Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on Earth’s satellite Sunday, where it will carry out 10 NASA experiments.
A lander run by the private company Firefly Aerospace and carrying equipment for NASA touched down on the Moon on Sunday.
The Blue Ghost lunar lander carried a drill, vacuum and other experiments, the latest feat by a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth’s satellite ahead of astronaut missions.
The lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the Moon’s northeastern edge of the near side.
Confirmation of a successful touchdown came from the company’s Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 360,000 kilometers away.
“We’re on the Moon,” Mission Control reported, adding the lander was “stable”.
A smooth, upright landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon. There have been five other landings on the Moon, all carried out by five states – the US, Russia, China, India and Japan.
Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.
Blue Ghost — named after a rare US species of fireflies — had its size and shape going for it. The squat, four-legged lander stands 2 metres tall and 3.5 metres wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.
The space agency paid €97 million for the delivery, plus €42 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial delivery programme, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.
The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.
It carried a vacuum to suck up Moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 3 metres below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.
On its way to the Moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the Moon, with detailed shots of its grey pockmarked surface. At the same time, an onboard receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.
More commercial craft are soon set to land on the Moon
The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.
Another lander — a tall and skinny unit 4 metres tall and built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the Moon on Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the Moon, just 160 kilometers from its south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.
Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines’ lander put the US back on the Moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo programme in 1972.
A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on 15 January, taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the Moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.
The Moon is littered with wreckage not only from space, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.
NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realising some missions will fail, said the space agency’s top science officer Nicky Fox.
Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo Moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.
Kim said everything went like clockwork. “We got some Moon dust on our boots,” Kim added.
