CEDAR PARK, Texas\u2014Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away.<\/p>\n
These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace hope that their robotic spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, will become the second commercial mission to complete a soft landing on the Moon, following the landing of a spacecraft by Intuitive Machines last year. This is the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace, a company established in 2014 to develop a small satellite launcher.<\/p>\n
Since then, Firefly has undergone changes in ownership, a bankruptcy, and a renaming. Recognizing that the company had to diversify to survive, Firefly executives began pursuing other business opportunities\u2014spacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a medium-class rocket\u2014to go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.<\/p>\n
From a business perspective, Firefly\u2019s foray into lunar transportation has been worth the effort. NASA\u2019s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has awarded the company three contracts to deliver experiments to the Moon\u2019s surface. Under the first deal, NASA is paying Firefly about $101 million to transport 10 payloads to the Moon on the company\u2019s first Blue Ghost lander.<\/p>\n
Now, Firefly is about to find out if its lunar program is a technical success. Landing on the Moon is risky. In the last decade, the success rate for lunar landing attempts is a little above 50 percent\u20146-for-11\u2014and two of the successful landers either tipped over or landed upside-down.<\/p>\n
Jason Kim, Firefly\u2019s CEO, is confident that Blue Ghost will work. In an interview with Ars, Kim cited the lander\u2019s development team, design, and \u201crobust\u201d testing on the ground before Blue Ghost went to the launch pad as reasons for his optimism.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, it\u2019s those three things,\u201d Kim said. \u201cIt\u2019s the people. Are you trained up? Are they committed? Are they responsible and own it? Two, it\u2019s the design with margin, really good designs with margin, then taking into account all the lessons learned (from other lunar missions).<\/p>\n
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\u201cAnd then, three, the qualification program, testing it and testing it and testing it,\u201d Kim said. \u201cThat\u2019s what gives everyone confidence that we\u2019re going to stick this landing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Assembled in Cedar Park, a suburb north of Austin, Texas, the Blue Ghost spacecraft is about the size of an SUV. Blue Ghost launched January 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket alongside another privately developed lunar lander from the Japanese company ispace. The two landers are taking separate paths to the Moon, with Firefly due to land first, followed by ispace\u2019s Resilience lander at a separate location in the next few months.<\/p>\n
You can find Blue Ghost\u2019s landing site on the upper right part of the full Moon in a dark region the size of Missouri known as Mare Crisium. This 340-mile-wide (550-kilometer) impact basin was formed when an asteroid struck the Moon nearly 4 billion years ago. Firefly will target landing near an ancient volcanic dome named Mons Latreille, which has sat dormant for billions of years after volcanic activity ceased on the Moon.<\/p>\n
It will take 46 days for Blue Ghost to transit from the launch pad in Florida to Mare Crisium. The spacecraft spent nearly a month circling the Earth, gradually boosting its orbit higher until it reached the vicinity of the Moon on February 13, when it fired its engines to slip into lunar orbit. Since then, Blue Ghost has adjusted its trajectory several times before reaching a near-circular orbit about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the Moon on Monday.<\/p>\n
Firefly released a time-lapse video Monday from one of Blue Ghost\u2019s 12 cameras showing the spacecraft\u2019s top deck, with the Moon\u2019s cratered terrain unrolling beneath it. In the distance, a crescent Earth disappears behind the Moon\u2019s curved horizon, then reemerges in an Earthrise reminiscent of iconic imagery captured by astronauts during the Apollo program.<\/p>\n
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