Firefly Aerospace shares rose 5.3% on Wednesday after the company announced a commercial payload agreement with Starcloud to demonstrate artificial-intelligence computing in lunar orbit. Starcloud’s SC-1L computing payload will fly aboard Firefly’s Elytra orbital vehicle, ingest data from Firefly’s Solux vision system, process it on orbit and transmit the results to Earth. The demonstration is planned for Firefly’s third lunar mission, targeted to launch no earlier than 2028. Elytra will first serve as the transfer vehicle and communications relay for Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, which is scheduled to land at the Moon’s Gruithuisen Domes under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. Elytra is then intended to remain in lunar orbit for five years for customer payload and imaging operations. The agreement follows Starcloud’s AI computing demonstration in low Earth orbit and complements Firefly’s separate collaboration with NVIDIA on its Ocula lunar imaging service. The Starcloud mission would be Firefly’s second Elytra deployment to lunar orbit after Blue Ghost Mission 2, targeted for no earlier than 2027.