Relive Blue Ghost’s lunar landing as it happened and follow updates on its ongoing mission.
An uncrewed spacecraft developed in the United States has successfully soft-landed on the moon, making Texas-based Firefly Aerospace only the second private-sector company ever to complete such a feat.
Firefly’s 6.6-foot-tall (2-meter-tall) Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon’s near side around 2:34 a.m. CT (3:34 a.m. ET) Sunday.
A parade of lunar landers developed by the private-sector have launched this year, part of a convoy of robotic spacecraft that NASA and its partner agencies hope will pave the way for astronauts to return to the moon’s surface later this decade.
Success was far from guaranteed. In February 2023, another Texas-based space company, Intuitive Machines, became the first private-sector company to soft-land a vehicle on the moon, but broadly speaking, about half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure.
Firefly CEO Jason Kim said that the lander was “stable and upright” after landing.
“Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed,” Kim said. “We got some moon dust on our boots.”
Each of Blue Ghost’s four feet were equipped with sensors that were designed to immediately confirm when they had touched lunar soil. But when the spacecraft touched down, the webcast showed only three of the vehicle’s four landing legs confirmed contact.
Firefly’s Ray Allensworth, the program director for Blue Ghost, told CNN in an interview that there may be a benign explanation.
“So there’s also a good chance that the software just ignored — threw the data out — from that sensor because maybe it tripped early. I’m not 100% sure,” Allensworth said. “We’d have to go back and look at the data.”
But it is abundantly clear that Blue Ghost is sitting upright, she said. What’s more, all signs so far point to the fact that Blue Ghost touched down within its expected 330-foot (100-meter) target, Allensworth said in a news conference.
Firefly Aerospace shares the first images of the lunar surface from Blue Ghost following its successful touchdown. – Firefly Aerospace
The lander also conducted two “hazard avoidance” maneuvers during its final descent that included boulders and rocks, indicating that Blue Ghost’s autonomous landing software worked as it needed to, she said.
The mission landed near an ancient volcanic feature called Mons Latreille, which lies on the far eastern edge of the moon’s visible face just north of the equator. Mons Latreille is located within Mare Crisium — or “Sea of Crises” in Latin — a sprawling lunar basin that stretches 340 miles (550 kilometers) wide.
The team chose the site because “it avoids large magnetic anomalies — (or interruptions) — on the lunar surface that could disrupt some of our payload measurements,” said Ryan Watkins, the program scientist for NASA’s Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office, during a December briefing.
An ‘incredible achievement’
About 40 minutes after landing, Blue Ghost’s first image of its new home arrived on Earth, showcasing the lunar dust beneath its feet, craters and a portion of the lander as seen by one of its cameras.
“The navigation system did such a phenomenal job finding what looks like a relatively flat surface for us to land on,” said Brigette Oaks, Firefly’s vice president of engineering.
The shadow of the Blue Ghost lander can be seen on the lunar surface, with Earth visible above it. – Firefly Aerospace
Kim said he hopes the landing inspires the next generation of kids. “You never know where you’re going to land,” he said. “We just landed on the moon. We hope that the Fireflies today inspire a whole generation. There’s space for everyone in space.”
NASA’s acting administrator Janet Petro offered her gratitude to the Firefly team and everyone who worked on the mission, highlighting their motivation and dedication.
“This incredible achievement demonstrates how NASA and American companies are leading the way in space exploration for the benefit of all,” Petro said. “We have already learned many lessons — and the technological and science demonstrations onboard Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 will improve our ability to not only discover more science, but to ensure the safety of our spacecraft instruments for future human exploration — both in the short term and long term.”
While the lander touched down during the middle of the night for North America, lunar daytime is just beginning at Blue Ghost’s landing site.
“That’s when the sun rises at our landing site in Mare Crisium, and we want to take full advantage of the entire lunar day (14 Earth days) when we have sunlight to operate our 10 payloads,” said Risa Schnautz, Firefly’s director of marketing and communications in an email to CNN.
Blue Ghost will spend the next 14 days conducting science and technology demonstrations, including collecting lunar samples, drilling into the subsurface, conducting X-ray imaging and capturing high-definition imagery.
