
Firefly Aerospace is no stranger to adversity. The company went through bankruptcy and recovered from three troubled Alpha rocket launches. An angel investor was forced to sell the company over foreign ownership concerns. Last year, its former CEO was sidelined amid allegations of misconduct.
So success was all the sweeter when Firefly, with its debut spacecraft, not only landed on the Moon, but operated for more than 14 days on the lunar surface, fulfilling a $102 million flight services contract for NASA.
“When this small team started on this program in 2021, they had never built or flown a spacecraft,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim says. “To achieve these milestones on the first attempt is a feat that has even eluded nations. Firefly proved that space exploration is limitless, even for the smallest of teams.”
Launched by SpaceX on Jan. 15, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander spent 45 days in transit before touching down March 2 in Mare Crisium, a 300-mi.-wide basin on the Moon’s near side. Onboard the lander were 10 NASA science experiments and technology demonstrations as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
“The Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1) is what I would call an existence proof of how we wanted CLPS to work,” says Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration.
Blue Ghost was the agency’s first of four CLPS missions to be completely successful, with seven more lunar surface sorties in development for NASA. To date, the agency has committed about $1.4 billion through its CLPS initiative, which is intended to seed a lunar services and delivery industry. Under CLPS, vendors design, fly and operate lunar landers to meet NASA’s science needs.
In total, Blue Ghost transmitted more than 119 GB of data back to Earth, including 51 GB of science and technology data, significantly surpassing mission requirements, Firefly said March 17.
Key payload milestones include:
• Tracking signals from the U.S. GPS, Europe’s Galileo and other Global Navigation Satellite System constellations, an achievement that suggests GPS-like signals could be used to navigate future missions to the Moon and beyond.
• Reflecting laser pulses from Earth with the Next-Generation Lunar Retroreflector, allowing scientists to precisely measure the Moon’s shape and distance.
• Taking X-ray images to study the interaction of solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field.
• Deploying a 6-ft. mast from the top of the lander and four tethered Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder electrodes on the surface, reaching a distance up to 60 ft. from the lander, to measure electric and magnetic fields.
• Demonstrating a computer that can withstand space radiation while in transit to the Moon.
• Studying how lunar regolith sticks to a range of materials exposed to the Moon’s environment.
• Imaging the spacecraft’s descent and touchdown on the Moon to provide insights into the effects that engine plumes have on the surface for future robotics and crewed lunar landings.
• Drilling about 3 ft. into the surface to measure the temperature and flow of heat from the Moon’s interior.
• Demonstrating a sample collection system that uses pressurized nitrogen gas to collect, transfer and sort lunar regolith.
• Demonstrating the use of electrodynamic forces to lift and remove lunar regolith from glass and thermal radiator surfaces, a promising solution for dust mitigation.
After 14 days on the lunar surface and 5 hr. after the onset of lunar night, Blue Ghost operations came to an end, with a final download of data at 7:15 pm. EDT March 16.
Firefly is under contract for two more missions to the Moon for NASA, with commercial customers expected to join. “We’re getting a lot of inquiries,” Kim says.
Firefly will look for one more piece of data from Blue Ghost. After daylight returns to the landing site in early April, engineers will attempt to contact the spacecraft, which was not designed to survive the cold lunar night.
“I’d say the probability is very low that we do power back on, but this lander has surprised me multiple times over the last two months, and things have gone extremely well. I’ll remain optimistic,” says Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s spacecraft program director. “Maybe we will get a signal.”