CEDAR PARK, Texas — Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar landed touched down on the surface of the moon March 2.
The spacecraft touched down at 3:34 a.m. Eastern, a little more than an hour after it started maneuvers to descend from a low orbit around the moon. The company said the lander was in an “upright, stable” position.
“We have confirmation #BlueGhost stuck the landing!” the company announced on social media just after touchdown. “This small step on the Moon represents a giant leap in commercial exploration. Congratulations to the entire Firefly team, our mission partners, and our @NASA customers for this incredible feat that paves the way for future missions to the Moon and Mars.”
Firefly said it was “the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful Moon landing.” Intuitive Machines landed its IM-1 lander on the moon in February 2024, but the spacecraft suffered a hard landing and tipped on its side, although it was still able to operate and return data for a week.
“Every single thing was clockwork,” Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said in comments on stage at a company event near its headquarters here shortly after landing. The mission team was “calm and collected” during its descent, he said, but “after we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up.”
The planned landing site was near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon. The site was selected to avoid magnetic anomalies that could disrupt operations of some instruments. The landing location also has few rocks on or below the surface that could prevent one instrument, a heat probe, from drilling up to three meters below the surface.
Blue Ghost launched Jan. 15 on a Falcon 9, sharing a launch with Resilience lunar lander from Japanese company ispace. It entered orbit around the moon Feb. 13, later maneuvering into a low lunar orbit before the landing attempt.
Blue Ghost carries 10 payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program under a $101.5 million contract. Among them are instruments to measure subsurface heat flow, the structure and composition of the moon’s interior, and the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field. Other payloads will study how the lunar regolith interacts with the materials, test a radiation-tolerant computer and an electrodynamic dust shield. The lander is expected to operate through sunset at the site March 16.
Firefly Aerospace has two more lunar lander missions in development. The company won in 2023 CLPS awards for Blue Ghost 2, a lunar lander mission to the far side of the moon that will also deliver ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder mission to orbit around the moon. NASA awarded Firefly another CLPS award Dec. 18 for Blue Ghost 3, a lander to the Gruithuisen Domes region on the near side of the moon. That task order is valued at $179.6 million.
