Spaceflight Inc

Spaceflight Inc was a leading provider of rideshare launch services and mission management for small satellite operators, headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. Founded in 2009, Spaceflight built its reputation by making space more accessible to commercial, government, and research organizations by aggregating secondary payloads onto rideshare missions and handling all integration, mission management, and regulatory work on behalf of customers.

Spaceflight organized and managed some of the most significant rideshare missions in history, including SSO-A: SmallSat Express in December 2018 — at the time the largest dedicated rideshare mission ever flown — deploying 64 satellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. The company worked with launch vehicle providers including SpaceX (Falcon 9), Rocket Lab (Electron), ISRO (PSLV), Arianespace, Roscosmos (Soyuz), and others to provide customers with a wide range of orbit and timeline options.

To extend rideshare mission capabilities, Spaceflight developed the Sherpa family of orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs) — dedicated spacecraft that could carry a cluster of smallsats from a primary rideshare drop-off orbit to a precise target orbit. The Sherpa family included passive dispensers (Sherpa-FX), attitude control variant (Sherpa-AC), electric propulsion (Sherpa-LTE), chemical propulsion (Sherpa-LTC), and high-energy (Sherpa-ES) variants. Sherpa OTVs flew on SpaceX Transporter missions starting in 2021.

In March 2023, Firefly Aerospace announced the acquisition of Spaceflight Inc, integrating the company's rideshare services and mission management expertise into Firefly's growing launch portfolio.