Moon Monday #215: Firefly performs first actual soft lunar landing for the US in the 21st century, bags key firsts

On March 2 at 8:34 UTC, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost spacecraft part of NASA’s CLPS program successfully completed its 12-minute descent from a 20-kilometer altitude point in its orbit to autonomously guide itself to a soft, upright touchdown on the Moon amid the lava plains of Mare Crisium. Notably, the lander only used its thrusters and not the main engine for the final hundred seconds or so of its descent. Shortly after landing, Firefly began commanding the spacecraft, including deploying the high-bandwidth X-band communications antenna. Until March 16, the end of the local lunar day, Firefly will operate the 10 NASA payloads onboard Blue Ghost and send us high-definition pictures and videos. ✨

The $101 million CLPS contracted Blue Ghost makes Firefly the first private company in the world to soft land on the Moon for real since Intuitive Machines’ falsely regarded soft landing was a rather hard one that literally broke a leg, tipped the spacecraft over, and didn’t meet majority of the mission’s technical and scientific objectives. Firefly has been careful with their communications, calling itself “the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful Moon landing” so that it may humbly flaunt Blue Ghost’s success without stepping on Intuitive’s or NASA’s toes. Note however that even Firefly’s statement isn’t entirely accurate. None of the CLPS missions flown so far have been actually commercial since US-tax-funded NASA is their sole enabler by a long shot. Regardless, Blue Ghost is the first truly successful NASA CLPS mission with the only private soft lunar landing yet. It could be the start 0f the tide that turns CLPS around. For Firefly, Blue Ghost’s success is incredible news as the company has two more CLPS landing missions contracted by NASA:

1. One to the Moon’s farside, for scientists to conduct unique radio astronomy observations. On the same mission, targeting launch next year, Firefly will also deploy the Lunar Pathfinder spacecraft in lunar orbit for ESA to kickoff its navigation and communications constellation called Moonlight. The total contract value across these services is about $130 million.
2. $179 million to carry six NASA-funded science & technology payload suites to one of the Gruithuisen Domes, a unique volcanic site on the Moon’s nearside.

Test like you fly, test when you fly

Firefly approached its first Moon mission with rigor. The company invested more into lander testing than its lunar competitors, carefully studied all recent Moon mission failures, did not underbid on its CLPS contract, and chose a cautious trajectory to the Moon regardless. Instead of skipping on propulsion system qualification, Firefly “qualified Blue Ghost’s propulsion system beyond the total firing duration expected on the mission”, said William Coogan, Firefly’s chief lunar lander engineer in a conversation last year explaining the company’s comprehensive approach. More insightful quotes from the conversation below:

Firefly conducted nearly 100 drop tests on lunar soil simulants to qualify the legs of the lander. We even tested drops on concrete because it’s harder than anything we’ll land on.

A lot of the LRO [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] imagery is from disparate times of the day. We worked with the NASA LRO team to get imagery for the same time of the day as the landing to help test our models.

We tested loads on the lander structure with a 60-foot [18-meter] test structure originally made for squishing and bending rockets. As a launch company, we leveraged our diverse portfolio which might otherwise be prohibitive for companies only building Moon landers.

Unsuccessful missions can be very expensive to a company. We recognized that and intentionally did not go for the lowest value proposal for our CLPS bids so we can do what’s necessary [in terms of testing, etc].

We also tested lander leg drops on sand, particularly to know what loads will be imparted on the payloads. We can’t land so hard that it potentially breaks our payloads because they’re the whole point of the mission.

Clearly, the efforts paid off. Despite such rigorous testing on Earth, you can only know your spacecraft’s behavior once it is in space, including things like the precise performance of your spacecraft’s attitude control and effects of propellant sloshing on the craft. That’s why Firefly chose a slower, more cautious trajectory design that provided its engineers and mission operators several weeks in space to thoroughly characterize Blue Ghost’s systems and adapt to unexpected changes—Chandrayaan 3 style. In fact, Firefly’s approach to testing Blue Ghost’s hardware and vision-based navigation has also mimicked Chandrayaan 3’s for good.

Like ISRO, Firefly built a one-acre moonscape on Earth to test via a heavy-lift drone the lander’s vision-based ability to avoid hazards and navigate with respect to the terrain it sees, which helped ensure a safe touchdown for Blue Ghost. Firefly says Blue Ghost “touched down within its 100-meter landing target.” Recall that Blue Ghost’s landing ellipse was supposed to be centered at 18.56°N, 61.81°E. We’re awaiting the final landing coordinates to know the achieved precision. If Firefly’s statement is confirmed, Blue Ghost would proudly follow JAXA SLIM lunar lander’s lead in sparking an era of precision landings crucial for future crewed exploration.

