Blue Ghost, a Private U.S. Spacecraft, Lands on the Moon
After its successful lunar touchdown, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost mission could soon be joined on the moon by two more commercial spacecraft
An artist’s impression of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander on the lunar surface.
Blue Ghost, a NASA-funded lunar lander built and operated by the private U.S. company Firefly Aerospace, has successfully touched down on the moon.
After 45 days in space—and a pulse-pounding semi-autonomous hour-long descent to its landing site—at 3:35 A.M. EST three of the boxy, car-sized spacecraft’s four footpad-tipped legs crunched into the surface of Mare Crisium, a vast and ancient impact basin filled with frozen lava on the moon’s northeastern near side. This marks the second time the U.S. has soft-landed on the moon since the crewed Apollo 17 mission of 1972; the first occurred just over a year ago when another robotic commercial mission, the Odysseus lander from the company Intuitive Machines, made moonfall lopsided but intact in a crater near the lunar south pole. (Another U.S. commercial mission, the Peregrine lander from the company Astrobotic, failed to reach the moon in January 2024.)
“We’re on the moon!” cheered Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate after observing the landing at a Firefly Aerospace “watch party” near the company’s mission control center in Cedar Park, Texas.
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“Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed,” said Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim at the same event. “We’ve got some moon dust on our boots!”
“I’m so proud of our team. Firefly has a way of constantly exceeding expectations, and this is a perfect example of that,” said Brigette Oakes, Firefly Aerospace’s vice president of engineering, during a livestream just after the landing. “Now we have a permanent presence on the moon, with every [Firefly Aerospace] employee’s name engraved on the Blue Ghost plaque. Now when we look up at the moon we can tell our kids and future generations that our names are up there.”
“I can’t tell you how excited I am right now to get to be here and experience a landing on the moon,” said NASA acting administrator Janet Petro from Firefly’s watch party. “I think this administration really wants to keep America first, and I think the way that we keep America first is by dominating in all the domains of space…. As long as we keep dominating that [lunar] space I think we’re gonna be putting America first, [and] we’re gonna be making America proud.”
The initiative has funded all three U.S. commercial lunar landing attempts to date, having earmarked up to $2.8 billion for missions through 2028. And its next installment—Intuitive Machines’s Athena lander—is already enroute. Scheduled for a March 6 landing, Athena will target the flat-topped lunar mountain of Mons Mouton just 160 kilometers from the lunar south pole, where it’s planned to function for about ten days.
If all goes well, on March 14 both Blue Ghost and Athena will witness a lunar eclipse as Earth’s shadow briefly passes across the moon. Two days after that, the lunar night will fall, plunging the surface into two weeks of darkness and cold to which both landers will likely succumb.
In the meantime, yet another commercial lunar lander—Resilience, built by the Japanese company ispace—will be preparing for its own appointment with destiny, a landing projected for May at a site called Mare Frigoris in the moon’s far north. This would be ispace’s second lunar landing attempt, after its first mission crashed in 2023.
Resilience, also called HAKUTO-R Mission 2, launched to the moon alongside Blue Ghost on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in late February. But unlike other landers the Japanese mission is taking a more leisurely, fuel-saving trajectory to reach its lunar destination. Tallying in Blue Ghost as well, the trio of spacecraft marked the first time in history that three landers were simultaneously bound for the moon.
The lander’s farthest-reaching experiments, however, may be those that study the moon’s innards to illuminate new chapters of its 4.5-billion-year-history. According to NASA scientists, Mare Crisium is a region that may be more representative of the moon’s average composition than any site studied by the Apollo astronauts.
One of these inward-looking instruments, dubbed LISTER (short for Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity), is a drill capable of reaching a record-setting 3 meters beneath the lunar surface to measure heat flowing up from within—deep enough to give scientists a better idea of how exactly the moon cooled from a ball of molten rock to the cold, inert world we know today. Another, called the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS), will place electrodes across a roughly 700-square-meter swath of terrain. Its measurements of subtle electric and magnetic currents coursing through the moon can probe more than a thousand kilometers into the interior—two-thirds of the way to the lunar center. Scientists hope that the fresh view of our satellite’s inner composition and structure may also shed light on the deep evolution of other rocky worlds such as Venus, Mars and even Earth.
Blue Ghost can endure the frigid lunar night for several hours, but its most poignant final feat on the moon is planned to occur before night falls, during the lunar sunset. Twilight unfolds slowly on the moon, and as the sun slips behind the lunar limb, its light scatters off dust lofted by electrostatic charges and micrometeoroid impacts in the near-vacuum conditions. This creates something called lunar horizon glow, a phenomenon most notably observed by NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan during Apollo 17, the final mission of the Apollo program. Before it passes into darkness, Blue Ghost will beam its high-definition view of the glow back to Earth, offering a fleeting glimpse of this beautiful and rarely seen lunar wonder.
Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight, and is a senior editor at Scientific American. He is the author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: the Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science, and many other publications. A dynamic public speaker, Billings has given invited talks for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Google, and has served as M.C. for events held by National Geographic, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, Pioneer Works, and various other organizations.
Billings joined Scientific American in 2014, and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com