Two privately-built moon landers share a ride to space atop a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket
With the nearly full moon shining overhead, two companies, one American and the other headquartered in Japan, launched privately developed robotic lunar landers early Wednesday, sharing a sky-lighting ride to space atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The U.S. lander, built by Austin, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and known as "Blue Ghost," is carrying 10 sophisticated instruments for NASA while the Japanese spacecraft, built by Tokyo-based ispace and known as "Resilience," is carrying four instruments of its own and a small microrover known as "Tenacious."
Mounted one atop the other in the nose cone of the Falcon 9, liftoff from historic pad 39A came on time at 1:11 a.m. EST Wednesday. Blue Ghost, weighing 1,033 pounds without propellant, was released to fly on its own one hour and five minutes after liftoff.
Resilience, which weighs about 750 pounds, was deployed 21 minutes later, after the Falcon 9 carried out a final second stage engine firing to put the craft on a different trajectory.
"Our customers have different strategies for arriving to the moon, and Falcon 9's abilities enable us to deliver each lander to their respective injection orbits to complete their missions," said Julianna Scheiman, a senior SpaceX manager.
The landers are taking very different routes to the moon. Blue Ghost is expected to spend about 25 days in Earth orbit, giving Firefly engineers time to thoroughly check out the craft's instruments, propulsion and other subsystems. The craft then will fire its engines for a four-day trip to the moon, followed by 16 days in lunar orbit.
If no major problems develop, Blue Ghost, 6.6 feet tall and 11.5 feet wide, then will descend to the surface near the center of Mare Crisium — the Sea of Crisis — touching down on four shock-absorbing legs. Its 10 science instruments will have two full weeks, or a lunar "day," to collect data.
"The research we gather will help unlock future space exploration, while also benefiting life on Earth, with new insights into how space weather and other cosmic forces affect our planet," said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.
"Each milestone we complete will provide valuable data for future missions and ultimately keep the United States and our international partners at the forefront of space exploration."
Unlike Blue Ghost, ispace's Resilience, also known as Hakuto-R, will head for the moon about two days after launch, using a low-energy fuel-saving trajectory. One month later, the craft will fly past the moon, using its gravity to adjust the flight path before entering orbit about four months after launch. Two weeks after that, Resilience will attempt its own landing at Mare Frigoris, the Sea of Cold.
ispace launched its first Hakuto lander in late 2022, but flight controllers lost contact the following March as the spacecraft was nearing the moon's surface.
Investigators later determined the onboard software misinterpreted the lander's altitude after flying over the rim of a crater. The vehicle subsequently ran out of propellant and crashed to the surface.
That problem has been corrected, ispace says, prompting the company to name its second Hakuto lander "Resilience." ispace officials are optimistic about its chances the second time around.
"We've got experiments that I think are going to help with the establishment of lunar infrastructure that will eventually, hopefully lead to a permanent, significant human presence on the moon," said Ron Garan, a former space shuttle astronaut and CEO of ispace USA.
"We're doing an electrolysis experiment. We're doing a food production experiment. We also have some art installations."
A model of a Swedish house will be carried away from the lander on the rover, which will "set it down on the lunar surface," Garan said. "We're going to photograph it, and it's a really exciting artistic endeavor as well."
Garan called the microrover, built by ispace's Luxembourg-based unit and measuring just 10.2 inches tall and 21.6 inches long, "really critical to the future of our company."
"The data that's going to come off the rover is going to be really valuable to us as we continue to hone our design on the surface mobility aspect of the business," he said. "And so, that's really exciting, too."
The Resilience mission is privately funded, without any financing from NASA. The instruments aboard Blue Ghost, in contrast, cost NASA $44 million to develop. The agency agreed to pay Firefly $101 million to carry them to the moon as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
The CLPS program is aimed at encouraging private industry to launch agency payloads to the moon to collect needed science and engineering data before Artemis astronauts begin work on the surface near the lunar south pole later this decade.
"NASA is investing in commercial delivery services to the moon to enable industry growth and to support long-term lunar exploration, helping the United States stay ahead in space innovation," said Nicola Fox, head of NASA's science mission directorate.
"To date, five vendors have been awarded 11 lunar deliveries under CLPS and are sending more than 50 instruments to various locations on the moon, including the lunar South Pole. Existing CLPS contracts (have) a cumulative maximum contract value of $2.6 billion through 2028. No other nation has done this."
The Blue Ghost instruments will collect data on the lunar dust environment, drill into the soil below the lander, monitor background X-ray emissions, test whether Earth-orbiting navigation satellites can be used near the moon and the effectiveness of computer radiation shielding, among other topics of interest.
"Before we can send our humans back to the moon, we are sending a lot of science and a lot of technology ahead of time to prepare for that," said Fox.
"The technological and science demonstrations on board Firefly's Blue Ghost mission will be critical in our ability to not only discover more science, but also to ensure the safety of our spacecraft instruments and most importantly, the safety of our astronauts."
Kim said the Blue Ghost mission will span about two months.
"After Blue Ghost lands on the moon, we'll be collecting critical payload science data throughout the entire mission," he said. "We'll then wrap up the mission by capturing a solar eclipse and a lunar sunset in high definition video before operating several hours into the lunar night."
Toward the end of the mission, the company hopes to capture a phenomenon first seen by NASA's Surveyor moon landers and at least two Apollo crews, a so-called "horizon glow" caused by sunlight interacting with small dust particles kicked up by solar radiation and micrometeoroid impacts.
"Knowing that Firefly's Blue Ghost mission is a culmination of what the last Apollo astronaut to walk on the moon observed is a fitting tribute to their legacy," Kim said.
