Firefly Aerospace is preparing for its next mission to the Moon and it hopes to, once again, make history, but this time, even before it reaches the lunar surface.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled what it calls Ocula, a lunar imaging service, which will capture high-resolution imagery of the Moon. Firefly Aerospace said it will become the first company to offer this type of capability in lunar orbit from a commercial provider.
“It was always a thought, even before the Blue Ghost Mission 1 landing, that getting more imagery of the lunar surface, as well as looking for previous minerals or understanding activity on the Moon or even looking away from the Moon’s surface and doing space domain awareness, those were all things that we were always exploring,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace.
“So, we had an idea that something like Ocula would be beneficial to NASA, the science, the commercial and the national security missions out there, but having this orbiter that’s going to fly tandem with the Blue Ghost 2 lunar lander, afforded an opportunity to actually make this happen.”
Like many parts of Firefly Aerospace’s hardware and software, this new imaging service also pays homage to the movie Serenity, a sequel to the sci-fi series, Firefly. Ocula is the name of one type of spaceship in the film.
“I think Ocula is just a great name for a mission as game-changing as this. It’s a great coincidence that it has a lineage there, but you know, it’s fitting for the mission that we’re doing,” Kim said. “It’s the first of a kind. It’s going to be the first commercial mission to do this imaging and mapping and space domain awareness around the Moon.
“It’s a cool name, so I hope it catches on and more and more people find out about it.”
Unlike Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed on the Earth-facing side of the Moon in early March, Blue Ghost Mission 2 will perform a landing on the far side. Prior to its landing attempt, it will deploy the Elytra spacecraft with Ocula onboard.
“I think the purpose of this first Ocula mission is to provide an affordable means to be a ride share, to demonstrate the feasibility of this mission and the capabilities of this mission,” Kim said. “We’re going to learn a lot from actually performing this mission and we’re going to have another opportunity with Blue Ghost 3 as well. That will have a tandem orbiter as well.”
Ocula’s telescope is able to capture up to 0.2-meter resolution of the surface of the Moon at an altitude of 50 km (31 mi). Kim said Firefly will announce more details, like the planned operating orbit for Elytra and Ocula’s first mission in the coming months.
Kim said the goal is to develop a constellation in lunar orbit that can offer a high revisit rate to a variety of parties. He said that Firetly is “getting a lot of demand/interest” in accessing the data that will be gathered by Ocula, but said they’re not ready to announce potential customers at this time.
“Between understanding the demand and understanding the physics of orbiting and operating around the Moon and looking at different geographic features of the lunar surface and really groundbreaking and opening up new categories with this mission, we’re going to be able to formulate what the future constellation is going to look like,” Kim said.
Firefly Aerospace is developing the Ocula technology in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Kim said that came in part from a long-standing relationship.
“I think they do a lot of important things for the Department of Energy for our nation. A while back they were able to develop a very compact, high-performance imaging sensor and they’ve, over the years, upgraded it and developed flight versions of it and flown versions of it,” Kim said.
“They’ve got a lot of flight heritage and they continue to tech refresh that capability.”
In addition to Blue Ghost Mission 2, Firefly plans to fly Ocula on the Elytra 3 vehicle, which will be in support of a Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) Sinequone Project no earlier than 2027. That will be a responsive space domain awareness mission.
Blue Ghost Mission 2 meanwhile is targeting a launch in 2026. The mission passed its critical design review in 2024 and teams are now in the process of integration and testing.
“We’re really excited about all the great mission capabilities that are going to be part of that mission. Not only just the Ocula mission, but going to the far side of the Moon and being able to do the LuSEE-Night mission and look at signals from millions of years ago,” Kim said. “That’s going to be very exciting for us. And as you know, we also are carrying a rover on that mission as well that we announced a couple months ago.”
And as Firefly Aerospace continues to develop and deploy the various versions of its Elytra spacecraft, referred to as Dawn, Dusk and Dark, Kim said they’re also looking towards the possibility of deploying the Ocula technology in future Mars exploration missions as well.
“[Elytra] is able to host a lot of different, diverse payloads and its got a lot of size, weight and power accommodations for that. So, it’s kind of a perfect mix of not too small, not too large of a spacecraft, but able to carry a lot of fuel to do a lot of different delta V, intensive, dynamic space operations and it can hold a lot of different mission payloads as well,” Kim said.
“So that’s a long way of saying if there’s a need from NASA or other customers for orbiting Mars and imaging it or providing long haul communications, really Elytra is a perfect system and platform to perform that kind of mission.”
