Alpha’s track record
The booster destroyed Monday was slated to fly on the seventh launch of Firefly’s Alpha rocket, an expendable, two-stage launch vehicle capable of placing a payload of a little over 2,200 pounds, or a metric ton, into low-Earth orbit.
This upcoming launch was supposed to be the Alpha rocket’s return to flight after an in-flight failure in April, when the upper stage’s engine shut down before the rocket could reach orbit and deploy its satellite payload.
But engineers traced the cause of the failure to the first stage, which ruptured milliseconds after stage separation, sending out a blast wave that damaged the upper stage engine. Investigators
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