The Deep State's Role in Firefly's Lunar Landing

No. Seriously

Firefly Aerospace did something amazing today. It stuck the landing with its Blue Ghost machine and planted that bad boy right on the lunar surface. As a result, a bunch of fantastic Moon science should take place over the next couple of weeks.

To put some context around the moment, The New York Times wrote,

It was a remarkable success for the company, achieving what many others have not.

Among the countries, companies and organizations that have attempted in the 21st century to set down softly on the moon, only China can claim complete success on the first try. Others, including those from India, Russia, an Israeli nonprofit and a Japanese company, all crashed and carved new craters on the lunar surface.

Last year, two landers — one sent by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and the other by Intuitive Machines of Houston — did successfully land and continued working and communicating with Earth. But both toppled over, limiting what the spacecraft could accomplish on the moon’s surface.

Intuitive Machines was the first private company to successfully land on the moon. Firefly is now the second. Both are part of NASA’s efforts to harness private enterprise to reduce the cost of taking scientific and technological payloads to the moon. For this mission, NASA is paying Firefly $101.5 million.

On the whole, this is a very positive happening for science, commercial space and Firefly. So please excuse us as we tell you the less inspiring story behind the story that you will not read anywhere else.

The main figure who made Firefly possible is Max Polyakov. He’s the Ukrainian businessman who rescued the Texas-based rocket start-up from the perils of bankruptcy almost a decade ago. Polyakov put $250 million into Firefly, reinvigorating not only its rocket program but also its lunar aspirations.

Polyakov at his former home in Silicon Valley

Polyakov kept Firefly humming until 2022 when the U.S. government forced him to sell his stake in the company. This was an odd and surprising turn of events.

The U.S. loves capitalists, and the government really loves rich people spending excessive amounts of money on things the government desires like rockets. So why would it force Polyakov out of his own company just as Firefly had stood up its first rocket at a pad in Southern California?

Well, in When The Heavens Went on Sale, I found the receipts. Officials from multiple branches of the U.S. government raised concerns first that Polyakov owned some shady internet dating sites and second that he could be a Russian asset. As I wrote in the book,

The feds argued that Polyakov might choose to funnel American aerospace technology to Russia and that he represented a serious threat to US national security. “To the extent that national security can be summarized at an unclassified level, the concerns pertain to the influence of Polyakov on Firefly Aerospace, the potential transfer to Russia of proprietary non-public IP and technical information relating to sensitive United States Government customer information,” the government wrote, according to a copy of the documents that I obtained.

The US government complaints were thin on specifics. In fact, there were no specific gripes against Polyakov. There was no mention of the dating sites or alleged nefarious business ties. The government simply spent page after page noting that Russia was an adversary to the US in space, that Polyakov hailed from Ukraine, and that Russia and Ukraine used to build spacecraft together. Despite presenting no hard evidence as to why Polyakov, who despised Russia, might help Russia, the government demanded that Polyakov dispose of all his Firefly shares as quickly as possible.

To prove that it meant business, the government blocked Firefly from trying to launch its next rocket. It cut the company off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, and it prevented Firefly from acquiring the licenses it needed to launch. It also thwarted the ability of some of Polyakov’s other businesses to perform financial transactions by placing them on a federal blacklist.

Just so we’re clear here, the government contended that Polyakov was born in Ukraine, and Ukraine is near Russia and so possibly Polyakov Bad, if not now then in the future. Oh, and, there’s some classified stuff we can’t tell you that really backs up our case, so trust us on this one and let’s get this Firefly company in pureblood American hands.

Polyakov and Firefly co-founder Artiom Anisimov making the rounds across their space empire

Hindsight has not been kind to the Feds here.

Not long after the Feds forced Polyakov to sell his stake in Firefly, Russia invaded Ukraine. In the years that followed, Polyakov has received a bunch of medals from the Ukrainian government for his essential work providing technology and means to the war effort. If he’s a Russian spy, he’s the worst Russian spy imaginable because he’s ended up as a Ukrainian hero.

What’s more, the Feds cleared Polyakov of everything they’d previously accused him of last year. This should make you question whether there was anything at all in those classified documents in the first place. (Spoiler alert: there wasn’t.)

If one were cynical, one might suggest that the traditional space contractors and some government bureaucrats helped engineer Polyakov’s ouster because Firefly had gone from a super risky venture to standing a rocket on a pad, and certain people wanted absolute control of that rocket on the pad and future rockets on the pad. Never mind the guy who risked his own money to make all of this happen.

I’m not much of a political animal and often find my eyes rolling during much of the Deep State discourse. But this whole situation struck me as appalling.

The obvious tragedy in all of this is that Polyakov left the U.S. as a result of his treatment and watched the lunar lander he helped fund make it to the Moon from afar. Unlike figures such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, he did not get to revel in the moment he created, and he’s largely being written out of Firefly’s history.

So, space buffs, as you celebrate Blue Ghost, go ahead and pour one out for Max. He deserves it.