

Three of these lines deserve to be read together. The cash decline from $792.966 million to $326.179 million looks alarming until the cash-flow statement is opened: $260.0 million went to repaying the revolving credit facility and $125.0 million went into time deposits that sit one line lower on the same balance sheet. Actual operating burn was $62.545 million. Liquidity is properly measured as cash plus short-term investments, and burn is properly measured as free cash flow.

The second is the relationship between revenue and research spending. Firefly spent $0.83 on research and development for every dollar of revenue in the quarter, and another $0.56 on selling, general and administrative costs. There is no revenue level at which that structure produces a profit; the structure has to change, and that means either much higher revenue against a flat cost base or a deliberate slowing of one of the development programs.

The third is the covenant. The April 3, 2026 amendment removed the free-cash-flow maintenance test and replaced the liquidity test with a fixed $381.3 million floor checked at the end of every month. Starting from $551.6 million at March 31 and adding roughly $181.9 million of net offering proceeds gives about $733.6 million of headroom on a pro-forma basis. At the Q1 free-cash-flow rate of $78.9 million a quarter, that is a long runway; but it is a covenant, not a target, and the company also has to fund Eclipse, lander production and two acquisitions inside it.

08 The guidance arithmetic

Firefly issued its 2026 revenue forecast of $420 million to $450 million on March 19, 2026 and reaffirmed it on May 4. First quarter revenue was $80.879 million. That leaves $339.1 million to $369.1 million to be recognized across the remaining three quarters, an average of $113.0 million to $123.0 million each.

That is the whole guidance question in one paragraph. Firefly needs each of the next three quarters to be forty to fifty per cent larger than the best quarter it has ever reported, and roughly twice the size of the quarter before that. It is not impossible: revenue on long-duration spacecraft contracts is recognized over time as costs are incurred, and Blue Ghost Missions 2, 3 and 4 are all in production simultaneously for the first time, alongside a full run rate from SciTec that only entered the accounts in October 2025. But it requires an acceleration that has no precedent in the company’s own reported history.

There is a second way to frame the same problem. At March 31, 2026, remaining performance obligations were $652.6 million and management expected approximately 36.9% of them, about $240.8 million, to convert to revenue within twelve months. The guidance requires $339.1 million to $369.1 million in nine months. The two statements can only be reconciled by new bookings landing and converting inside the same year, by the constrained variable consideration that is excluded from remaining performance obligations coming through, or by the guidance being optimistic. The August 11 print is the first real read on which.

09 Backlog, ceilings and announcements: three different things

Firefly’s own definition of backlog, repeated verbatim in the 10-K and the 10-Q, is worth quoting in substance: it is the company’s estimate of revenue it expects to realize in future periods from awarded contracts, net of revenue already recognized, recorded on the execution of a legally binding agreement “even though our contracts include certain termination rights exercisable by our customers with advance notice”, and it includes deferred revenue already collected. That is a wider net than the ASC 606 measure, and the gap between the two is where the judgement lives.

The distinction is not pedantry. Between them, the three ceilings in the table add to more than $155 billion of notional value against a company that recognized $159.9 million of revenue in its best full year. Reading any part of those ceilings into a valuation is the single most common error made about this stock.

10 Customer concentration, and how it has changed

For the year ended December 31, 2025 a single customer represented 59.1% of Firefly’s revenue, the top five customers together represented over 86%, and the top five backlog customers accounted for approximately 81% of backlog. In 2024 the largest customer was 58.6%; in 2023 it was 30.7%.

Q1 2026 looks materially better. Three customers exceeded the 10% disclosure threshold at 24.5%, 19.3% and 14.1%, a combined 57.9% spread across three relationships rather than concentrated in one. In Q1 2025 a single customer was 90.7% of revenue. The SciTec acquisition is the main reason: defense software task orders arrive from different program offices than lunar landers do.

Concentration in receivables has not improved in the same way. At March 31, 2026 one customer represented 38.3% of accounts receivable and a second 28.7%, versus 28.6% and 22.9% at December 31, 2025. Two counterparties therefore account for 67.0% of what Firefly is owed. When revenue is recognized over time on milestone-driven contracts, a payment dispute or a schedule slip at one of those two shows up in cash before it shows up anywhere else.

11 Capital structure, the June offering and the August 11 lock-up

Firefly went public on August 8, 2025, selling 22.2 million shares including a fully exercised 2.9 million share over-allotment at $45.00, for an aggregate offering price of $998.6 million and net proceeds of $932.5 million after $57.4 million of underwriting discounts and $11.2 million of offering costs. At the same moment all outstanding preferred stock converted into 105.8 million common shares and outstanding common warrants converted into a further 1.0 million. That is how a company with 13.2 million shares at the end of 2024 arrived at 148.1 million by September 30, 2025.

