- Firefly Aerospace landed its Blue Ghost spacecraft on the moon on Sunday.
- Moon landings were once exclusive to government agencies, but Firefly is now the second company to do it.
- The Blue Ghost mission, funded by NASA, includes experiments to study lunar dust and moon GPS.
Firefly Aerospace became the second company to ever land on the moon on Sunday when its Blue Ghost spacecraft plopped onto the gray dust of a lunar plain known as Mare Crisium.
Moon landings have long been the sole domain of government space agencies, but no longer.
Blue Ghost is one of a series of commercial missions ushering in a new era, with companies joining the race to the moon in a bid to build new industries of space tourism and mining.
Though the Blue Ghost mission is funded by NASA and carries 10 payloads for the agency, Firefly built the hardware and coded the software that stuck the landing.
“This is such an incredible feat for Firefly, NASA, our nation, and the world, as we pave the way for a lasting lunar presence,” a Firefly team member said on a livestream after they confirmed the landing.
Why many try and fail to land on the moon
Landing on the moon is a nail-biting maneuver, and engineers often describe it as “15 minutes of terror.”
As it plummets towards the lunar surface, a moon lander must continually sense the ground below it, calculate its altitude, point itself toward a safe landing spot, orient itself to land upright, deploy its legs, and slow itself down at just the right time.
There’s no time for sending commands back and forth, so the spacecraft must execute this complex series of tasks without the help of the humans who built it.
“It’s just the first time it’s completely on its own, making decisions,” Ray Allensworth, the director of Firefly’s spacecraft program, told Business Insider in mid-February. “I think a lot of us will be holding our breath, you know, lighting a candle.”
Many have tried and failed. The moon is littered with crashed spacecraft from India, Russia, an Israeli nonprofit, and the Japanese company ispace.
And the US company Astrobotic had to completely forgo its landing attempt last January after a valve failure caused a propellant leak in orbit.
An elite few have landed softly on the moon: the Apollo-era US, the Soviet Union, China, Japan, India, and the Texas-based company Intuitive Machines, which landed its Odysseus spacecraft a little off-kilter but in one piece a year ago.
Now Firefly has joined their esteemed ranks.
“Even just talking about it kind of sends a little chill down your spine,” Allensworth said ahead of the landing.
What Blue Ghost will do on the moon
If all goes well, Firefly’s mission will operate for about 14 Earth days, which is a full lunar day. The landing site, Mare Crisium, is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon. It’s relatively free of craters and boulders, making it a perfect site to study the lunar surface.
The experiments onboard the lander include a drill to probe just beneath the lunar surface and a vacuum to suck up lunar dust — both from Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin — as well as a demo computer from Montana State University that’s designed to withstand extreme radiation, and an Italian experiment that’s “like GPS for the moon,” Allensworth said.
At the end of the lunar day, Blue Ghost plans to observe the sunset and study how the sun causes moon dust to levitate, a mysterious phenomenon observed by Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.
Even before landing, Allensworth said, “I think we have a lot of things to be proud of. We’ve returned a really significant amount of data for our payloads and from the spacecraft.”
All of that data will inform the company’s next mission, which aims to land on the far side of the moon in 2026.
“Ultimately, our goal is that we’re going to the moon at least yearly and hopefully increase that cadence over time,” Allensworth said.