Blue Ghost’s suite of science equipment
Blue Ghost comes equipped with 10 science instruments and technology demonstrations from NASA, some of which already began collecting data as the lunar lander traversed the roughly 239,000-mile (384,400-kilometer) void between Earth and the moon.
The equipment includes a device that’s testing out how GPS services might be used in orbit and on the lunar surface, a vacuum that will aim to suck up soil, and a telescope that will observe how Earth’s protective magnetic field, also known as the magnetosphere, responds to space weather.
Blue Ghost’s planned landing site of Mons Latreille (inset) within Mare Crisium. – CNN/NASA
Firefly is also expecting the spacecraft to deliver stunning images from its landing site.
Allensworth said that rather than using its high-definition cameras to stream a live broadcast of the lunar landing, Blue Ghost’s team in mission control wanted to focus the vehicle’s communications bandwidth on delivering accurate real-time data, getting information about the spacecraft’s altitude and speed.
“Even though you might have the camera capability to do live streaming, it’s not always the most practical thing to do in the moment,” Allensworth said.
During its 14 days of operations on the moon, Blue Ghost will photograph an eclipse, during which Earth will block the sun’s rays from the moon’s surface for about five hours. The vehicle is also expected to snap pictures of a phenomenon last witnessed by astronauts more than 50 years ago.
“There’s a phenomenon called the lunar horizon glow (scattered light caused by floating electrostatic particles) that only the Apollo 15 and 17 astronauts have seen with their eyes,” Kim told CNN in a previous interview. “We’re going to be able to capture that in 4K-by-4K high-definition video and share that with the rest of the world.”
Firefly’s Blue Ghost will also continue collecting data for several hours into lunar night — when brutally cold conditions thrust the landing zone near Mons Latreille into shadow and temperatures could drop to as cold as minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 degrees Celsius).
The fall of lunar night has typically spelled the end for lunar landers. But NASA wants Blue Ghost to go for it. The space agency even upped the value of the contract it’s paying to Firefly — from $93 million to $101 million — in part so that the company could prepare the lander to survive such frigid temperatures, Kim said.
Paving the way for humans on the moon
The Blue Ghost lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, initiative.
The program is a concerted effort by the space agency to encourage the private sector to develop lunar landers in the hopes that their robotic exploration will pave the way for astronauts to return to the moon for the first time in 50 years under the Artemis program.
Dr. Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said Firefly made something that is incredibly difficult look easy.
“This is an incredibly challenging technical feat to pull off, to land anything on the surface of the moon, and what you saw today is an existence of proof that the model that NASA has been pursuing since 2018 is possible to be successful,” he said, referring to the CLPS program.
Firefly employees at a watch party in Cedar Park, Texas, celebrate as Blue Ghost successfully touches down on March 2. – Jackie Wattles/CNN
There are 14 companies currently able to bid on CLPS contracts, which provide money to carry out lunar landings. So far, two companies — Astrobotic Technology and Intuitive Machines — have attempted missions, but only the latter has managed a soft touchdown.
Astrobotic’s first mission last year failed shortly after reaching orbit because of propulsion issues. And while Intuitive Machines’ mission was largely successful, its lander tipped over on its side, limiting the length of time it was able to operate.
Two other private-sector vehicles are currently making their own approaches to the moon. Intuitive Machines’ second lander launched Wednesday and is heading for the moon’s south pole region. And a lander built by Japan-based company Ispace, which launched alongside Blue Ghost in January, will attempt a soft landing this spring — an effort to redeem the company’s failed first attempt in 2023.
Kim told CNN he is looking forward to Firefly’s next lunar mission for NASA, which is already on the books and is slated to land a Blue Ghost vehicle on the far side of the moon. So far, only China has sent a spacecraft there.
The CEO said Firefly has exciting new technology on deck for that feat.
A separate spacecraft for that mission, called Elytra, will be put in orbit around the moon to serve as a communications relay, beaming data between the spacecraft and Earth because Blue Ghost’s antennas won’t be able to point directly home.
“That orbiter is very exciting because we could put cameras on there, we could put other sensors on there, and now we can start creating a new category of mapping out the moon,” Kim said. “And so we’re really excited about doing that, because there’s a lot of government and science and commercial entities that want that data.”
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