Updated 7:45 a.m. Eastern with post-landing comments.

CEDAR PARK, Texas — Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar landed touched down on the surface of the moon March 2, a key milestone for the company and NASA’s lunar exploration efforts.

The spacecraft touched down at 3:34 a.m. Eastern, a little more than an hour after it started maneuvers to descend from a low orbit around the moon. The company said the lander was in an “upright, stable” position.

“We have confirmation #BlueGhost stuck the landing!” the company announced on social media just after touchdown. “This small step on the Moon represents a giant leap in commercial exploration. Congratulations to the entire Firefly team, our mission partners, and our @NASA customers for this incredible feat that paves the way for future missions to the Moon and Mars.”

“Everything was as planned. You could see everything was within margins,” Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said at a post-landing briefing. “From my observation, the team just nailed it.”

The mission team was “calm and collected” during its descent, he said earlier on stage at an event near the company’s headquarters here, but “after we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up.”

“It really did go according to plan,” Ray Allensworth, spacecraft program director at Firefly, said at the briefing, not requiring mission controllers to implement any contingency plans. She said the landing was within a 100-meter ellipse designated for the mission, but did not immediately have more details on the accuracy of the landing.

The planned landing site was near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon. The site was selected to avoid magnetic anomalies that could disrupt operations of some instruments. The landing location also has few rocks on or below the surface that could prevent one instrument, a heat probe, from drilling up to three meters below the surface.

Firefly said it was “the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful Moon landing.” Intuitive Machines landed its IM-1 lander on the moon in February 2024, but the spacecraft suffered a hard landing and tipped on its side, although it was still able to operate and return data for a week.

Mission plans

Blue Ghost launched Jan. 15 on a Falcon 9, sharing a launch with Resilience lunar lander from Japanese company ispace. It entered orbit around the moon Feb. 13, later maneuvering into a low lunar orbit before the landing attempt.

Blue Ghost carries 10 payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program under a $101.5 million contract. Among them are instruments to measure subsurface heat flow, the structure and composition of the moon’s interior, and the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field. Other payloads will study how the lunar regolith interacts with the materials, test a radiation-tolerant computer and an electrodynamic dust shield. The lander is expected to operate through sunset at the site March 16.

Allensworth said in an interview after landing that controllers were working to commission the nine powered payloads (the tenth, a laser retroreflector, is passive) while deploying an X-band antenna that will allow for higher data rates. “We really want to get those payloads going as soon as possible. That’s why we landed at lunar sunrise, so we would have the full lunar day.”

She said she expected the first few days of the mission to be very busy as the payloads start collecting data. As the landing site approaches noon, the tempo will slow down. “Then the lander gets to a temperature range that some of the payloads won’t operate. So it’ll kind of quiet down a little bit at the in the middle.”

Operations will pick up again close to sunset, along with “bonus” operations such as images of a lunar eclipse on March 14. Those operations will continue through several hours after sunset, with the lander operating on batteries to collect data such as any levitation of lunar dust believed to occur at sunset.

“We gave Firefly the challenge of working with us to put together the ops plan to run, over the 14 days, these 10 different experiments,” Joel Kearns, NASA deputy association administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, at the post-landing briefing. “There’s going to be science operations every day for the remainder of the mission.”

Validation for NASA and Firefly

The successful landing was a milestone for the CLPS program, NASA’s efforts to develop commercial capabilities that the agency could use to deliver science and technology payloads to the moon at lower costs than conventional government-led missions.

NASA adopted what it called a “shots on goal” approach to CLPS, warning that not all the missions, particularly at the beginning of the program, would be successful. The first CLPS mission, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, failed to reach the moon in January 2024 because of a propulsion failure, followed by the hard landing on IM-1.

“We asked these companies to do a really, really difficult thing,” Kearns said at the briefing. He credited Firefly for being “very rigorous technically” in the design and operations of their lander.

“Firefly is a prime example of how NASA is leveraging the entrepreneurial spirit and innovation in the commercial space industry,” said Vanessa Wyche, acting associate administrator of NASA, at the briefing.

The landing is also a milestone for Firefly Aerospace. The company started as a launch vehicle developer but has since diversified into spacecraft and lunar landers.

There are synergies among those product lines. “If you think about the lunar lander, it’s really just a spacecraft with legs,” Kim said in an interview, adding that the company’s expertise in engine development for launch vehicles translates to the thrusters needed for Blue Ghost. “We’re a perfect company to design very capable, high-performing lunar landers.”

Blue Ghost opens up opportunities elsewhere in the company, with Kim citing operations of the lander while in Earth orbit and in transit to the moon. “We just opened the whole company up to do things in LEO, MEO, GEO, cislunar and the moon,” he said. “Furthermore, the lander is also scalable to go to Mars.”

Firefly Aerospace has two more lunar lander missions in development. The company won in 2023 CLPS awards for Blue Ghost 2, a lunar lander mission to the far side of the moon that will also deliver ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder mission to orbit around the moon. NASA awarded Firefly another CLPS award Dec. 18 for Blue Ghost 3, a lander to the Gruithuisen Domes region on the near side of the moon. That task order is valued at $179.6 million.

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