For the first time in lunar exploration, two robotic landers from two different nations launched a rocket to the moon.

But even though Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based ispace share a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the two missions take very different paths and schedules to reach the lunar surface.

Launch from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center occurred at 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 UTC) on January 15. The flight marked the 100th orbital launch for SpaceX from the historic launch site formerly used by Apollo and the Space Shuttle.

Minutes after deployment, Firefly confirmed receipt of a signal from its lander, officially allowing the 45-day journey to the moon to continue.



Weather officers from the 45th Weather Squadron estimated the likelihood of favorable conditions for launch at 90 percent and indicated that winds could be a problem at the time of launch.

“Rain showers and cloudy conditions will clear the Space Coast by early afternoon. Wind speeds will decrease throughout the day today,” meteorologists wrote. “Through early Wednesday morning and the main launch window, winds will be 15 to 20 mph with occasional gusts up to 25 mph. This results in a low probability of lift-off winds and a violation of the Cumulus Cloud Rule.”

SpaceX used the Falcon 9 first stage booster, designated B1085, on this mission, which was its fifth launch. His previous launches were Crew-9, GPS 3 SV07, Starlink 10-5 and Starlink 6-77.

Just under 8.5 minutes into the flight, B1085 landed on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship, marking the 107th landing for JRTI and the 398th booster landing to date.

“Spirit Riders in Heaven”

Wednesday morning’s launch marked the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace. The Blue Ghost lunar lander was conceived after the company was selected as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

The goal of CLPS is to bring NASA science to the lunar surface without the agency having to build the landers or procure launches. NASA has multiple contracts with various CLPS providers, with Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission 1 and Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 flights taking place in early 2024.

Blue Ghost has a dry mass of 469 kg (1,034 lbs) and weighs approximately 1,500 kg (3,300 lbs) when fueled. It uses a combination of MMH hypergolic fuel and MON-3 oxidizer to power the main engine and thrusters during its journey.

It is designed to carry ten NASA science payloads to the lunar surface, the most ever on a single lander under CLPS.

Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said that once the 10 instruments were small enough to fly on a lander, the agency looked for a company to handle all science operations over a period of time 14 days (one year) lunar daylight period).

“Firefly and several other bidders have risen to this challenge. They have developed a really credible mission plan to conduct all the experiments they want with our instruments,” Kearns said.

In a prelaunch interview with Spaceflight Now, Brigette Oakes, vice president of engineering at Firefly, said the company incorporated lessons learned from previous lunar missions.

“We really learned a lot of lessons from previous missions as well. I mean, we’ve fully and thoroughly reviewed every lunar mission that’s been done, commercial or NASA, and learned a lot of lessons from that, and then basically just fine-tuned it with the add-on product lines and adapted it to the Firefly model lines and then have the best taken from what previous companies have done before us.”

Firefly has also taken insights and hardware from its Alpha rocket and integrated these into Blue Ghost as well.

“There is a lot of great wisdom, experience and teaching in this company. We have rockets and satellites in our company. “So there are a lot of similarities between the two different parts of our company and there are a lot of lessons learned that are being shared,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly.

“As we go into cadence with our Alpha rocket, we’ve learned a lot of those lessons, even the reaction control drive, those are things we learned for our Blue Ghost lander because we have ACS and RCS engines on our Blue Ghost -Have landers that have a legacy from the Alpha rocket. Therefore there is a lot of overlap in our company. So that really helps programs like Blue Ghost boost their confidence.”

As Firefly makes its first landing attempt on March 2, Kim said one of this lander’s most important tools is a quartet of cup-shaped ends on the landing legs.

“These landing sites are carefully designed with crumple zones,” he said. “If you think about honeycomb and how crunchy it is, that’s built into the actual structure. And when it lands, like a car when it’s in an accident, it’s intentionally crumpled. That’s what this design brings.”

The mission, called “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” will take slightly longer to reach the lunar surface compared to the last CLPS mission from Houston-based Intuitive Machines. The IM-1 flight took about seven days from launch to landing, while the Blue Ghost lander takes about 45 days to complete its journey.

Once on the surface, it will be powered for about two weeks by instruments including a sample collection device called the Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) from Honeybee Robotics; a navigation demonstration called Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) by the Italian Space Agency and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and Aegis Aerospace’s Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC), which will study how lunar regolith adheres to a variety of materials.

The lander is also designed to survive a few hours into the lunar night to capture sunset and other data in the moon’s darkness.

“Never give up the moon quest”

Beneath the Blue Ghost lunar lander was ispace’s lander called Resilience in a specially designed payload container. This was the second time the Japan-based part of the company launched a lander to the moon.

Its first launch attempt, Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1), took off as a solo flight on a Falcon 9 in December 2022 and made a failed landing attempt in April 2023.

In an interview with Spaceflight Now before launch, former NASA astronaut and current ispace-US CEO Ron Garan said it was a software error that prevented the first landing. He said the radar altimeter detected a large jump in altitude as they approached the crater they were targeting, causing the lander to misinterpret where it was in the mission profile.

It then appeared to land gently, but was actually about 5,000 meters above the crater floor and hovered there until it ran out of fuel and crashed.

“We’ve obviously fixed all the software, we’re not landing at the bottom of a deep crater this time and so our confidence level is much higher in this case,” Garan said.

For Hakuto-R Mission 2, mission name “Never Quit the Lunar Quest,” the Resilience Lander will target a landing in a region called Mare Frigoris — the “Sea of ​​Cold” — located in the northern part of the Moon.

The mission will take significantly longer to reach the moon than Firefly’s Blue Ghost. While Firefly’s lander will deploy into a highly elliptical Earth orbit and take 25 days for a gradual orbital approach before performing a translunar injection burn, Resilience will take a slower path to the Moon, using the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage along the way for a low-energy transfer to the moon.

Essentially, it will perform a flyby of the moon, fly about a million miles into space, and then sync back up with the moon for its landing.

“The low-energy transfer allows us to trade fuel for payload capacity margin,” Garan explained. “It just means we can put more capacity on the lunar surface.”

The lander carries several scientific instruments, including a food production experiment and one demonstrating electrolysis.

“Electrolysis is really exciting because of the effects it has. If we are actually able to do electrolysis on the moon, then we can produce rocket fuel on the moon,” Garan said.

The mission will also involve a small rover called Tenacity, which will operate independently after landing. It has an HD camera designed to, among other things, capture images of an art installation called “Moon House,” which is a replica of a Swedish house placed on the surface.

Garan said the rover came from ispace’s European division.

“The rover itself is really crucial to the future of our company. That the rover is efficient and the data that will come from the rover will be really valuable to us as we continue to refine our design around the surface mobility aspect of the business,” Garan said. “And that’s really exciting too.”

Both the rover and lander will operate on the lunar surface for about two weeks as the moon enters lunar night. Garan said they are looking at a variety of methods to potentially achieve this, from orbital solar concepts to nuclear options and beyond.

“To start a cislunar economy, you have to be able to survive the night. There are millions and millions of dollars being put into these missions, and if they only last two weeks, that’s not a very good return on investment,” Garan said. “So we want to be able to do surface operations for months or years, and to do that you have to be able to survive the night.”