Firefly lands on the Moonby Jeff Foust
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| Throwing a party for the landing was a risk, given the spotty success record of recent lunar landers. |
What set this event apart is what happened a little after midnight, when the band completed its final set and cleared the stage. Not long after, a man in a suit and tie took the stage, and a PowerPoint slide appeared on a screen. “Are you ready to see America land on the Moon tonight?” asked Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
The crowd cheered. This was no concert but instead a watch party for Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lander, which was on track to attempt a landing on the Moon in just a couple hours. With landing planned for about 2:30 am, the company leaned heavily into the “party” aspect of a watch party for its employees and guests. (One can only imagine how different the vibe would have been if the landing took place, say, at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon.)
Blue Ghost 1 launched a month and a half earlier on a Falcon 9, sharing a ride with another commercial lander called Resilience from Japanese company ispace. (Resilience, taking a low-energy trajectory to the Moon to conserve fuel, won’t attempt a landing until early June.) After nearly a month in Earth orbit, the lander fired its engines to go to the Moon, entering lunar orbit on February 13. It then maneuvered into a low lunar orbit to set up the landing attempt in the early morning hours of March 2.
Throwing a party for the landing was a risk, given the spotty success record of recent lunar landers. The first lander mission by ispace crashed in April 2023 when a software glitch caused the spacecraft to hover five kilometers above the surface until it exhausted its propellant and crashed. Russia’s Luna 25 crashed in August 2023 when a burn designed to lower its orbit around the Moon ran longer than planned. Peregrine, Astrobotic’s first lunar lander mission, suffered a propellant leak hours after launch in January 2024 that kept it from attempting a landing.
The following month, Intuitive Machines launched its IM-1 lander mission, which touched down on the surface harder than planned, snapping a landing leg and causing it to tip on its side. The company still was able to operate the lander for a week, getting at least some data from its NASA-sponsored payloads. Between Peregrine and IM-1, the Japanese lander SLIM also landed off-kilter, but was still able to operate to a limited degree for several lunar days, far longer than anticipated.
In other words, a lot could go wrong that night. There was, though, an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation in the crowd. “This is an amazing feat that Firefly is doing on behalf of the United States of America, and I sure hope everybody appreciates it out there,” Kearns said after discussing the technical challenges of landing on the Moon. The cheers from the crowd suggested they did.
Attention soon shifted to the screen, which carried the joint NASA/Firefly broadcast of the landing. That broadcast would cut away at times back to the event for interviews with NASA and Firefly officials, but the focus was on activities in mission control, just up the road from the venue at the company’s headquarters.
With no live video from Blue Ghost itself—its limited bandwidth during descent was devoted to telemetry—the broadcast showed an animation based on that telemetry of the lander during its approach to the lunar surface. The crowd quieted to hear the calls from mission control, aside from the occasional calls of “C’mon, Blue Ghost!” and “Go, baby, go!”
The animation then showed the lander on the surface. The crowd erupted as controllers reported the engine had shut down and the lander was experiencing lunar gravity. Then came a final call from mission control: “Y’all stuck the landing. We’re on the Moon.” The cheers became even louder.
 The crowd at Firefly’s party watches coverage of Blue Ghost 1’s landing. (credit: J. Foust) |
That landing was remarkably drama-free. “It really did go to plan,” said Ray Allensworth, spacecraft program director at Firefly, during a post-landing press conference. “We had a couple different contingencies that we did not have to use. It was amazing. It was kind of like you were reading a script.”
“The team was clockwork ever since launch,” Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly, said at that briefing. There were no issues from launch through the various maneuvers to reach to lunar orbit to the landing. “The team just nailed it.”
| “The team was clockwork ever since launch,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim said. “The team just nailed it.” |
There was appreciation, and some relief, from NASA as well. Blue Ghost 1 was the third mission flying through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. While NASA has long touted a “shots on goal” philosophy for CLPS, understanding that some of the early missions might not be successful, having one of those shots clearly go into the back of the net offered the agency some relief.
“We asked these companies to do a really, really difficult thing,” Kearns said at the post-landing briefing. He credited Firefly for being “extremely technically rigorous” in its approach to building and operating Blue Ghost.
“What Firefly demonstrated today I think they made look easy but is incredibly difficult,” he said. “This is an incredibly challenging technical feat to pull off, to land anything on the surface of the Moon. What you saw today was an existence proof that the model that NASA has been pursuing since 2018 is possible to be successful.”
