US firm Firefly’s Blue Ghost moon lander locks in for lunar touchdown

WASHINGTON: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost moon lander tightened its lunar orbit on Sunday before its inaugural attempt at an uncrewed touchdown, nearing a pivotal moment for one of a handful of private firms on the frontlines of a global moon race.

The size of a compact car, the four-legged Blue Ghost is carrying 10 scientific payloads and using 21 thrusters to guide toward its scheduled 3:45 a.m. ET (0845 GMT) touchdown near an ancient volcanic vent on Mare Crisium, a large basin in the northeast corner of the moon’s Earth-facing side.

Firefly is seeking to be the second private firm to score a soft moon landing.

Houston-based Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander made a lopsided soft touchdown last year. Five nations have made successful soft landings in the past - the then-Soviet Union, the US, China, India and, last year, Japan.

Flight controllers at Firefly’s Austin, Texas, headquarters sent final commands to Blue Ghost as it lowered its lunar orbit, flying about 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Earth a month and a half after launching atop a SpaceX rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The moonshot by Firefly, an upstart primarily building rockets, is one of three lunar missions actively in progress.

Japan’s ispace launched its second lander on the same rocket as Firefly’s in January, before Intuitive Machines embarked on its second lunar mission on Wednesday.

Backed by NASA and its flagship Artemis moon program, private companies are playing an outsized role in the modern moon race with the hopes of stimulating a lunar market.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are building landers to put US astronauts on the moon as soon as 2027 for the first time since 1972.

Crowded moon race

Missions like Firefly’s Blue Ghost represent low-budget precursor missions to the moon that will enable research into the lunar environment before the US sends its astronauts there.

Firefly has a $101 million NASA contract for the mission.

China, meanwhile, is making swift progress in its own moon efforts, with its robotic Chang’e lunar program and plans to put Chinese astronauts on the moon’s surface by 2030.

China lands on moon’s far side in historic sample-retrieval mission

Also eyeing the moon are US-aligned Japan and India, which made its first soft lunar landing in 2023.

Blue Ghost has two navigation cameras to spot hazards on the lunar surface during its final descent and help the spacecraft steer toward an ideal landing spot.

The craft’s four carbon-composite legs have impact sensors that will trigger Blue Ghost’s engine to shutdown upon landing. Two solar panels on the side and one of the top will power the lander and its research instruments for a 14-day mission on the moon, before the frigid lunar night brings temperatures as low as minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 degrees Celsius).

Two onboard instruments will study the lunar soil and its subsurface temperatures in experiments by Honeybee Robotics, a firm owned by Blue Origin, which is developing its own lunar lander to send humans to the moon for NASA’s Artemis program later this decade.

NASA’s Langley Research Center has a stereo camera on board to analyze the lunar dirt plumes kicked up by Blue Ghost’s landing engine, gathering data to help researchers predict the dusty surface material’s dispersal during heavier moon missions in the future.

Research into landing plumes is a prominent technical issue at the center of discussions on how countries such as the US and China will coexist on nearby areas of the moon.

Plume behavior is a factor behind the “safety zones” envisioned by NASA’s space safety pact, the Artemis Accords, to prevent interference or damage to prospective neighbors on the moon.