Watch Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket launch tonight for 1st time in 10 months

Alpha Flight 7 "Stairway To Seven" - YouTube

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Firefly Aerospace plans to launch its Alpha rocket for the first time in 10 months tonight (March 11), and you can watch the action live.

Alpha is scheduled to launch from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base tonight during a two-hour window that opens at 8:50 p.m. EDT (5:50 p.m. local California time; 0050 GMT on March 12), on a mission Firefly calls "Stairway to Seven." It was originally scheduled to fly on March 1, but Firefly called that attempt off due to high winds. Planned attempts on March 9 and March 10 were then nixed by separate technical issues.

You can watch the launch live here at Space.com courtesy of Firefly and its streaming partner NASASpaceflight, or directly via the companies.

As its name suggests, "Stairway to Seven" will be the seventh liftoff to date for the two-stage, 96.7-foot-tall (29.6-meter-tall) Alpha.

The sixth, called "Message in a Booster," launched on April 29 of last year, carrying a prototype satellite for aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. Things didn't go according to plan, however. Alpha's first-stage booster broke apart just after stage separation, generating a pressure wave that affected the upper stage's thrust. As a result, the upper stage ran out of propellant shortly before reaching its target deployment orbit, and the payload was lost.

On Aug. 26, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration cleared Alpha to return to flight. But a month later, the booster slated to fly on "Stairway to Seven" exploded during a test at Firefly's facility in Briggs, Texas, causing further delays.

"Stairway to Seven" won't carry any operational payloads. Rather, it will serve "as a test flight, with the primary goal to achieve nominal first and second stage performance," Firefly wrote in a mission description.

It will also be the final flight of Alpha's Block I configuration.

"Flight 7 will test and validate key systems ahead of Firefly’s Block II configuration upgrade on Flight 8 that's designed to enhance reliability and manufacturability across the vehicle," Firefly wrote in the mission description. "The Block II configuration includes a 7-foot increase to Alpha’s length, consolidated batteries and avionics built in house, an enhanced thermal protection system and stronger carbon composite structures built with automated machinery."

"Stairway to Seven" will launch just over a week after a big anniversary for Firefly: On March 2, 2025, the company's robotic Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon. Blue Ghost operated nominally for two weeks thereafter as planned, becoming the first private spacecraft ever to complete a lunar surface mission.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 6:30 p.m. ET on March 6 with the new target launch date of March 9; again at 5:20 p.m. ET on March 10 with the new target launch date of March 10; and then again at 4 p.m. ET on March 11 with the new target launch date of March 11.