The American company performed its first perfect moon landing early on Sunday when Firefly Aerospace sent the Blue Ghost Lander to the surface.
“You all stopped landing. We got a call out from Firefly’s chief engineer Will Coogan, and then hoops and applause were followed between the company’s mission controls in Cedar Park, Texas during the mission livestream.
Lander ran for 12 minutes of power drop before landing at 3:34am, bringing Lander into a vertical position and slowing from about 3,800 mph. The main engine shuts down and the vehicle’s response-controlled thruster slows down due to a final controlled descent.
The mission control callout was followed by a declaration of success after reporting that the sensor quickly continued to read as “Moon Gravity and steady.”
“They just got fired in the mission control room now,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly, after landing. “They were just holding everything together. Even when we landed, everything was clockwork, and after seeing us stand upright everything, they were fired. There was moon dust in their boots.”
The landing follows the commercial company’s first successful landing, which took place last year on an intuitive machine at the Odysseus Lander, but the lander was faster, causing one of its feet to be damaged and partially tilted to the side. Therefore, we were able to carry out some of the science that brought to the moon under NASA’s Commercial Month Payload Services program, but was not 100% successful.
The fireflies have now improved their efforts and have made a stable landing on the mare Chrysium near Mons Latraille, on the northeastern corner of the globe facing the moon as seen from the Northern Hemisphere.
“I think we’ll hear Will, our chief engineer, forever. Firefly Program Director, Ray Allensworth, said: “They’re all business again. So I couldn’t keep it together, so I had to leave.”
The team focused on ensuring that the Blue Ghost was healthy and safe before working on working on a payload designed to work in two weeks of sunlight on the landing site.
“We landed at the beginning of the day of the month. We want to maximize as much time as possible for every payload, so they jump into it right away. And really, these first three days after landing are just stuffed with jam and try to turn off all the payloads as much as possible,” she said.
It was the first of three lunar landers who were in space at the same time to attempt to land.
The intuitive machine just launched its second lander, Athena, from the Kennedy Space Center last week, and is scheduled to travel quickly to the moon landing on March 6th and entering orbit later on Sunday.
Both Blue Ghost and Athena are flying on the NASA CLPS mission. The majority of each Lander payload is for NASA, but both companies also have some commercial partners.
“We really think we need to keep moving forward,” said NASA administrator Janet Petro before the attempted landing. “This program that marries NASA (a little seed money) will move them forward, together with the commercial and private industries, and build the economy for the month. Building that economy will make us dominate both inside and outside the month, so we have to do that.”
The third commercial company not associated with ISPACE Japan, which is not associated with NASA, also has a lander on its way to the moon, but will not arrive for a few months from now.
Ispace Lander and Firefly’s Blue Ghost actually stood up together in mid-January, but unlike the intuitive machine mission, they both had longer flight paths before each of the planned moon.
When you look out the window and realize you’re almost at home, you’re the feeling you get! T-4 days before landing on the moon. The Blue Ghost will arrive at its final destination until 2:34am on March 2nd. 1:20am CST, about 75… We will be launching a joint live stream with @Nasa at pic.twitter.com/t5tn85zpmm.
– Firefly Aerospace (@firefly_space) February 26, 2025
The Firefly Mission was called “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” and there was a 45-day transit containing multiple Earth orbits to ensure the system was working before a trip to the moon that had been spent several days in orbit.
The company took a stunning image of the moon during orbit posted on X on February 26th.
It features 10 NASA science and technology payloads that NASA paid $101.5 million to Firefly. NASA uses the CLPS program, allowing you to line up your own launch providers, build your landers and become a client of a US-based commercial company that is responsible for all mission communications.
This is the third release of four CLP missions so far. The first was Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology Peregrine Lander in January 2024, suffering from propulsion issues after its launch and did not reach the moon. The intuitive machine was partially successful landing followed by the launch of Firefly, followed by the launch of the second intuitive machine.
Among Blue Ghost’s NASA experiments are several devices that focus on the complexity of the moon’s dust. Both versions flew on the first intuitive machine mission, but were unable to complete the job. What is called the stereo camera in the Lune’s plum surface study (scalp) is looking to see what dust plume is being kicked by the Lander, and another electrodynamic dust shield (EDS) is trying to test how to stop the dust surface accumulation.
As for EDS, the Kennedy Space Center team has been working on this concept for many years, using electromagnetic fields to clean up dust particles.
“I mentioned it several times as a child on the dust mitigation technology poster,” said NASA’s Kristen John, director of Space Technology Mission. “You just watch that technology fly. …It’s a great concept. When it’s working, watching the video and seeing the dust repeats. So the technology itself is really impressive. And I think it’s really exciting and really validated for the team because you can finally see it demoed to the surface.”
Among the other NASA payloads are tools for measuring heat from inside the moon, lunar rejolis sample collectors called PlanetVac, inert laser reflectors that can be seen from Earth, devices for attaching lunar regoliths to various surfaces, radiation resistant computers, devices for measuring X-ray imagers, and devices for measuring the Earth’s magnetic field. It communicates on surface with the lunar orbit, and with the US GPS and the European Galileo system.
The two commercial payloads are commemorative papers, but there are no human remains, and a small pyramid with seed banks and digital time capsules for the company beyond burial, and for the company’s lifeship.
After landing, the plan is to spend about two weeks during the day before Lunar Night puts the lander in darkness and debilitating cold, but Firefly wants to stay active for about five hours at night before closing.
“We did an incredible amount of work in preparing landings and training, preparing simulated landings, doing digital work and analytics that lead to it,” says Kevin Scholtes, future systems architect at Firefly, has been working on Blue Ghost since 2021.
The Lander itself resembles that of the Apollo Mission, and Scholtes said the company is paying attention to the troubles seen by both other commercial landing attempts and government missions.
“We did a pretty big deep dive,” he said. “In most cases, the lessons we learned from them were able to be incorporated into our program. …We have been very leaning towards trying to make sure we didn’t ignore the opportunity to learn from these events.”
For one thing, the lander is much broader at the base with a lower center of gravity, and Schortes said it is to counter the challenges of low gravity that could lead to a transformation.
“It’s a completely different kind of force, and in the astronaut video you can see it roaming around and flipping over,” he said. “There’s a lot of counter-efficiency in it, which makes it easier to design the structure light but oddly enough for the moon and makes it difficult to get taller.”
Original issue: March 1, 2025, 8:58pm EST
