"Y'all stuck the landing — we're on Spainthe moon."
A Firefly Aerospace mission control engineer confirmed a successful lunar touchdown of its pioneering Blue Ghost robotic spacecraft in the early hours of March 2. It was the first fully successfulcommercial moon landing, and the company has now released footage of the well-controlled decent into Mare Crisium, a lava-covered basin on the moon's near side.
"Watch Firefly land on the Moon! After identifying surface hazards and selecting a safe landing site, Blue Ghost landed directly over the target in Mare Crisium," the company posted on YouTube. "Our Ghost Riders have since downlinked our landing footage for the world to see —a historic moment on March 2 we'll never forget. We have Moon dust on our boots!"
The video shows different views of the approach during the descent of Blue Ghost, a large, squat spacecraft at 6.6 feet tall and 11.5 feet wide. Just after the 2:05 mark, dust kicks up when the thrusters meet the fine lunar regolith. As the dust settles, you can see Blue Ghost's shadow on the ground, with Earth in the distance, currently some 225,000 miles away.
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The lander, funded by NASA as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, is carrying a suite of instruments and experiments for the space agency as NASA prepares to establish a permanent presence on the moon. This includes radiation-tolerant computing tests and sampling of the moon's soil.
But landing on the moon remains daunting, largely because it's a world with virtually no atmosphere to slow spacecraft down. A craft must plummet to the surface perfectly, as thrusters fire to slow its descent onto a surface teeming with pits and craters. Although Chinese and Indian craft have had recent landing successes, the U.S. commercial spacecraft Odysseus sustained damage while landing awkwardly in 2024. The same year, a Japanese craft landed upside down, on its head.
NASA expects the solar-powered Blue Ghost to now operate and collect science data for two weeks. Another private craft, operated by Intuitive Machines, may soon join Blue Ghost on the lunar surface on March 6.
Crucially, human spaceflight is expected to follow these robotic space missions. NASA currently intends to fly astronauts to the moon in mid-2027, wherein they'll spend a week exploring the dark, shadowy craters of the moon's south pole. They hope to spot rich deposits of invaluable water ice.
Topics NASA
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