Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander has made it to the moon.
Blue Ghost fired its engines for four minutes and 15 seconds on Thursday (Feb. 13), injecting itself into an elliptical lunar orbit ahead of a planned touchdown try a little over two weeks from now.
The spacecraft commemorated the milestone by snapping some photos, a number of which Firefly stitched into a dramatic, 27-second-long time-lapse video.
“I love you to the moon, but not back — I’m staying there,” the Texas-based company wrote (from Blue Ghost’s perspective) today (Feb. 14) in an X post that shared the video.
Related: Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander leaves Earth orbit to head for the moon
Blue Ghost launched Jan. 15 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The lander’s mission, called “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Blue Ghost is carrying 10 science and technology experiments for the agency, which wants to better understand the lunar environment before sending astronauts back to the moon via its Artemis program.
Blue Ghost will spend the next 16 days in lunar orbit, if all goes to plan. It will conduct additional engine burns to circularize its path around Earth’s nearest neighbor, then attempt a landing in the Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) region of the moon’s near side on March 2.
Success would be historic. To date, just one private company, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, has soft-landed a spacecraft on the moon. That milestone came in February 2024, when a spacecraft called Odysseus touched down near the lunar south pole, also on a CLPS-backed mission.
Blue Ghost didn’t take flight alone last month; Resilience, a moon lander built by Tokyo-based company ispace, lifted off aboard the same Falcon 9. Resilience’s path to the moon is longer and more circuitous than Blue Ghost’s, however; the Japanese lander is expected to arrive in lunar orbit about 3.5 months from now.
Resilience, which isn’t carrying any NASA payloads, is ispace’s second moon lander. The first successfully reached lunar orbit in March 2023 but crashed during its touchdown attempt a month later after getting confused by the rim of a crater.
And there’s more moon-mission action coming soon. Intuitive Machines is scheduled to launch its second lunar lander, Athena, on Feb. 26, also on a Falcon 9. Athena’s flight is supported by CLPS as well.
Article by:Source: mwall@space.com (Mike Wall)
