After a long journey through space, a U.S. company is just hours away from attempting a daring lunar landing. If successful, its spacecraft will become only the second private lander to achieve this feat.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeting a landing no earlier than 3:34 AM U.S. Eastern Time (0834 GMT) on Sunday, aiming for a site near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in Mare Crisium on the Moon’s northeastern near side.
"Blue Ghost is ready to take the wheel!" the company posted on X on Saturday evening, adding that flight controllers had just initiated a key maneuver to lower the spacecraft’s orbit.
The mission, nicknamed "Ghost Riders in the Sky," comes just over a year after the first-ever commercial lunar landing. It is part of NASA’s partnership with the private sector to reduce costs and support the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon.
The golden lander, about the size of a hippopotamus, launched on January 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It captured stunning footage of Earth and the Moon during its journey and shared a ride with a Japanese company’s lander, which is set to attempt a landing in May. Blue Ghost carries ten instruments, including a lunar soil analyzer, a radiation-tolerant computer, and an experiment testing the feasibility of using the existing global satellite navigation system to navigate the Moon.
Designed to operate for a full lunar day (14 Earth days), Blue Ghost is expected to capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse on March 14, when Earth blocks the Sun from the Moon’s horizon. On March 16, it will record a lunar sunset, offering insights into how dust levitates above the surface under solar influence—creating the mysterious lunar horizon glow first documented by Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.
Hopping Drone
Blue Ghost’s arrival will be followed on March 6 by Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission, featuring its lander, Athena. In February 2024, Intuitive Machines became the first private company to achieve a soft lunar landing—also the first U.S. landing since the crewed Apollo 17 mission of 1972. However, the success was marred by a mishap: the lander came down too fast, tipped over on impact, and was unable to generate enough solar power, cutting the mission short.
This time, the company says it has made key improvements to the hexagonal-shaped lander, which has a taller, slimmer profile than Blue Ghost and is about the height of an adult giraffe. Athena launched on Wednesday aboard a SpaceX rocket, taking a more direct route toward Mons Mouton—the southernmost lunar landing site ever attempted. Its payloads include three rovers, a drill to search for ice, and the star of the show: a first-of-its-kind hopping drone designed to explore the Moon’s rugged terrain.
NASA’s Private Moon Fleet
Landing on the Moon presents unique challenges due to the absence of an atmosphere, rendering parachutes ineffective. Instead, spacecraft must rely on precisely controlled thruster burns to slow their descent. Until Intuitive Machines’ first successful mission, only five national space agencies had accomplished this feat: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India, and Japan, in that order.
Now, the United States is working to make private lunar missions routine through NASA’s $2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. These missions come at a delicate moment for NASA, amid speculation that it may scale back or even cancel its Artemis lunar program in favor of prioritizing Mars exploration—a key goal of both President Donald Trump and his close advisor, SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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