With its blue Ghost Lunar Module, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, has just reached that no other private enterprise, nowhere in the world, has ever reached: successfully ended up on the lunar surface.
After being launched in January, the Blue Ghost Mission 1 on Mare Crisium, in the vicinity of a mountain called Mons Latreille, became eastern at about 3:34 pm on Sunday, March 2. NASA reports that the Blue Ghost Lander is in a stable, vertical position.
“This incredible achievement demonstrates how NASA and American businesses are the lead in spatial exploration for the benefit of all,” said Janet Petro, the acting administrator of NASA, in a statement on March 2. “We have learned a lot of lessons, and the technology and science demonstrations have boarded Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 mission to discover our ability to no longer discover science, but also to ensure the instruments of the instruments.”
Blue Ghost is not the first private LED mission to reach the lunar surface. The honor goes to intuitive machines, another company in Texas, which in February 2024 tried to land on the moon; However, the module fell to the surface on its side and stopped being in operation. (Intuitive machines will have another chance on March 6, with its Athena moon module, launched last month.) Other companies also tried, but their spacecraft eventually crashed.
Firefly’s lander still has a lot of work for it. The Blue Ghost module carries ten science and technology instruments for NASA, which will work on the surface on one Monday, the equivalent of 14 days on earth. As part of the NASA’s Artemis program, which man will return to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972, Blue Ghost’s mission aims to learn more about the lunar environment, to support astronauts in future exploration of the Moon and Mars. Moments after the Touchdown, the module captured its first images shared by Nasa and Firefly on their official accounts.