Many thanks to Astrolab and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Resources to follow Blue Ghost

1. Firefly’s Live Updates blog for Blue Ghost
2. NASA-funded payloads onboard, amassing nearly 100 kilograms
3. NASA’s Artemis blog rather than the inactive official CLPS blog
4. Browse my dedicated CLPS coverage webpage and the Moon Monday archive
5. My guide on how to follow CLPS updates
6. Subscribe for free to Moon Monday to receive mission updates with context 🌝

In the meanwhile, the US wants to “dominate” on the Moon..

Blue Ghost provided the US with its first soft Moon landing in the 21st century as the country tries to counter’s China’s lead in lunar surface exploration. Since 2013, China has had four on four consecutive successful lunar surface missions, each one increasingly complex and cresting [for now] at the farside sample return by Chang’e 6 last year. For the US, three tries over the two years have resulted in one failure with Astrobotic Peregrine, one partial success with Intuitive Machines IM-1, and one success with Firefly Blue Ghost. Yet NASA’s Acting Administrator Janet Petro had this to say during Firefly’s livestream:

I think this [new US] administration really wants to keep America first, and I think the way that we keep America first is by dominating in all the domains of space. And the domain of space we’re going to capture, recently tonight, is going to be on the surface of the Moon, and around the Moon. So as long as we keep dominating that space, I think we're going to be putting America first.

Had the word dominate been uttered by a Chinese entity for a Chang’e mission, it would’ve likely triggered a series of sharp reactions from western media and industry folks at large about China’s intentions at the Moon. Of course, there would be reactionary social media posts too but let’s keep the argument civil. In this case, it’s the NASA Administrator using the word “dominate”—twice—instead of a softer option like “lead”. Virtually no media outlets questioned its intent while quoting it, including but not limited to Space.com and Scientific American. English is the first language of the United States.

Intuitive Machines launches second Moon lander

On February 26, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched and deployed Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS lander called Athena towards the Moon. The mission, called IM-2, hosts many payloads, including a NASA-funded drill and spectrometer to hunt for water ice, a rover each by US-based Lunar Outpost and Japan-based Dymon, a NASA-funded hopper from Intuitive, and a retroreflector. Today, March 3, Athena performed a 492-second main engine burn to successfully put itself in lunar orbit. Athena will attempt to land on the Moon around 85°S on March 6. See press kits by Intuitive and NASA for more mission details.

Based on Intuitive’s experience with its first Moon mission IM-1, the company has refined several lander systems with the hope of bagging full success this time around instead of a hard landing and tip over—which NASA and Intuitive disappointingly skewed the success criteria of and continue to at various space events and channels when talking of the mission. As Athena approaches its nerve-racking lunar descent and landing, I’m optimistic that this time around Intuitive will achieve a soft touchdown. But I also sincerely hope that if it does not, Intuitive remembers what makes a Moon landing “successful” this time around.

Lunar Trailblazer launches for Luna too

Launching alongside Athena as a rocket rideshare was the also NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer orbiter. Unlike Athena, Lunar Trailblazer will spend four to seven months in a low-energy, fuel-efficient transfer trajectory before entering lunar orbit—similar to ispace Japan’s recently launched Moon mission. Unfortunately, the first set of telemetry from Trailblazer on February 26 has indicated that the small spacecraft is facing power issues. NASA lost communications with Trailblazer on February 27. The agency is working to restore telemetry and then establish commanding of the craft to better understand and address the power issues.

Lunar Trailblazer was launched to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon from orbit. It will also help us better understand several other key scientific aspects of Luna. Here’s hoping that this key scientific spacecraft is back online and in control soon.

More Moon

• Andrew Jones reports that South Korea’s National Space Council approved plans made by the country’s newly forged space agency KASA to build a Moon lander as part of a broader investment in indigenous space technologies. In January, Kim Na-young reported that KASA is budgeting about $31 million this year towards the country’s goal of building a Moon lander by 2032. In an approach similar to what ISRO takes for its planetary missions like Chandrayaan 3, South Korea is also indigenously developing the rocket that will launch its Moon lander. The rocket’s budget line is separate. KASA also plans to send a lunar environment monitoring payload through NASA onboard Intuitive Machines’ third CLPS Moon lander for about $5 million. All of these investments are part of South Korea’s FY2025 space budget of $562.5 million.
• ESA is requesting scientific proposals from its community as helpful for the agency’s involvement in science payloads onboard upcoming NASA CLPS Moon landing missions.
• The Open University is hiring a postdoctorate to conduct mineralogical and isotopic studies of lunar samples.