The second act came ten months later. The prospectus is dated May 28, 2026, when the stock closed at $49.37. Twelve million shares were sold at $48.00 on June 1: four million newly issued by Firefly and eight million by entities affiliated with AE Industrial Partners, the sponsor. The underwriting discount was $2.28 a share. Firefly received $182.88 million before expenses, about $181.93 million net on the capitalization table. AE Industrial received $365.76 million before expenses and reduced its stake from 36.7% to a stated 31.7%. Underwriters held a 30-day option on a further 1.8 million secondary shares; no Form 4 has been filed reporting its exercise.

Whether that matters depends entirely on what AE Industrial does with the roughly 50.8 million shares it still holds, which is close to 31% of the company and roughly six times the entire reported public float of 86.24 million shares. A sponsor that has just sold eight million shares at $48.00 and watched the price fall to $21.89 has an obvious reason not to sell more at these levels, and an equally obvious reason to want liquidity eventually. Neither inference is knowledge. What is knowable is the calendar: the restriction lifts on the day the numbers land.

The dilution stack

As of April 30, 2026, before the offering, there were 160,235,217 shares outstanding. Adding the four million primary shares gives 164,235,217. On top of that sit, per the prospectus:

• 14,212,815 options under the 2017 plan at a weighted-average exercise price of $1.32. At the August 3 close of $21.89 these carry roughly $292 million of intrinsic value and would bring in only about $18.8 million of cash if exercised in full.
• 4,194,753 restricted stock units outstanding at April 30, plus 993,731 granted after that date, so 5,188,484 in total.
• 646,464 warrants exercisable at $21.1725, which is now marginally in the money.
• 19,644,816 shares reserved but unissued under the 2025 omnibus plan and 3,215,000 under the employee stock purchase plan.
• An undisclosed number of shares issued for Space-ng, carrying $22.0 million of value per the Form D.

Counting only awards that already exist, the loaded share count is 184,282,980, or 12.2% above the current outstanding figure. Counting the plan reserves as well takes it to 207,142,796, or 26.1% above. Neither is a prediction; both are the arithmetic disclosed in the company’s own prospectus. The option pool in particular is a legacy of a long private life at very low strike prices, and it converts almost entirely into shares rather than into cash for the company.

12 Ownership, Short Interest And Retail Sentiment

Jason Kim has been chief executive since 2024 and was elected to a board term expiring in 2029 at the June 4, 2026 annual meeting. Darren Ma is chief financial officer. Ramon Sanchez became chief operating officer effective December 22, 2025. Shea Ferring is chief technology officer. The 2026 proxy lists eight directors on a classified board: Kirk Konert of AE Industrial Partners as chairman, Kim, Kevin McAllister, Christopher Emerson, Jon Lusczakoski, Pamela Braden, Ryan Boland and Thomas Zurbuchen, the former head of NASA’s science directorate. Marc Weiser resigned on April 2, 2026 and the seat was filled on April 15.

Firefly is a controlled company under Nasdaq rules. Through a Director Nomination Agreement and voting proxies, AE Industrial Partners controls a majority of the voting power with respect to the election of directors, and the certificate of incorporation contains a series of provisions that fall away only at a “Trigger Date” defined as the point at which AE and its affiliates cease to hold at least 40% of the voting power. Before that date, directors can be removed with or without cause by a simple majority; after it, only for cause and only with a 66 and two thirds per cent vote. Firefly is also an emerging growth company under the JOBS Act, which means its auditor is not yet required to attest to internal control over financial reporting.

On internal controls, one point is often reported incorrectly. Firefly did identify a material weakness relating to the accounting for certain complex transactions, but the 2025 Form 10-K states that remediation measures were implemented during 2025 and that after testing the design and operating effectiveness of the new controls the company concluded the weakness was fully remediated as of September 30, 2025. It is a historical item, not an open one, though the risk factor properly notes that new deficiencies can always emerge as complexity increases.

Compensation is worth a line because of its scale relative to the P&L. For fiscal 2025 Kim’s total compensation was $38,219,515, of which $36,053,338 was the grant-date fair value of stock awards. Ma’s was $11,326,441 and Sanchez’s $11,311,909. Stock-based compensation expense across the whole company was $17.840 million in 2025 and $12.512 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone, which is a useful indication of how quickly the grant cadence stepped up after listing.

The block below is a snapshot of the Stocktwits flow, with its date. These are opinions of retail traders and non-professional investors, not analyst research, and they measure attention and how one-sided positioning has become rather than anything about the business.

