Artist’s impression of the Blue Ghost moon landing
Firefly Aerospace
Two private spacecraft aiming to land on the moon will blast off on a SpaceX rocket, a sign of increasing commercial activity on the lunar surface.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander and ispace’s Resilience lander have managed to ride on the same Falcon 9 rocket, and are currently scheduled for liftoff on January 15 at 6:11 GMT (1:11 a.m. EST) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The launch will be ispace’s second attempt to land on the moon. It ended in his first failure in his Hakuto-R spacecraft he entered the collision the surface of the moon in 2023. The Japanese company says it has since upgraded Resilience’s hardware and software to avoid the bugs that caused the crash.
Meanwhile, the US company Firefly Aerospace will make the first attempt. The company has a contract with NASA as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which pays private companies to achieve its scientific goals.
Resilience will carry six payloads to the lunar surface, including an experiment to produce food on the moon using microalgae and a microrover that will travel, study and photograph the landing zone. Blue Ghost will carry a mix of 10 private and public payloads to the Moon, including a radiation-resistant computer, a probe that will measure how heat passes through the lunar surface, and an attempt to establish a permanent link to a satellite receiver. Earth’s GPS network.
The Resilience lunar lander is ready for launch
iSpace
Both missions will reach Earth orbit relatively quickly, within minutes of launch, but it will take much longer to reach the moon. Blue Ghost will orbit Earth for 25 days before firing its engines to begin a four-day trip to the moon, where it will orbit for 16 days. After this, it will descend autonomously and land on the plain called Mare Crisium, where it will take two weeks to fulfill its scientific objectives.
Resilience will take a more bumpy route on a journey that will fly past the moon a month after launch, sliding through deeper space for a month before returning to the moon. Once in orbit, it must land on a plain called Mare Frigoris four to five months after launch.
If the missions are successful, they will become the second and third private spacecraft to land on the moon. The first was Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander, which the touch last year
Blue Ghost and Resilience are the first around a dozen spaceships are expected to touch down on the lunar surface this year, largely powered by NASA’s CLPS, and many are designed to test and demonstrate the technology necessary for a future permanent human presence on the moon. These include a second and a third mission for Intuitive Machines. IM-2 will seek to drill near the lunar south pole for buried ice that could be used in future missions, as well as deploy two exploration rovers and a lunar satellite to communicate with Earth.
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