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Firefly Aerospace touched down a spacecraft on the Moon this morning, in the first ever ‘fully successful’ landing by a private compay.
The Blue Ghost lander arrived on schedule, and has already started sending back photos.
Even governments have struggled with soft landings, so today’s achievement is an exciting milestone for those hoping for new insights about our cosmic neighbourhood.
Last year, Intuitive Machines landed a spacecraft on the Moon named Odysseus, which managed to transmit data and worked with Nasa, but also broke a leg and tipped over.
It’s for this reason that Firefly are celebrating making history as ‘the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful Moon landing’ which ‘represents a giant leap in commercial exploration’.
The landing didn’t come with as much fanfare as the Apollo 11 landing in 1969, where people tuned in their TV sets across the world to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take the giant leap for mankind.
But it means Nasa is fully back in business on the lunar surface, after a decades-long hiatus when our satellite was just something we looked at in the sky.
After paying £115 million for the technology and the delivery, they hope that the mission will allow them to ‘learn more about the lunar environment and support future astronauts on the Moon and Mars’.
The lander is carrying a a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis, and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10ft below the surface, as part of ten experiments into the lunar conditions.
In future, it is hoped these experiments could pave the way for a lasting human presence on the Moon, rather than just a quick stroll and back into the rocket.
Launched in mid-January from Florida, Blue Ghost is the third mission under Nasa’s commercial lunar delivery program.
It is part of preparations to send astronauts back later this decade, and the hope is that competing private businesses will make space exploration cheaper and easier.
Firefly’s Ray Allensworth said the lander skipped over hazards including boulders to land safely this morning.
He said the team continue to analyse the data to figure out the lander’s exact position, but all indications suggest it landed within the 328-foot target zone in Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crises).
The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.
Another lander – a 15ft device built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines – is due to land on the Moon on Thursday. It is aiming for the bottom of the Moon, just 100 miles from the south pole.
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 January 15, taking a longer, windier route.
Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting a lunar landing for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.
Nasa’s top science officer Nicky Fox said the space agency wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realising some missions will fail.
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