Early Sunday morning, a robotic spacecraft from an American startup was gently placed on a lava plain next to the moon near the moon.
The Blue Ghost Lander built by Firefly Aerospace in Cedar Park, Texas landed at 3:34 a.m. ET.
“You all take root and land,” said Will Coogan, chief engineer of Blue Ghost, during a live broadcast in the Flight Operations Room. “We’re on the moon.”
A few minutes later, Firefly CEO Jason Kim proudly announced: “We have some moonlight dust on our boots.”
Within about half an hour, the spacecraft sent its first photo back to the surface of the moon.
This is an amazing success for the company, achieving what many others don’t have.
Among these countries, companies and organizations that attempt to land gently on the moon in the 21st century, only China can achieve complete success in its first attempt. Others, including those from India, Russia, Israeli nonprofits and Japanese companies, collapsed on the surface of the moon and carved new craters.
Last year, two landers – one sent by the Japan Space Agency Jaxa and the other by the Intuitive Machine of Houston – landed successfully, continuing to work and communicate with the Earth. But both were overturned, limiting the work spacecraft could do on the moon’s surface.
Intuitive Machines is the first private company to successfully land on the moon. Firefly is now the second one. Both are part of NASA’s efforts to leverage private enterprises to reduce the cost of bringing scientific and technological payloads to the moon. For this mission, NASA paid $101.5 million for Fireflies.
“What Fireflies are showing today is that I think they look easy, but it’s very difficult,” NASA’s deputy director of exploration, Joel Kearns, said in a post-landing press conference.
Dr. Kearns said success provides a “proof of existence” that NASA’s approach to funding such tasks can work.
The Blue Ghost Spacecraft has performed well almost perfectly since its launch from the Kennedy Space Center in NASA, Florida on January 15.
“We didn’t have any major anomalies, which is great,” Ray Allensworth, the director of the Firefly Blue Ghost program, said on the live broadcast.
About an hour before landing, the spacecraft performed pre-programmed commands to launch its main engine for 19 seconds in order to push itself out from a 62-mile-high orbit onto a downward path.
At that moment, the spacecraft was behind the moon and had no communication. No one in the flight operation room knew what the spacecraft was doing until it appeared about 20 minutes later.
As it emerges from the distant lunar calendar, all systems work as expected, and the blue ghost is what it should be.
About 11 minutes before landing, the lander drove at 3,800 miles per hour, launching its main engine again to slow down. During the last few minutes of the descent, it rotates vertically, avoiding danger and drops at a slow walk.
“Oh my goodness, we did it!” Ms. Allensworth shouted afterward. “It’s amazing. My heart beats so fast.”
The landing site is located in Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed by lava, carved by ancient asteroid impacts in a 345-mile-wide crater. Mare Crisium is located in the northeastern quadrant near the moon.
The mission is to last about 14 days until the moon.
Lander will carry 10 tools for NASA as part of the agency’s commercial lunar payload service program. Several people focus on lunar dust, usually angled, sticky and sharp – for the bane of machinery, as well as potential health problems for future astronauts.
“We will look at how dust adheres to various materials,” Maria Banks, a project scientist at NASA CLPS program, said in a pre-release press conference. “When we descend to the surface, we are doing stereo imaging to see if the impact of rocket feathers affects lunar thunder fruit. We will test the usage of electromagneticism to mitigate or prevent dust buildup.”
The receiver on the spacecraft successfully tracked the global navigation signal in lunar orbit. This suggests that signals used by the US GPS and the European Galileo satellite for Earth navigation can also help spacecraft bypass the moon on the moon.
“By actually doing it on the moon’s orbit and on the moon’s surface, we provide us with a whole new way in the future.
The X-ray telescope will review the Earth to capture a global view of the interaction between Earth’s magnetic field and charged particles of the solar wind.
“We are learning how it moves over time with the first global image of the magnetic field,” said Brian Walsh, a professor of engineering at Boston University.
The lander also carries a drill bit, which is designed to poke a 9-foot drill bit into the lunar soil and measure the heat inside the moon. Another experiment was a computer designed to recover from errors caused by space radiation.
This landing is a welcome spotlight for a company that is more involved in court and political drama than at times than launches of Rockets and Moon Landes.
The original version of the company is Firefly Space Systems, founded in 2014. The CEO is Thomas Markusic, who has worked for three billionaire-owned Rockets companies (Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic).
Virgin Galactic filed a lawsuit against Fireflies, claiming that Mr. Markusic had stole his trade secrets in establishing Fireflies. In 2016, a major European investor supported it, Firefly took all its employees off as funds dried up.
A tech entrepreneur Max Polyakov participated in the rescue, while Firefly Space Systems was reborn as Firefly Aerospace. But in 2022, the U.S. government cited national security issues, forcing Ukrainian Dr. Polyakov to sell his share of firefly.
But Fireflies also won some key contracts, including a mission set on the moon on Sunday.
In the past few years, Firefly has successfully launched its small Alpha rocket several times, including a mission to participate in the U.S. Space Force, which demonstrates the ability to prepare and launch payloads in a short period of time. Firefly is also developing a larger rocket, currently called a medium launcher, and a series of spacecraft called the Elytra, which can perform various missions in orbit.
Firefly also won two other CLPS missions.
The second one, which is planned to be launched next year, is to land on the other side of the moon. The third plan, in 2028, is to investigate Gruithuisen Domes, an unusual volcanic area near the moon.
“As long as we execute, we will continue to be bolder and bigger,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in an interview last week.
The moon will continue to be a busy place. Another CLPS mission is only a few days away. The second moon lander of the intuitive machine, Athena, is scheduled to land near the Moon’s South Pole on Thursday.
Moreover, another spacecraft is on the way. On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Blue Ghost was launched at Orbit, a lunar landing built by Japan’s Ispace.
Although elasticity leaves Earth at the same time as the Blue Ghost, it takes a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.
