Firefly Alpha Block 2 | INCUS
Firefly Aerospace is targeting 2027 for Firefly Alpha Block 2 carrying INCUS from Launch Area 0 A, Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, USA, United States of America. Launch Library files only the year, so the date is a placeholder. The date is still provisional and can move.
COUNTDOWN
FLIGHT PLAN
There's no launch window filed yet. Current date is a placeholder or rough estimation based on unreliable or interpreted sources.
FIELD KIT / OPTICS
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MISSION BRIEF
The Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) is a NASA Earth science mission led by Colorado State University that will investigate the behavior of tropical storms in order to better represent these storms in weather and climate models. It consists of 3 SmallSats flying in tight coordination to study why convective storms, heavy precipitation, and clouds occur exactly when and where they form. Each satellite will have a high frequency precipitation radar that observes rapid changes in convective cloud depth and intensities. 1 of the 3 satellites also will carry a microwave radiometer to provide the spatial content of the larger scale weather observed by the radars. By flying so closely together, the satellites will use the slight differences in when they make observations to apply a novel time-differencing approach to estimate the vertical transport of convective mass.
SOURCE: LAUNCH LIBRARY 2 // THE SPACE DEVS
LAUNCH CORRIDOR
- Due east
- The lowest inclination a direct launch from here can reach is 37.8°. That’s this pad’s own latitude. Flying east also gets the most free speed from Earth’s rotation.
- Due south
- The polar corridor, at 90° inclination, passes over both poles. It gets no help from Earth’s spin, so the same rocket can carry less.
Drag the globe to turn it. The shading is the real terminator, and it moves.
A globe of the Earth centred on Launch Area 0 A at latitude 37.83 degrees north, longitude 75.49 degrees west. Two curved lines leave the pad. The solid gold line runs due east and marks the lowest orbital inclination a direct launch from this site can reach, 37.8 degrees, equal to the pad’s latitude of 37.8 degrees. The dashed cyan line runs due south and marks the polar corridor at 90 degrees inclination. The darkened part of the globe is the night side. The surface wind is from 326° at 6 km/h. That's the cyan arrow at the pad.
LAUNCH SITE
Launch Area 0 A
Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, USA, United States of America
OBSERVED 2026-11-11 10:45:00Z // OPEN-METEO (CC BY 4.0) // GENERAL CONDITIONS, NOT LAUNCH CRITERIA
Minimum direct inclination 38°. This pad is 38° north of the equator, so a direct launch can't reach an orbit inclined less than 38°. An orbit of inclination i never passes over latitudes beyond ±i. Getting to an equatorial orbit, which geostationary satellites need, takes a 38° plane change at some point in the flight. Inclinations of 38° and up are reachable straight off the pad. The ground here moves east at about 367 m/s with Earth's spin. That's 465 m/s at the equator, falling with the cosine of latitude. A launch due east keeps that head start.
DATUM WGS-84 // EQUIRECTANGULAR PROJECTION // ORBIT FIGURES DERIVED FROM THE PUBLISHED LATITUDE
Open this pad in a mapPAD CONDITIONS
SURFACE WIND @ 10 M
6km/h
Blowing from the north-west, bearing 326 degrees
GUSTING
7km/h
Clear sky
SOURCE: OPEN-METEO CC BY 4.0
The observed figures are general weather at the coordinates of Launch Area 0 A. They aren’t the launch rules. The operator and the range write those for each mission, and they cover things this forecast doesn’t carry, like electric fields, cloud layers higher up and winds along the rocket’s path. Only the operator publishes them. Wind often stops a countdown, but no number here is a limit for this flight. Nothing here is a go or no-go call. No operator figure was published for this attempt.