13 Ownership, short interest and retail sentiment

The 2025 Form 10-K reports AE Industrial Partners entities at 58,805,752 shares or 35.6%, the Astera Institute at 13,081,389 or 7.9%, founder Thomas Markusic at 12,487,089 or 7.6%, and directors and executive officers as a group at 12,719,829 or 7.7%. After selling eight million shares in June, AE was shown in the prospectus as holding 50,805,752 shares, or 31.7% of the enlarged count.

That concentration explains the two oddest numbers on any screen of this stock: Finviz Elite shows insider ownership at 47.49% and a float of only 86.24 million shares against 164.2 million outstanding. Short interest of 13.86% of that float is roughly 11.95 million shares, close to 1.8 days of average volume. A small float, a large short position and a binary event calendar is a combination that produces violent moves in both directions on news that would barely register at a larger company.

Insider transactions since the listing have been overwhelmingly grants rather than purchases. The Form 4s filed on June 8, 2026 for directors, for example, all report the same 3,630-share award dated June 4 at a price of $0, which is the annual director equity grant made at the annual meeting. Routine grants are not insider buying and should not be presented as a signal.

Retail commentary on Reddit, Stocktwits and X around $FLY is dominated by launch and lunar imagery and moves sharply with sector sentiment. Those are the opinions of non-professional traders. They can indicate attention and positioning; they cannot establish mission probability, contract economics or value, and nothing in this section should be read as an endorsement of any view expressed there.

14 Catalyst map

15 The constructive case and the sceptical case

Firefly is one of a very small number of companies that has actually landed on the Moon and actually flown its own orbital rocket, and it now owns a defense software business with a lead role on a missile-warning ground program. Revenue grew 163% in 2025 and 45% year on year in Q1 2026. Gross margin has moved from negative 18.7% in 2024 to 19.2% in 2025. Customer concentration halved between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026. There is $551.6 million of liquidity before offering proceeds, almost no debt after the revolver was repaid, and a $305.0 million undrawn revolving facility behind it. Six contracted lunar missions, more than thirty Alpha launches under contract and a place on the NITE-STAR pool give a long runway of opportunity, and the option pool means most future dilution comes from awards already granted rather than from new capital raises.

The company burned $237.8 million of free cash flow in 2025 and $78.9 million more in the first quarter of 2026, and spends more on research than it earns in revenue. The 2026 forecast requires each of the next three quarters to be forty to fifty per cent bigger than the best quarter in company history, while remaining performance obligations have fallen for two consecutive quarters and backlog fell in Q1. Gross margin went down, not up, in the record revenue quarter. Two customers are two thirds of receivables. Goodwill and intangibles are 41% of the balance sheet. The float is small, the sponsor still owns roughly 31% and its lock-up expires on results day. Alpha has no scheduled next flight, Mission 2 has no scheduled date and Eclipse has no date closer than “no earlier than 2027”. At $21.89 the shares are 51% below the IPO price and 54% below the June offering price, which is the market’s own summary of how the last twelve months went.

16 Scenario framework

These are analytical frameworks for organizing evidence, not forecasts, targets or probabilities. Nothing here should be read as advice.

17 Bottom line

Firefly Aerospace has done things almost no listed company its size has done. It has landed a spacecraft on the Moon and operated it for a full lunar day, it has returned an orbital rocket to flight after a public failure and a federal mishap investigation, and it has bought its way into missile-warning software with a genuine prime-contractor role. Those are not narratives; they are events with dates.

What it has not done is turn any of that into an economic model that pays for itself. Revenue is milestone-driven and therefore lumpy to the point of being unreadable quarter to quarter: $55.9 million, then $15.5 million, then $30.8 million, then $57.7 million, then $80.9 million. Gross margin peaked at 27.7% and fell to 21.6% in the record quarter. Research and development alone consumes 83% of revenue. Free cash flow has been negative by more than $190 million in each of the last two full years.

The gap between those two paragraphs is what August 11 is for. The company has told the market it expects $420 million to $450 million of revenue this year, and it has delivered $80.9 million of it. The step required from here is unprecedented in its own history. On the same day, the restriction on a sponsor that owns roughly 31% of the company and has already sold eight million shares at $48.00 comes off. It is unusual for a single date to carry both the operational and the ownership question at once, and this one does.

The honest description of Firefly at $21.89, roughly $3.6 billion of market value and 8.3 times the midpoint of its own revenue forecast, is neither a broken listing nor a de-risked platform. It is a company with real assets, real contracts and a real capital constraint, priced somewhere between the two, whose next three months of disclosure will do more to settle the argument than the last twelve did.

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