State Enterprise "Production Association Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant named after A.M. Makarov ”(YUZHMASH) was visited by a delegation of the American company of Ukrainian businessman Max Polyakov FireFly, consisting of Senior Vice President for Spacecraft Russell Shea Ferring and engineer Roman Lukavsky.
Firefly Aerospace is a privately held aerospace company headquartered in Austin that develops light launch vehicles to launch small satellites and cubesats into space.
The guests from the USA got acquainted with the workshop of the main assembly of launch vehicles in Dnipro, where they examined samples of rocket and space technology.
After getting acquainted with the production, the guests were shown a film about the production capabilities of YUZHMASH and a presentation of current and promising projects. During the negotiations, the management of the enterprise raised issues of possible cooperation in the space sector.
In turn, Mr. Ferring made a presentation in which he spoke about the new developments of the FireFly company for the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes. Also, Mr. Ferring proposed to continue discussing areas of cooperation during the visit of the YUZHMASH delegation to the United States at the next launch of the Antares launch vehicle.
Recall that the American supplier of fuel-efficient launch vehicles Firefly in 2019 ordered components for missiles at YUZHMASH for a total of about 15 million dollars. Among other things, the Ukrainian company was supposed to supply 100 combustion chambers, 500 units of automation and 40 turbopumps to the United States. However, nothing more was reported later.
