Hugs, high-fives and cheers were shared in Firefly Aerospace’s mission control room in the predawn hours on Sunday. Down the road, dozens more engineers alongside their family and friends did likewise at a watch party.
For the second time since the end of the Apollo era, an American-built lander had a soft touchdown on the Moon’s surface. The spacecraft, dubbed Blue Ghost, set down on the surface of a region called Mare Crisium, located on the northeastern part of the Earth-facing side of the Moon.
The final landing sequence took a little more than hour to complete with no overt anomalies popping up along the way. The control room was very quiet during the final moments of the descent for the mission dubbed ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky.’
Touchdown came at roughly 3:34 a.m. EST (0834 UTC). It was confirmed by sensors built into the landing pads on the Blue Ghost’s four legs. Contact was initially confirmed by three of them.
Would you look at that view! #BlueGhost captured its first image on the Moon that embodies everything this bold, unstoppable Firefly team has worked so hard for over the last 3+ years. And we’re just getting started! Find out what’s next for #BGM1 at 4:30am during our press… pic.twitter.com/PjnVwtW65O
— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) March 2, 2025
Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim said he and the team were elated to achieve this goal that’s been years in the making.
“They were calm and collected and cool the whole time Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed,” Kim said during the joint NASA-Firefly Aerospace landing broadcast. “And then after we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up! We got some Moon dust on our boots!”
The lander began its journey to the Moon on January 15, 2025, when it launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket alongside ispace’s Resilience lunar lander. Blue Ghost arrived in lunar orbit on Feb. 13 after completing a successful Lunar Orbit Insertion burn that lasted more than four minutes.
Blue Ghost completed its third and final maneuvering burn on Feb. 24, which put it in a low, near-circular orbit at roughly 100 km by 100 km.
The final hour encapsulating the descent and landing was the most nerve-wracking, according to Ray Allensworth, the Spacecraft Program Director for Firefly Aerospace. It began its descent orbit insertion burn about 63 minutes prior to touchdown.
“It was so quiet for a nine-minute burn, 12 minutes. Getting through PDI (Powered Descent Initiation), pitch over, and then you just hear these four callouts,” Allensworth said. “And I think I’ll just forever hear our Chief Engineer Will’s voice, ‘We successfully landed on the Moon,’ and then just everybody kind of lost their minds.”
Blue Ghost is one of a series of landers developed by a group of companies for NASA’s Commercial Payload Services (CLPS) program. It’s designed not only to help get science and technology demonstrations down to the surface of the Moon, but also to help stimulate the budding cislunar economy.
“We choose our landing sites very carefully. Our CLPS landers will go to the South Pole, to the near side, to the far side. This one is just in a really perfect location,” said Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Onboard Blue Ghost are a suite of 10 NASA science payloads for the CLPS program. They will study a range of lunar features, from the dust kicked up from the landing itself to the thermal conditions up to three meters below the surface to observations of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Some of these instruments on the Blue Ghost lunar lander have been on previous landers and will be featured on future ones as well.
“We’ve only really been to a few places on the surface of the Moon during Apollo or even with our robotic Surveyor craft from the 1960s. There are a bunch of measurements we really want to take to characterize overall around the Moon, especially the South Pole, where our astronauts will go initially,” said Joel Kearns, the Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration within NASA’s SMD.
“There are particularly scientific questions where you have to take the same measurement on the near side or the far side in a Mare, one of these frozen lava pools, as opposed to the highland mountains, to really understand the Moon and, based on that, to better understand Earth.”
The lander is designed to operate on the Moon’s surface for the duration of a lunar day, which will last about 14 Earth days. The mission will conclude on March 16 when the lander hopefully is able to capture a lunar sunset and then operate for a few hours in darkness.
Firefly Aerospace is in the midst of preparing for its second CLPS mission, a trip to the far side of the Moon, which is targeting launch in 2026. That mission will involve another Blue Ghost lander as well as one of the company’s Elytra orbital vehicles.
