Blue Ghost Lunar Lander Heads to the Moon – Sky & Telescope

Posted on 15/01/2025

Photo of Blue Ghost launch shows a white stripe in darkness reflected on water in the foreground — A Falcon 9 rocket launches with Blue Ghost
*NASA / Frank Michaux*

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket headed skyward early this morning, with two missions going to the Moon: iSpace’s second Hakuto R mission and Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander.

The launch is the first in a busy year for lunar and planetary spaceflight in 2025. Liftoff from Pad LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center occurred at 1:11 a.m. EST / 6:11 UT. Liftoff to orbit was nominal. The two spacecraft separated and deployed just over 65 and 93 minutes after liftoff respectively and are reported to be in good operational health.

Watch the launch here:

The two missions are taking the long way to the Moon, from low-Earth orbit to trans-lunar injection, and then onward to capture in cis-lunar orbit in late 2025.

Blue Ghost

“On behalf of Firefly, we want to thank SpaceX for a spot-on deployment in our target orbit,” says Jason Kim (Firefly Aerospace CEO) in a recent press release. “The mission is now in the hands of the unstoppable Firefly Team.”

The company’s Blue Ghost Lander is named after a species of firefly found in the U.S. Appalachians. The mission includes 10 payloads as part of the NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Service program, which is also part of the Artemis initiative. If all goes well, Blue Ghost will land in the Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille on the Moon’s nearside sometime in early March. Firefly Aerospace expects 14-days of surface operations from the mission, spanning one lunar day from local sunrise to sunset.

Firefly Team — The Firefly team with the Blue Ghost lander
*Firefly Aerospace*

The 10 payloads Blue Ghost will carry to the Moon include Lunar PlanetVac, developed by Blue Origin and Honeybee Robotics to demonstrate pneumatic sample collection of lunar regolith. Also onboard is the Lunar Environment heliospheric X-Ray Imager (LEXI), which will provide the first holistic images of Earth’s magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind. (A version of LEXI flew in space briefly before, as the Sub-orbital Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (STORM) on a sounding rocket mission in 2012.)

The Southwest Research Institute’s Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder is also heading to the Moon to probe the structure of the lunar mantle. (The sounder was originally designed to fly on NASA’s Maven mission to Mars.)

Artist's concept of Blue Ghost lander shows a gold-foiled module on gray lunar regolith — An artist’s conception of the Blue Ghost lander on the Moon
*Firefly Aerospace*

High-definition cameras on the lander will be well-positioned to see the March 14th total lunar eclipse, which will appear as a solar eclipse when seen from the Moon. This type of imaging was attempted before during Surveyor 3 in 1967, although those results were a bit underwhelming due to the fuzzy image quality.

Researchers also hope to duplicate an observation carried out by Eugene Cernan, one of the astronauts on Apollo 17 (the final mission of the Apollo program). Cernan noted a glow due to dust suspended electrostatically over the lunar horizon, and lander cameras should be able to confirm the glow’s presence.

Resilience

iSpace lunar lander concept art shows silver-black lander on dark regolith with Earth in the background — An illustration shows the aerospace company iSpace’s Hakuto R lander on the Moon. The first mission never made it to the lunar surface, but a second attempt is targeted for later this year.
*iSpace*

The second payload on the Falcon rocket is iSpace’s second Hakuto R, named Resilience. The mission is due to land at Mare Frigoris sometime in the May to June time frame. The first Hakuto R lander failed in 2023, crashing at the Atlas Crater site, but it was nevertheless notable for returning an image of a solar eclipse from lunar orbit as the Moon’s shadow passed over Earth’s surface.

Hakuto R carries water electrolyzer equipment, designed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. For this first attempt, Hakuto R will carry its own water to the Moon; the technology could be useful in future missions to the ice-filled craters at the lunar south pole. Hakuto R also carries an algae growth experiment, which could inform attempts to grow food on the Moon.

rover concept art shows rectangular box holding a solar array; four slotted wheels carry the chassey — The iSpace micro-rover.
*iSpace*

The plan for Resilience is to use a robotic arm to deploy a small lunar rover named Tenacious on the lunar surface shortly after landing. Tenacious will collect lunar samples and demonstrate its capabilities for surface operations as part of iSpace’s agreement with NASA.

If successful, these missions would demonstrate a win for NASA’s commercial spaceflight program. The program saw only mixed success in 2024, with Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander failing to reach the Moon and Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander making a lopsided landing.

Safe journeys to both missions, as the Moon takes center stage for spaceflight in 2025.

Article by:Source – David Dickinson