Two private moon landers, Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace of Texas and Resilience from Ispace of Japan, successfully launched on the same SpaceX rocket early Wednesday morning. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. Eastern time, carrying both spacecraft to the lunar surface.
Firefly purchased a Falcon 9 launch to send its Blue Ghost lander to the moon, while Ispace, aiming to save on costs, asked SpaceX for a rideshare. This turned out to be a fortuitous scheduling arrangement, as it allowed both spacecraft to share the same rocket.
After reaching orbit, the second stage of the Falcon 9 fired again to deploy Blue Ghost in an elliptical orbit around Earth, while making a final adjustment to ensure Resilience’s deployment. Both spacecraft successfully turned on and established communication with ground stations on Earth, operating as expected.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost is a robotic lander designed for scientific experiments, including measuring the moon’s heat flow and capturing images of its surface. It will arrive at the moon first, landing near Mare Crisium about 45 days after launch.
Ispace’s Resilience, on the other hand, carries two payloads: a water electrolyzer experiment and a small rover named Tenacious. The mission aims to collect soil samples, which Ispace plans to sell to NASA for $5,000 each.
This joint mission demonstrates NASA’s reliance on private companies to launch devices to the moon at lower costs. Despite some early failures in the program, NASA officials expect continued progress, with several new missions scheduled to launch in the coming months.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-spacex-launch-lunar-landers.html