>>13889617If the 50 engine order is for Astra, they'll be fine as long as Astra is, and we'll see Firefly at least make their moon landers and tug. If it's just an IP agreement and a couple engines sent to Astra, and the 50 engine customer is someone else, that looks less certain. The report about Astra buying Reavers seemed to hint at either.
Alpha isn't very good compared to similar rockets by ABL and Relativity, and those have had more commercial success so far. I think Firefly was trying to beat them to orbit (they probably still will) and exude reliability by acing it on their first try (fail). Markusic recently said that they plan for the landers to be a bigger money-maker than Alpha, so they realize that Alpha alone won't cut it. Down the line, Beta seems earlier in its development than Terran R and maybe Neutron, so even if Starship doesn't take too much of the market by then, Beta may be dead on arrival. Integrated moon landers aren't a big enough market to justify these rockets.
They're setting themselves up well as a supplier though, so they may make it there, but they won't thrive.
>>13889643I'm pretty sure it wasn't initially, but everyone started making show references so they decided to run with it.
