Review: To the Black

by Jeff Foust
Tuesday, September 8, 2026

To the Black
directed by Scott Edwards
94 minutes

A little more than a year ago, Firefly Aerospace achieved one of the great milestones of a business by going public. The company has become known as a lunar lander developer, with one successful mission under its belt, a second scheduled to launch early next year, and several more in development. It has expanded into spacecraft and other capabilities, including angling for work in the Golden Dome missile defense system.

There have been fewer achievements, though, in the area where the company got its start: launch. While Firefly executives said in an earnings call last month that demand for launch was at an all-time high, the company has performed only a single launch of its Alpha rocket this year, in March. That was a return-to-flight mission after a failure last April; the company also lost an Alpha booster during ground testing last fall. An improved “Block 2” version of Alpha is set to make its debut in the fourth quarter, although executives said little about the cadence of launches after that.

Getting Alpha flying in the first place is a story of perseverance against both technical and business setbacks. To the Black, a documentary that recently started streaming on services such as Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, takes viewers behind the scenes of the development of the rocket in the company’s early years.

The central figure in the documentary is Tom Markusic, the cofounder and chief executive of what was originally Firefly Space Systems. The filmmakers were embedded in the company for several years as he and the company worked on Alpha, with behind-the-scenes footage interspersed with interviews of Markusic, others at the company, and some outside perspectives about the development of Alpha, including neighbors of the company’s test site in the small town of Briggs, Texas.

The challenges of developing a rocket are amplified here by the difficulties keeping the business alive. Firefly celebrates new funding only to see that investor withdraw in 2016, citing uncertainty about Brexit. That appears to be the end of the line for the company, which begins the process of shutting down even as Markusic continues last-ditch efforts to find a new investor. Improbably, that pays off when Ukrainian entrepreneur Max Polyakov steps up, buying the company’s assets in a bankruptcy auction and reconstituting the company as Firefly Aerospace.

The film follows the continued development of Alpha, including testing achievements and setbacks. That culminates in the first flight of Alpha five years ago, where the vehicle suffered the failure of one of its four engines, leading to the vehicle losing control and exploding in flight. The documentary includes some stunning footage of the failure, including closeups of debris falling back to the ground; the filmmakers are also in mission control capturing Markusic’s reaction to the launch and failure.

A little over a year later, Alpha returned to flight, making it to orbit on its second launch. The company, though, had changed: Polyakov was forced by the federal government to sell his majority stake in the company and new private equity owners pushed Markusic out of the CEO role. It appears at this point the filmmakers lost their insider access to the company, using webcast footage of the launch to close out the documentary.

This is not the first account of the trials and tribulations of Firefly, which was one of several companies profiled in Ashee Vance’s book When the Heavens Went on Sale (see “Review: When the Heavens Went on Sale”, The Space Review, May 15, 2023), although the company was not included in the documentary Wild Wild Space based on the book (see “Reviews: space documentaries of the past and present”, The Space Review, June 17, 2024). The lengthy inside access this documentary offers, though, provides one of the most detailed accounts of the struggles, both technical and financial, involved with getting a rocket off the pad. Now, the challenge is doing it again, and again, and again.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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