US authorities forced another CIS entrepreneur to sell his space company

Ukrainian businessman Maxim Polyakov, who founded the space company Firefly Aerospace in the United States, is forced to sell it. This is not the first time that the US authorities have forced the founders from the CIS countries to give up the rights to their space business. Earlier, the same fate befell the project of the Russian entrepreneur Mikhail Kokorich.

The US government demanded that the Ukrainian businessman Maxim Polyakov sell the American business because of the threat to national security, reports Bloomberg . According to the American authorities, the founder from Ukraine can transfer the developments of the aerospace company Firefly Aerospace to Ukraine and other countries with their own space programs.

Polyakov himself Bloomberg calls a wealthy Ukrainian entrepreneur who built his own IT empire in his homeland. As the Ukrainian Forbes wrote , Polyakov founded about twenty IT companies and made exits worth more than $100 million each. Polyakov's Noosphere Ventures, according to the publication, unites a dozen business areas. The annual turnover of the Polyakov group is estimated at several hundred million dollars.

Firefly Aerospace is a developer of small and medium launch vehicles for commercial launches into orbit. Polyakov got the company in 2017, when he bought out the bankrupt Firefly Space Systems business from its founder Tom Markusic, a NASA native who still remains the company's chief executive. In 2018, NASA chose Firefly Aerospace to deliver payloads to the moon. But this fall, the company's first test flight of a rocket ended in an explosion.

For the first time, the American authorities expressed their concerns about Polyakov back in the fall of 2020. Then the entrepreneur had to leave the board of directors and sell part of his share. But this did not satisfy the authorities, and a year later they suspended the launch of Firefly Aerospace rockets, forcing the businessman to leave the company.

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Polyakov is not the first businessman from the CIS countries to conquer space in the United States, but in the end he was left without his business. Momentus Space, a space startup founded by ex-owner of Technosila Mikhail Kokorich, entered the Nasdaq this summer. For the deal, Momentus was valued at $567 million. But Kokorich himself had to step down as CEO and sell shares of the company he created before it went public. Then we talked with the entrepreneur about why Elon Musk needed his space tug, because of which the company began to have problems with the US Department of Defense and the Securities Commission, what awaits it next and what the businessman himself will do now.

Now Kokorich has moved to Switzerland, where he founded a new company, Destinus. It is planned that it will be able to deliver cargo into space in a matter of hours, the transportation of which now takes almost a week. Why did American regulators dislike Kokorich, how did investors react to his conflict with the US military, and why does a person need space? about this in detail He spoke in an interview with Russian Norms!