The goal of Blue Ghost 1, though, wasn’t just to land on the Moon but to deliver to the lunar surface ten payloads for NASA that would operate through the two-week lunar day at the Mare Crisium landing site. That payload delivery and operations was funded by a $101.5 million task order to Firefly.
Allensworth said in an interview shortly after landing that work had already started to commission the nine powered payloads (the tenth, a laser retroreflector, is passive), some of which had already collected during the transit and landing. “We really want to get those payloads going as soon as possible. That’s why we landed at lunar sunrise, so we would have the full lunar day,” she said.
The first few days would be hectic, she predicted, as those payloads were commissioned and collected data, then slow down around the midpoint of the two-week lunar day. “The lander gets to a temperature range that some of the payloads won’t operate. So it’ll kind of quiet down a little bit at the in the middle.”
Those activities will ramp up again as sunset approached. The lander will operate through sunset and potentially five hours into lunar night, using batteries to keep returning data to try to observe conditions such as potential levitation of lunar dust at sunset. “Our goal is to capture as much data as possible into lunar night,” she said at the briefing. “We’re going to continue to operate the lander as long as the batteries have a state of charge.”
Those ten payloads include a mix of science and technology demonstration investigations. They include a probe to measure heat flux from the interior of the moon, an instrument to examine the composition and structure of the Moon’s mantle using measurements of electric and magnetic fields, and an X-ray imager to study the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth’s magnetosphere from the perspective of the Moon.
Lunar regolith is one focus of the mission. The Lunar PlanetVac payload will test the ability to collect regolith samples using compressed gas. Another will examine how regolith adheres to a range of materials, while a third will test the effectiveness of electric fields of removing regolith that accumulates on surfaces.
Operating those instruments required careful choreography to ensure all return their data within the limitations of time, power, and bandwidth. “It’s very tricky of course, to plan around limited resources to make sure everyone gets what they need at the time that they need it during the mission,” Maria Banks, the NASA CLPS project scientist for the mission, said at a prelaunch briefing.
 NASA and Firefly officials participate in a Champagne toast after the successful landing. (credit: J. Foust) |
NASA, though, would likely admit that’s a good problem to have. It also gives the company confidence as it works on two more Blue Ghost landers for future CLPS missions. Blue Ghost 2, which will attempt a landing on the far side of the Moon, is on track for a launch in 2026. “We have a lot of hardware on hand, and so really, the team will immediately transition into starting the initial integration of that spacecraft,” Allensworth said after the landing.
The company is also starting work on Blue Ghost 3, a mission to the Gruithuisen Domes region on the near side of the Moon slated to launch in 2028. The company won a CLPS award with $179.6 million for that mission in December.
| “What Firefly demonstrated today I think they made look easy but is incredibly difficult,” Kearns said. “What you saw today was an existence proof that the model that NASA has been pursuing since 2018 is possible to be successful.” |
Kim, Firefly’s CEO, saw the success of Blue Ghost 1 supporting the company’s broader ambitions as a developer of launch vehicles and spacecraft. “We just opened the whole company up to do things in LEO, MEO, GEO, cislunar, and the Moon,” he said, based on the operations of Blue Ghost 1 while in Earth orbit and in transit to the Moon. “Furthermore, the lander is also scalable to go to Mars.”
The next shot on goal for CLPS is just days away. Last Wednesday, a Falcon 9 launched IM-2, the second Intuitive Machines lander. The design is the same as the IM-1 lander, but with various upgrades to it to address issues from the first mission, like a faulty laser rangefinder that led to the hard landing.
“We identified 85 specific things that didn’t go like we wanted to on IM-1,” Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines, said at a prelaunch briefing last week. That included tests of the laser altimeter. “We’re pretty confident those things won’t happen again.”
There is a bit of a rivalry between the two Texas companies. Immediately after landing, Firefly trumpeted that it was the “first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful soft-landing on the Moon,” a reference to the hard landing of IM-1 that caused the lander to fall on its side. Houston-based Intuitive Machines, meanwhile, posted congratulations on social media after the Blue Ghost landing: “there are now TWO Texas-made lunar landers on the surface and a third on the way.”
The third, IM-2, is scheduled to land this Thursday, Intuitive Machines confirmed Monday. The landing is scheduled for 11:32 am Central time: better for the circadian rhythms of viewers in North America, perhaps, but not exactly prime time for a concert.
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