'Moon dust on our boots': Texas company's blue ghost lands on lunar surface

A robotic spacecraft from an American startup gently set down on a lava plain on the moon's near side early Sunday morning.

The Blue Ghost lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, touched down at 3:34 a.m. Eastern time.

"You all stuck the landing," Will Coogan, the Blue Ghost chief engineer, said during a livestream from the flight operations room. "We're on the moon."

A few minutes later, Jason Kim, the CEO of Firefly, proudly declared, "We got some moon dust on our boots."

Within about half an hour, the spacecraft sent back its first photograph of the moon's surface.

It was a remarkable success for the company, achieving what many others have not.

Among the countries, companies and organizations that have attempted in the 21st century to set down softly on the moon, only China can claim complete success on the first try. Others, including those from India, Russia, an Israeli nonprofit and a Japanese company, all crashed and carved new craters on the lunar surface.

Last year, two landers -- one sent by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and the other by Intuitive Machines of Houston -- did successfully land and continued working and communicating with Earth. But both toppled over, limiting what the spacecraft could accomplish on the moon's surface.

Intuitive Machines was the first private company to successfully land on the moon. Firefly is now the second. Both are part of NASA's efforts to harness private enterprise to reduce the cost of taking scientific and technological payloads to the moon. For this mission, NASA is paying Firefly $101.5 million.

"What Firefly demonstrated today, I think they made it look easy, but it's incredibly difficult," Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's science mission directorate, said during a news conference after the landing.

The success provides an "existence proof" that NASA's approach in financing such missions can work, Kearns said.

Since launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 15, the Blue Ghost spacecraft had performed almost flawlessly.

"We haven't had any major anomalies, which is fantastic," Ray Allensworth, the program director for Blue Ghost at Firefly, said during the livestream.

About an hour before landing, the spacecraft executed a preprogrammed command to fire its main engine for 19 seconds in order to nudge itself out of a 62-mile-high orbit onto a downward path toward the surface.

At that moment, the spacecraft was behind the moon and out of communications. No one in the flight operations room knew how the spacecraft was doing until it emerged about 20 minutes later.

As it emerged from the lunar far side, all systems were operating as expected, and Blue Ghost was where it was supposed to be.

About 11 minutes before landing, the lander, traveling at 3,800 mph, fired its main engine again to slow down. For the final couple of minutes of descent, it pivoted to a vertical orientation, avoided hazards and set down at the pace of a slow walk.

"Oh my god, we did it!" Allensworth shouted afterward. "It's amazing. My heart is beating so fast."

The landing site lies in Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

The mission is to last about 14 Earth days until lunar sunset.

The lander is carrying 10 instruments for NASA as part of the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. Several are focused on lunar dust, which is often angular, sticky and sharp -- a bane for machinery and a potential health issue for future astronauts.

"We'll be looking at how dust adheres to various materials," Maria Banks, the project scientist for NASA's CLPS program, said during a news conference before the launch. "We're taking stereo imaging as we descend to the surface to see how the rocket plume is affecting the lunar regolith. And we're going to test the usage of electromagnetism to mitigate or prevent dust buildup."

A receiver on the spacecraft successfully tracked global navigation signals while in lunar orbit. That suggests that the signals from American GPS and European Galileo satellites used for navigation on Earth could also help spacecraft find their way around the moon.

"By actually doing it in lunar orbit and the lunar surface, we're opening up an entirely new way for us to navigate in the future," James Miller, a NASA official working on the instrument, said during the prelaunch news conference.

An X-ray telescope will look back at Earth to capture a global view of the interactions between Earth's magnetic field and the charged particles of the solar wind.

"We're taking the first global image of the magnetic field to understand how it moves as a function of time in response to the sun," said Brian Walsh, an engineering professor at Boston University who is the instrument's principal investigator.

The lander is also carrying a drill that is designed to poke up to 9 feet into the lunar soil and measure the flow of heat from the moon's interior. Another experiment is a computer designed to recover from errors caused by space radiation.

The landing put a welcome spotlight of success on a company that has at times been more involved with courtroom and political drama than the launching of rockets and moon landers.

The original version of the company, Firefly Space Systems, was founded in 2014. The CEO was Thomas Markusic, an aerospace engineer who had previously worked for three billionaire-owned rocket companies: Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.

Virgin Galactic filed a lawsuit against Firefly, alleging that Markusic had stolen its trade secrets in founding Firefly. In 2016, a major European investor backed out, and Firefly put all of its employees on furlough as its money dried up.

A technology entrepreneur, Max Polyakov, came to the rescue, and Firefly Space Systems was reborn as Firefly Aerospace. But in 2022, the U.S. government, citing national security concerns, forced Polyakov, a native of Ukraine, to sell his share of Firefly.

But Firefly had also won some key contracts including the mission that set down on the moon Sunday.

In the past few years, Firefly has successfully launched its small Alpha rocket a couple of times, including one mission for the U.S. Space Force that demonstrated the ability to prepare and launch a payload on short notice. Firefly is also developing a larger rocket currently known as the Medium Launch Vehicle, and a series of spacecraft known as Elytra that could perform various tasks in orbit.

Firefly has also won two more CLPS missions.

The second, scheduled to launch next year, is to land on the far side of the moon. The third, scheduled for 2028, is to investigate the Gruithuisen Domes, an unusual volcanic region on the near side of the moon.

"As long as we execute, we're going to keep going bolder and bigger," Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO, said in an interview last week.

The moon will continue to be a busy place. Another CLPS mission is just days away. Intuitive Machines' second moon lander, Athena, is scheduled to land Thursday near the moon's south pole.

And yet another spacecraft is also en route. On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan.

Although Resilience left Earth at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.