Blue Ghost spacecraft makes second-ever commercial landing on the moon
Blue Ghost took a photo of its shadow on the lunar surface, with Earth in the sky above
Firefly Aerospace
A Texan company has achieved the second commercial landing on the moon – and the first that didn’t topple over on touchdown. The success comes amid a flurry of private and state lunar exploration.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander launched on 15 January atop a SpaceX rocket and spent 45 days travelling to the moon. It landed on 2 March at 8.34am GMT, settling in a spot at Mare Crisium, a smooth basin formed by volcanic eruptions three billion years ago.
Blue Ghost used thrusters to slow from an orbital velocity of 1.7 kilometres per second to just 1 metre per second, then landed on shock-absorbing legs within 100 metres of its target. Jason Kim, Firefly’s CEO, told CNN that the craft’s short stature was key to a safe landing: “It’s a successful design, and you look at past designs and past designs that were successful, [they] look very similar — short and squatty.”
Blue Ghost is around 2 metres tall, 3.5 metres wide and carries 10 scientific instruments as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme that uses the private sector to carry out a range of experiments ahead of planned crewed missions.
These include the Lunar PlanetVac, which uses blasts of compressed gas to stir up and collect samples of moon dust, tests on radiation-hardened computer chips and the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment, which picks up signals from the GPS and Galileo navigation satellite constellations orbiting Earth in order to provide location and timing data on the moon.
The lander will operate for a lunar day – about 14 Earth days – before falling into darkness and shutting down around 16 March. The freezing lunar night will probably be the end for the mission, although other landers have unexpectedly survived the harsh conditions before.
In February last year, Texas-based Intuitive Machines landed its Odysseus spacecraft on the moon, making it the first private company to achieve a feat previously only accomplished by national space agencies. Odysseus toppled onto its side during landing, but still managed to perform surprisingly well.
A host of lunar missions are under way or in planning. Also on board Blue Ghost’s launch rocket was another commercial moon mission, ispace’s Resilience lander, which aims to touch down in April. Around a dozen landers are expected to reach the moon in 2025 alone.
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