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Firefly Aerospace successfully made its first attempt to land on the moon on an irregular blue ghost spacecraft on Sunday, launching a two-week research mission in which a few private companies compete to reach the forefront of the Global Moon Race.
A compact car-sized, four-legged blue ghost carried ten scientific payloads near 3:35am (0835 GMT) near the ancient volcanic vent of the mare Casium at the northeast corner of the globe.
Suspense and silence fell into the mission control room, full of company staff at Freefly headquarters in Austin, Texas, as the blue ghost descended towards the surface of the moon at two miles per hour. Will Coogan from Firefly’s Blue Ghost Chief Engineer confirmed in a live feed of mission control, where the spacecraft entered the lunar gravity.
“We’re on the moon,” Coogan declared after a while, prompting a cheer of mission control.
Firefly will become the second private company to win a lunar landing, but declared it to be the first company to carry out a “completely successful” soft landing. Odysseus Lander of Houston-based Intuitive Machines gave a biased touchdown last year.
Five countries have done successful soft landings in the past – the Soviet Union at the time, the US, China, India, and last year, Japan. The US and China are rushing to put astronauts on the moon in the second half of the decade.
The Blue Ghost flew through Earth three times along a winding path, totaling about 2.8 million miles, arriving on the moon about 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Earth, reaching the surface a month and a half after firing it from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida onto the SpaceX rocket.
Firefly’s Moonshot, a startup that primarily builds rockets, is one of three active, active ongoing missions. Japanese iSpace launched its second lander in January with the same rocket as the Firefly, and then on Wednesday the intuitive machine set out for the second moon mission.
Blue Ghost’s three solar panels power Lander’s research equipment for a 14-day mission on the moon. Before a frigid moon night brings a low temperature of 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 degrees Celsius).
Crowded Moon Race
Missions like Firefly’s Blue Ghost represent low-budget precursor missions that allow research into the lunar environment before the US sends astronauts on a series of crew missions that begin in 2027.
Meanwhile, China is rapidly advancing its own lunar efforts with its robotic Chang’e Lunar programme, planning to place the Chinese astronauts programme on the moon by 2030.
Firefly has a $111 million contract for Blue Ghost Mission from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. This would stimulate the private lunar market and hope to make such trekking a lower cost and more routine.
Other countries focusing on exploring the moon and deep space have followed NASA’s model of commercial spaceflight, with India investing in the civil space sector and Europe funding multiple rocket launch startups.
“We want to get a lower cost mission at a faster pace and a faster pace, and we’re proving that it works,” said NASA CLPS chief Chris Calvert. “We landed almost entirely on the moon.”
The success of the touchdown comes at a time of uncertainty and uncertainty throughout the US space industry. President Donald Trump has pressed for a focus on Mars, the preferred destination of SpaceX CEO and useful Trump ally Elon Musk.
NASA administrator Janet Petro said at the firefly landing event that the moon is part of America’s goal of “dominating” space.
At Blue Ghost, two onboard instruments will study the lunar soil and its underground temperature in an experiment by Honeybee Robotics owned by Blue Origin.
NASA’s Langley Research Center features a stereo camera for analyzing the lunar dirt feathers kicked by the Blue Ghost’s landing engine. Collect data to enable researchers to predict the dispersion of dusty surface materials during future heavy moon missions.
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