The Blue Ghost will make a soft landing on the moon on Sunday. Firefly Aerospace posted a video of the spacecraft making its second burn before getting into lunar orbit ahead of landing. The Earth rises and sets in the distance of the video.
Firefly Aerospace’s commercial robotic mission touched down on the Moon early Sunday, marking the second successful private company to land on the lunar surface in about a year and the first to remain upright.
With 10 NASA instruments, Blue Ghost touched down near a volcanic feature on the Moon in an area known as Mare Crisium at 2:34 a.m. CT. Firefly Spacecraft Program Director Ray Allensworth said the landing operation was a resounding success. It happened autonomously, and Blue Ghost evaded two hazards before finding a safe spot to touch down.
The Texas-based company was targeting a 100-meter landing area within Mare Crisium, and Allensworth said they appear to have hit the mark. The team went through their final landing practice just hours before the actual touchdown.
Blue Ghost Mission 1 – Shadow on the Moon’s Surface.
(Firefly Aerospace)
“I always had full faith in this team. We’ve been working so hard, but not just hard, but smart,” Allensworth said. “We really did focus on: What are the highest risks that we need to burn down? What are the things we need to absolutely test, analyze, model and then practice?”
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin cheered on Firefly’s Mission Operations in Cedar Park, Texas, near Austin, on Sunday, giving them a thumbs up and offering congratulations on social media.
Blue Ghost has already been sending back breathtaking views from the Moon, including a look from the lunar surface with Earth in the distance.
With not a minute to waste, Allensworth said operations on the Moon were already underway.
“We’ve already begun moving into surface commissioning and getting started on those payload operations. So, you know, we landed at the very beginning of the lunar day, and we really want to maximize that entire time on the surface and really get as much payload data back as possible for, for all of our customers,” Allensworth said.
Blue Ghost has been on its journey since launching with SpaceX in January, traveling more than 2.8 million miles.
The mission is designed to last 14 days on the lunar surface, but the Firefly team hopes to push those boundaries and possibly exceed that timeline.
The science on the Blue Ghost lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program and marks the second successful commercial landing part of CLPS. However, Firefly has noted that, unlike its predecessor later in the year, Intuitive Machines, this lander has completed an upright landing.
Intuitive Machine’s Nova-C lander toppled over during the landing process in February 2024 but was still hailed a success by NASA as the first American landing since 1972. The Houston-based company launched its second lunar mission last week, which is slated to land on the far side of the Moon on March 6.
Firefly plans to capture images from the Moon, including a total eclipse of the Sun on March 14 from the lunar surface.
On March 16, in the final hours of the mission, when Blue Ghost enters lunar night, the team hopes to capture a lunar sunset, recreating what Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan described during his mission.
“We’re going to continue to operate the lander as long as our batteries have a state of charge, and that we can continue to get data,” Allensworth said. “There’s a lot of really interesting phenomena that’ll happen, particularly at sunset, that we really want to make sure and capture. We’ve talked a lot about the regolith, and this phenomenon of levitating off the surface.”
Only four astronauts have witnessed this phenomenon, known as “lunar horizon glow,” as moondust is excited by sunlight and glows even after the Sun is gone. Firefly CEO Jason Kim said it could look like fireflies dancing on the Moon.