A robotic spacecraft from an American startup gently set down in a crater on the moon’s near side early Sunday morning.
The Blue Ghost lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, touched down at 3:35 a.m. Eastern time.
“You all stuck the landing, we’re on the moon,” a mission manager said during a live stream from the flight operations room.
It was a remarkable success for the company, achieving what many others have not.
Among the countries, companies and organizations that have attempted in the 21st century to set down softly on the moon, only China can claim complete success on the first try. Others, including India, Russia, an Israeli nonprofit and a Japanese company, carved new craters on the lunar surface instead.
Last year, two landers — one sent by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and the other by Intuitive Machines of Houston — did successfully land and continued working and communicating with Earth. But both toppled over, limiting what the spacecraft could accomplish on the moon’s surface.
Intuitive Machines was the first private company to successfully land on the moon. Firefly is now the second.
“We’re lucky to not go first,” said Ray Allensworth, who leads the Blue Ghost program at Firefly. “We use a lot of the publicly available data from other U.S. and other international companies that have already gone to the moon.”
That allowed Firefly to train its navigation software and perhaps avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier attempts.
Where did Blue Ghost land?
This mission set down in Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.
What did Blue Ghost take to the moon?
The lander is carrying a variety of scientific and experimental payloads to the lunar surface, including 10 for NASA. Those include a drill to measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean off glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.
That cargo is part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Service, or CLPS, which aims to put NASA equipment on the moon at a cheaper price than if NASA built its own lunar lander. The agency will pay Firefly $101.5 million if all 10 payloads reach the lunar surface, and a bit less if the mission does not fully succeed.
Blue Ghost is the third CLPS mission to launch to the moon. The first, in 2024, from Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, failed after launching. The second, by Intuitive Machines of Houston last year, reached the moon but tipped over.
Why did the landing occurring at such an early hour?
The physics of getting to a certain place in the solar system at a certain time does not always match when people will be awake to watch. The Blue Ghost lander spacecraft gets its power from solar panels, and thus the mission is aiming to land soon after the dawn of a new lunar day. And to get to Mare Crisium on March 2, the landing time turns out to be 3:45 a.m.
“That’s just when that happens,” said Ray Allensworth, the program manager for Blue Ghost at Firefly.
The mission is to last about 14 Earth days until lunar sunset.
How has the mission’s journey to the moon?
Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft’s systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on Feb. 13. The spacecraft’s cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon’s cratered surface.
A few small glitches have come up along the way, but no major malfunctions. Mostly, the mission controllers made adjustments as they learned how the spacecraft behaved in the space environment.
“Thermal alarms might go off,” Ms. Allensworth said. “Things are getting a little hotter than planned, a little colder than planned on the vehicle. You want to look at that data and see is it actually OK.”
What happened to the other lunar lander that launched with Blue Ghost?
On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. The two missions are separate, but Ispace, seeking a cheaper ride to space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload. That turned out to be the Blue Ghost launch.
Although Resilience launched at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.