The latest private lunar lander is a little closer to its destination. In the early morning hours of February 18, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost fired up its engines, marking the last leg of its 45-day journey to the moon.
The engine launch, which began at 3:09 a.m. EDT and lasted three minutes and 18 seconds, moved the lander, which had been in a high elliptical orbit around the Moon since February 13, into a lower orbit. From a new vantage point 75 miles (120 kilometers) above the lunar surface, Blue Ghost was able to take new images of the lunar far side and transmit them to Earth.
Although this is necessary to prepare Blue Ghost for its planned landing attempt on March 2, this change has a downside, as there will be periods of temporary communication outages between the spacecraft and its caretakers at the Texas-based Firefly base.
The 45-day route between planetary takeoff and lunar landing also allowed Blue Ghost operators to calibrate onboard instruments. If all goes according to plan, Blue Ghost will settle into its new home in an area of the moon known as Mare Crisium, or the Sea of Crises. The basin was formed by an ancient asteroid collision and was once filled with basaltic lava. The spacecraft’s 10 instruments will analyze the heat flow from the Moon’s interior, magnetic and electric fields on the surface, and the chemical composition of the lunar soil. The mission will also test technologies that can be used in NASA’s Artemis missions, which aim to land a human on the Moon for the first time since 1972.
Blue Ghost took a somewhat circuitous route on its way to the lunar surface. Instead of a direct shot from the Kennedy Space Center to the moon, its journey included several weeks in orbit around the Earth after launching on January 15. During this time, its cameras captured some impressive images of our planet and even snapped a selfie or two.
Blue Ghost is only the latest private lander to attempt a lunar landing, although the results have been mixed. In April 2023, the Hakuto-R M1 lander of the Japanese company ispace crashed during a landing attempt.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine, the first private American attempt at landing, was also unsuccessful, suffering a catastrophic failure shortly after launch in January 2024. A little over a month later, Intuitive Machine’s Odyssey succeeded where Peregrine failed, although it suffered a broken leg that left it lopsided on the moon.
If Blue Ghost lands safely, it will soon have a new company. ispace will try its luck again with its Resilience lander, launched by the same Falcon 9 rocket as Blue Ghost. This spacecraft approached the Moon more slowly and will attempt to land sometime in May or June. On board the lander is the Tenacious rover, which will hopefully be used to explore the lunar soil around Resilience’s planned landing site in the far north of the Moon.
If that’s not enough lunar exploration for you, Intuitive Machines also has another mission that could launch as early as next week. This mission will involve a robot designed to jump across the surface to explore a crater that is in permanent shadow.
