A new era of space exploration with a growing fleet of companies scrambling to reach the lunar surface has opened up with the successful landing on the Moon of Firefly Aerospace's private space mission Blue Ghost 1 yesterday (2 March 2025).
The Texas-based company became only the second commercial space company to land on the Moon after its robotic craft touched down at 0834 UTC on a dark basaltic plain called the Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises) near a solitary lunar mountain called Mons Latreille.
Blue Ghost’s two-week flight began with a launch on 15 January by a SpaceX Falcon 9. It is scheduled for 14 days – equivalent to a single lunar day – of surface operations, testing the functions of NASA equipment and performing several experiments.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, named ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and sets the tone for the future of exploration across cislunar space as the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful soft-landing on the Moon.
Hard on the heels of Blue Ghost will be a second landing attempt on 6 March by Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission, featuring its lander, Athena. During the company’s first mission in February 2024, the lander touched down too fast, snagging a foot on the surface and toppling over, severely curtailing operations.
“Firefly is literally and figuratively over the Moon,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. “Our Blue Ghost lunar lander now has a permanent home on the lunar surface with 10 NASA payloads and a plaque with every Firefly employee’s name.
“We’ve proved that we’re well equipped to deliver reliable, affordable access to the Moon – and we won’t stop there. With annual lunar missions, Firefly is paving the way for a lasting lunar presence that will help unlock access to the rest of the solar system for our nation, our partners and the world.”
Surface operations during the 14-day mission include lunar subsurface drilling, sample collection, X-ray imaging and dust mitigation experiments. On 14 March, Firefly expects to capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse when the Earth will block the Sun above the Moon’s horizon. Two days later it is scheduled to capture a lunar sunset, providing data on how lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow first documented by Eugene Cernan on Apollo 17.
During its 45-day journey to the Moon, Blue Ghost travelled more than 2.8 million miles, downlinked more than 27 GB of data and supported several payload science operations, including signal tracking from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) at a record-breaking, radiation tolerant computing through the Van Allen Belts with the RadPC payload, and measurements of magnetic field changes with its LMS payload.
In another new commercial initiative, Blue Ghost carried a small pyramid-shaped capsule for San Francisco-based LifeShip which is collecting DNA from customers as part of its campaign to establish a lunar seed bank and data archive.
The blockchain-based platform Copernic Space bought capacity in the LifeShip capsule for digital archive material and ‘lunar assets’ including music, code, fine art collections, company registrations and videos. Among these were the national symbols – flag, coat of arms and constitution – transported to the lunar surface in digital form for the space nation Asgardia (see Asgardia's legacy lands on Moon).
In development since 2020, Copernic Space says it is providing a "new opportunity for space industry players to tokenise their space assets and commercialise what they own providing access new monetisation methods".
Image: The shadow of Blue Ghost on the Moon's surface. Credit: Firefly Aerospace
