WASHINGTON — A Falcon 9 successfully launched Jan. 15 two landers built by American and Japanese companies taking different paths to the surface of the moon.
The Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 1:11 a.m. Eastern. After two burns of the rocket’s upper stage, the Blue Ghost 1 lander by Firefly Aerospace separated more than 65 minutes after launch.
The upper stage later performed a brief third burn before deploying the HAKUTO-R M2 Resilience lander for ispace nearly 93 minutes after liftoff. Both landers were placed into transfer orbits around the Earth.
The two spacecraft, while sharing the launch, are following different trajectories to the moon. Blue Ghost will spend about 25 days in Earth orbit before performing a translunar injection maneuver, arriving into lunar orbit about four days later. It will spend 16 days in lunar orbit, calibrating its vision navigation system and moving into a low lunar orbit, before attempting a landing in the Mare Crisium region of the moon on March 2, Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, said at a Jan. 14 NASA pre-launch briefing.
Resilience, like ispace’s initial lunar lander mission launched in late 2022, will take a low-energy trajectory to the moon, attempting a landing in Mare Frigoris. The company estimates that the landing will take place about four to five months after launch.
Lunar ridesharing
While both Firefly and ispace had previously announced agreements to launch their lunar landers on Falcon 9, the assumption in the industry had been they would launch on separate rockets, particularly since ispace launched its first lander on a dedicated Falcon 9. Only in December, though, did ispace announce Resilience would launch together with Blue Ghost 1, a week after a Bloomberg report stated they would share a ride. The two companies, though, offered few additional details about the arrangement.
At the NASA pre-launch briefing, Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science missions at SpaceX, said it was the launch provider that performed the matchmaking. “In this particular case, both Firefly and ispace came to SpaceX directly, and we paired the two payloads together,” she said, describing a company philosophy to maximize payload capacity. “When we found a solution for Firefly and ispace’s missions to fly together on the same Falcon 9, it was a no-brainer to put them together.”
She added that combining the two landers on a single launch allowed each customer to reduce their launch costs, but declined to disclose specific figures. Blue Ghost is considered the primary payload and Resilience the rideshare secondary payload, she said.
At ispace’s own pre-launch briefing Jan. 8, Takeshi Hakamada, chief executive of ispace, said the company had designed the lander to be compact to enable rideshare launch options. For the first mission, the company opted for a dedicated launch but sought a rideshare for the second mission to reduce costs. “SpaceX is the one who decided to make that happen. It was not us who decided to rideshare with Firefly,” he said through an interpreter.
Blue Ghost science
Blue Ghost 1’s primary customer is NASA, which is flying 10 science and technology demonstration payloads through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Those payloads include several studying the lunar regolith and how it adheres to materials as well as tests of the ability to use navigation signals from GPS and Galileo spacecraft in cislunar space.
Maria Banks, CLPS project scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said at a Jan. 13 briefing that the landing site was chosen 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.
She said NASA and the leads of the 10 experiments have coordinated closely with Firefly to plan operations of the experiments for up to two weeks after landing, when sunset at the landing site ends operations of the solar-powered lander. “It’s very tricky of course, to plan around limited resources to make sure everyone gets what they need at the time that they need it during the mission,” she said. That includes, she said, coordinating operations of experiments studying lunar dust in different ways.
This is the first lunar lander mission for Firefly, which is working on two more lander missions that will also carry NASA CLPS payloads. “Landing on the moon is very, very hard,” said Chris Culbert, NASA CLPS program manager, at the Jan. 13 briefing. “While we’ve been quite impressed with Firefly’s preparation for this mission, it will be their first lunar mission and landing. We look forward to Firefly overcoming any challenges and obstacles they may see.”
Kim said at the pre-launch briefing that Firefly, best known for its work on launch vehicles, and its workforce “don’t get the recognition, in my humble opinion, that they deserve for everything that they do to get ready for this moment.”
He noted that the lander carries a plaque with the names of company employees and investors. “It really puts this bold mission into perspective, knowing our Blue Ghost lander will soon have a permanent home there.”
Resilience from failure
Much of the publicity for the mission overlooked ispace and its Resilience lander. Unlike Firefly’s Blue Ghost, Resilience is not carrying any NASA payloads because ispace is not directly part of the CLPS program. As such, the inclusion of that lander was often not mentioned in NASA coverage of the launch.
There is a NASA connection for Resilience. The lander is carrying a small rover called Tenacious, developed by ispace’s European subsidiary in Luxembourg. It will gather a small amount of lunar regolith that it will then sell to NASA for $5,000 under a contract awarded by the agency in 2020 intended to provide precedent for the utilization and transfer of lunar resources. NASA officials at the pre-launch briefing Jan. 14 appeared unfamiliar with that contract, deferring questions about it to ispace.
Besides Tenacious, ispace is carrying several other science and technology demonstration payloads from Japanese companies and a Taiwanese university. It is also carrying a tiny model house, dubbed Moonhouse, by a Swedish artist.
Resilience is ispace’s second attempt to land on the moon. The company’s first lander crashed in April 2023 when a software glitch caused the lander to shut down its engines while still several kilometers above the surface.
“We came so close to success, and that left us with a sense of regret,” Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace, said at a Jan. 8 briefing. “We are now ready to rise again with the challenge of Mission 2.”
Hakamada, ispace’s chief executive, said at that briefing that the company started earlier in the month a promotional effort within Japan about the mission that emphasized the ability to accept and learn from failure. “The lesson from this campaign is that failure must not mark the end, and we have to encourage people to never give up on taking on new challenges despite the fear of failure.”
