Firefly Lands on the Moon

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 landed on the Moon early this morning.  The third of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLPS missions, the commercial lunar lander delivered 10 NASA payloads to Mare Crisium.  Another CLPS mission, Intuitive Machines’ IM-2, will land just four days from now as NASA uses these small robotic landers to gather data in support of the Artemis program to return humans to the lunar surface and to begin an era of commercial exploration and utilization of the Moon.

Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1) launched on January 15, 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and entered lunar orbit on February 24, sending back images of the surface that was described by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin as “magnificent desolation.”

The video, sped up by 10X, was taken about 100 km above the lunar surface, showing the far side of the Moon and a top-down view of Blue Ghost’s RCS thrusters (center) and radiator panels on each side. The radiator panels are moving nominally to protect Blue Ghost’s subsystems from extreme temperatures. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

Since then Firefly has been preparing for this morning’s landing, which went like “clockwork” according to Firefly’s CEO Jason Kim speaking on the live broadcast from Austin, TX, Firefly’s home base. The mission control team was “calm and collected and cool the whole time. Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed, and then after we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up.”

The lander touched down in Mare Crisium near Mons Latrielle at 3:34 am Eastern Standard Time.

In less than an hour, the company shared the first low resolution image from the lander using the S-band antenna. A portion of the lander can be seen in the upper center.

Two more low-res images were released at a post-landing press conference about two hours later, both showing the Earth on the horizon.  Higher resolution imagery will be forthcoming when the higher data rate X-band antenna is activated.

The ten NASA payloads are:

• Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR)
• Radiation Tolerant Computer System (RadPC)
• Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC)
• Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS)
• Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-Ray Imager (LEXI)
• Lunar PlanetVac (LPV)
• Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER)
• Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) 1.1
• Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS)
• Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE)

One of the main objectives is understanding more about lunar dust.  “Regolith adherence” is a problem because the sticky dust can interfere with the operation of spacesuits and mechanical equipment. The RAC, EDS, and LPV instruments will study how it adheres to various materials and whether electromagnetism can be used to prevent it from sticking. Mare Crisium was chosen as the landing site in part because there are no magnetic anomalies there that could interfere with the experiment.

NASA began the CLPS program in 2018 to encourage commercial companies to participate in lunar exploration through Public-Private Partnerships.  NASA buys services to deliver NASA science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. The companies design, build and launch the landers and are expected to find non-NASA customers to close the business case. Nine companies, including Firefly, were chosen in the first round of contracts and five more were selected later.

For BGM1, NASA paid Firefly $101 million for delivery services and spent another $44 million on its 10 payloads.

NASA’s goal is to launch two CLPS missions per year. NASA acknowledged CLPS was a high risk approach and described it as taking shots on goal and the success rate might be only 50 percent.

Powered only by solar cells, not radioisotope power sources, these small, comparatively inexpensive lunar landers are not expected to survive the lunar night when sunlight disappears and temperatures fall to -250°C (-418°F). Every part of the Moon has 14 days of sunlight and 14 days of darkness with the exception of permanently shadowed regions at the poles.

Firefly anticipates BGM1, which Kim describes as “short and squat,” will continue operating for 5 hours after sundown, however.  The lander is 2 meters (6.6 feet) tall and 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) wide.

Firefly is describing itself as the “first commercial company to successfully land on the Moon.” Others might award that distinction to Intuitive Machines, which landed on the Moon a year ago. The second of NASA’s CLPS missions, one of its legs broke and it tipped over upon landing, but it still provided enough data that NASA considers it a success. The first CLPS mission, Astrobotic’s Peregrine, suffered a propulsion failure and did not make it to the Moon.

Intuitive Machines launched its second CLPS lander, IM-2, last week and it will arrive on the Moon four days from now.

Others are sending similarly small, inexpensive landers to the Moon including the Japanese company, ispace, whose SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon mission also is on its way after launching on the same rocket as Blue Ghost. ispace’s first attempt last year was a failure. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) succeeded soon thereafter with its SLIM lander, however. SLIM is the only one of these types of landers that did, surprisingly, survive the lunar night. The Indian Space Research Organisation was the first to successfully land one of these new types of landers in 2023. JAXA and ISRO are government agencies, not companies.