A robotic lander from Texas-based Firefly Aerospace is now in orbit around the Moon and going through its final preparations to land in the coming weeks.
On Thursday, the company announced that its Blue Ghost lander fired its main engine and thrusters for four minutes and 15 seconds in a maneuver called the Lunar Orbit Insertion, which put it in an elliptical orbit around the Moon.
Its arrival comes nearly a month after the spacecraft launched onboard a Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. This is the third mission launched as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, an initiative designed to bring science and technology demonstrations to the Moon at a cheaper cost.
Shortly before launch, Brigette Oakes, the vice president of Engineering at Firefly, described the moment as an incredible time for her and her coworkers.
“The energy in the team right now is just a whole other level. And so, just feeding off of that excitement, it’s super exciting to see,” Oakes said. “And I grew up with stories of Apollo and everything, so to see that come full circle, just personally, is awesome.”
Manifested on this lander are 10 NASA payloads, which cover a range of objectives. Those include the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) instrument, which will drill between 2- to 3-meters into the Moon’s surface to study the heat flow; and the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) 1.1 instrument, which will use a series of cameras to capture the plume generated at landing to help create a three-dimensional model.
“We have a group at NASA that gets to gather to define what is the NASA cargo that we want to compete with industry to take to the Moon and we competed all these individual instruments, these 10 instruments that we ended up manifesting on this Firefly-owned mission,” said Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for Exploration within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“And we saw that for the type of advanced scientific or engineering measurements we wanted to make, the instruments were small enough and compact enough that we could actually fly 10, if someone could actually schedule them to get all of their operations done over the 14 Earth day lunar daytime.”
Firefly Aerospace ended up winning that bid and carries with it the most NASA instruments manifested on a single CLPS lander so far.
With its arrival in lunar orbit, it will spend the next 16 days performing some additional checkouts as well as maneuvers to circularize its orbit. Landing on the Moon at Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille is targeting 3:45 a.m. EDT (0745 UTC).
I love you to the Moon, but not back – I’m staying there,” 💙 Blue Ghost. We captured our first shots of the Moon following a successful Lunar Orbit Insertion. The lander will soon begin to circularize its orbit in preparation for landing on March 2. #BGM1 pic.twitter.com/2FclZ1hnvb
— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) February 14, 2025