LONGVIEW, Texas — Austin-based Firefly Aerospace recently became the second private company in little more than a year to put a lander on the moon — but it’s the first to stick the landing without a mishap.
Behind both missions — Intuitive Machine’s IM-1 mission in February 2024 and Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 in early March — was a Longview native helping to make them possible.
Jason Bates is a Longview High School graduate and avionics and integration specialist at Firefly Aerospace, where he puts electronics on the company’s space vehicles through a battery of tests before they tackle the hardest test of all: being catapulted from Earth on a rocket, and, in this mission, landing softly on a rock a quarter-million miles away…