Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander has successfully touched down on the moon, in a pivotal moment for private space travel.
The size of a compact car, the four-legged lander is carrying 10 scientific payloads and used 21 thrusters to guide itself to touchdown near an ancient volcanic vent on Mare Crisium, a large basin in the northeast corner of the moon’s Earth-facing side.
It has on board a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperatures as deep as 10 feet. Also on board is 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.
The demos should get two weeks of runtime before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.
A smooth upright landing makes Firefly – a decade old startup – the first private company to put a spacecraft on the moon without it crashing or falling over. The lander was launched in mid January.
Dr Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator at NASA, said this area was of “great scientific interest” but also “a very achievable place to land”.
This moment, he said, was “one for the history books”.
Firefly becomes the second private firm to score a soft moon landing, after Houston-based Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander made a lopsided soft touchdown last year.
A “soft” moon landing refers to a controlled landing on the moon, where it touches down at a low speed and causes minimal damage to the vehicle. A “hard landing” would be a crash landing.
Only five nations have been successful in soft-landings in the past: the then-Soviet Union, the US, China, India and Japan.
Dr Nicola Fox, from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said: “We choose our landing sites very carefully.
“This one in this really perfect location, we want to study the geological features on the moon. We want to study the interaction with the solar wind.”
She said part of this mission will be to help “prepare for future astronauts” who will go to the moon.
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‘A sustainable commercial lunar economy’
Backed by NASA and its flagship Artemis moon program, private companies have played a significant role in the modern moon race. The moonshot by Firefly, an upstart primarily building rockets, is one of three lunar missions actively in progress.
The space agency paid $101m (£80.3m) for the delivery, plus $44m (£35m) for the science and tech on board.
Dr Fox said one of the hopes from this was to generate “a sustainable commercial lunar economy and have it led by American companies”.
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.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are building landers to put US astronauts on the moon as soon as 2027 – this would be for the first time since 1972.
The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.
NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realizing some missions will fail, said Dr 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.
