A private lunar lander has successfully touched down on the moon, marking a significant step for commercial lunar exploration.
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, carrying scientific instruments for NASA, landed on Sunday, aiming for a volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon's near side.
This achievement underscores the growing role of private companies in lunar exploration, paving the way for future astronaut missions.
Confirmation of the touchdown came from Firefly's Mission Control in Austin, Texas, a testament to the complex coordination required for such a mission. The lander carried a drill, vacuum, and other experimental equipment for NASA, furthering our understanding of the lunar environment.
“We’re on the moon,” Mission Control reported, adding the lander was “stable.”
A smooth, upright landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the US, China, India and Japan.
Firefly sent an image of the lander on the surface of the moon - showing its pockmarked, grey texture.
Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.
Launched in mid-January from Florida, the two-metre tall lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.
The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.
It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.
On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon's surface.
At the same time, an on-board receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.
The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.
Another lander — a tall and skinny four metres tall built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the moon on Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the moon, just 100 miles from the south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.
Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines' lander put the US back on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972.
A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on 15 January taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.
The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.
NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realising some missions will fail, said the space agency's top science officer Nicky Fox.
Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.
“Every time we go up, we’re learning from each other,” Kim said.
