The remainder of the year will be headlined by Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket making its second flight (and landing attempt), and SpaceX's Starship making its final test flight of the year. An Alpha rocket blows up on the pad. The booster stage for Firefly Aerospace's next Alpha rocket was destroyed Monday in a fiery accident on the company's vertical test stand in Central Texas, Ars reports. Imagery posted on social media platforms showed a fireball engulfing the test stand and a column of black smoke rising into the sky over Firefly's facility roughly 40 miles north of Austin. 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.