Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial company to make a picture-perfect landing on the Moon early Sunday, touching down on an ancient basaltic plain, named Mare Crisium, to fulfill a $101 million contract with NASA.
The lunar lander, called Blue Ghost, settled onto the Moon's surface at 2:34 am CST (3:34 am EST; 08:34 UTC). A few dozen engineers in Firefly's mission control room monitored real-time data streaming down from a quarter-million miles away.
"Y’all stuck the landing, we’re on the Moon!" announced Will Coogan, the lander's chief engineer, to the Firefly team gathered in Leander, Texas, a suburb north of Austin. Down the street, at a middle-of-the-night event for Firefly employees, their families, and VIPs, the crowd erupted in applause and toasted champagne."They’re just fired up right now in the mission control room," said Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO. "They were all just pent up, holding it all in because they were calm, collected, and cool the whole time. Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed. After we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up."
Firefly's Blue Ghost, named for a species of firefly, became the second commercial company to put a spacecraft on the Moon, and the first to make a trouble-free landing. Intuitive Machines—also working under contract to NASA—landed its Odysseus spacecraft on the Moon in February 2024, but the lander snapped one of its legs and tipped over. Odysseus returned images and some scientific data from the lunar surface for a week, but the off-kilter landing cut short the mission.
Intuitive Machines, like Firefly, is headquartered in Texas. So America's first two commercial Moon landers come from the Lone Star State.
"We got some Moon dust on our boots," Kim told a crowd of supporters at the company's watch party.
It's been a long, strange trip for Firefly, founded in 2014 by a former SpaceX engineer named Tom Markusic. The company survived a bankruptcy and emerged with a new name and new ownership by a Ukrainian entrepreneur named Max Polyakov. The US government controversially forced a sale to US investors in 2022, citing national security concerns. Last year, the government backtracked, and released Polyakov and his companies from all restrictions imposed upon them.
Now owned by AE Industrial Partners, a private equity firm, Firefly has successfully flown its own small satellite launcher and is developing a medium-lift rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman. With Blue Ghost, Firefly has shot for the Moon, a business area the company's founders didn't imagine a decade ago.
An important moment
Sunday's landing shows NASA is starting to get its money's worth with an initiative set up seven years ago to establish a line of robotic precursor missions for the agency's Artemis lunar program. The CLPS, or Commercial Lunar Payload Services, program is designed to provide a cost-efficient way to deliver science and technology payloads to the Moon, while incubating the nascent industry of lunar transportation to support the needs of NASA and potential commercial customers.
NASA has a roster of 13 companies eligible to compete for CLPS missions, including long-established industry players like SpaceX and Lockheed Martin. But newcomers have won nearly all the CLPS contracts to date. NASA has assigned four CLPS landings to Intuitive Machines, three to Firefly, two to Astrobotic, and one to Draper Laboratory.
Before last year, more than five decades had passed since the last time an American spacecraft made a controlled landing on the Moon. China has landed four robotic missions on the Moon since 2013, including two landings on the Moon's far side and two sample return missions. India became the fourth country to land on the Moon in 2023, then Japan became the fifth in January 2024.
Government-owned space agencies developed all those missions, just as NASA managed the Apollo program to put US astronauts on the Moon from 1969 through 1972. By 2018, a decade had passed since NASA started teaming with commercial partners to deliver cargo, and eventually crew, to the International Space Station.
CLPS built on NASA's experience in commercial cargo and commercial crew, using fixed-price service contracts to procure lunar landing missions. However, there is a key difference. The agency didn't fund development costs for any of the CLPS participants. The private sector paid for all the work to design and build the CLPS landers, while NASA is only buying transportation services and committing to become a core customer. The idea was to help lunar transportation providers attract private investment with the prospect of lucrative NASA contracts, without burdening the contractors with onerous government requirements.
From the government's perspective, CLPS was "a lighter touch even than commercial cargo or commercial crew," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the former head of NASA's science division, in a 2023 interview with Ars.
NASA is using a similar development model from commercial crew to co-invest with SpaceX and Blue Origin in development of much larger human-rated lunar landers for the Artemis program.
The jury is still out on whether the CLPS initiative will create a commercial market, beyond the government, for lunar missions. NASA's commitment to commercial crew has led to several all-private human spaceflight missions to low-Earth orbit, most recently Polaris Dawn, during which private astronaut Jared Isaacman became the first person to perform a commercial spacewalk.
But Firefly's success Sunday, following on the heels of the Intuitive Machines landing last year, shows fixed-price contracting works for Moon missions. At a minimum, this will give NASA a lower-cost means of accessing the lunar surface. The Blue Ghost mission cost the space agency about $145 million—$101 million for Firefly's contract plus $44 million for the lander's government-provided science payloads.
There are no modern-era NASA lunar missions to allow an apples-to-apples cost comparison, but Zurbuchen estimated a traditional NASA development would cost more than $500 million.
Future CLPS missions will attempt to surmount new challenges, such as landing on the far side of the Moon. Firefly's first Blue Ghost lander targeted a relatively flat patch of the lunar surface, a 340-mile-wide (550-kilometer) impact basin formed when an asteroid struck the Moon nearly 4 billion years ago. This location, known as Mare Crisium or the Sea of Crises, can be found on the northeastern portion of the near side of the full Moon.
Shots on goal
NASA officials in 2018 acknowledged the strategy underpinning CLPS was risky. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine compared the strategy to taking "shots on goal," a sports analogy where not every shot is expected to land in the net. Astrobotic launched the first CLPS mission, but it succumbed to a propellant leak and never reached the Moon. That was followed by IM-1, the first Intuitive Machines mission, which achieved a partial success a year ago.
Firefly's 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's Resilience lander at a separate location in the next few months.
In the meantime, Intuitive Machines launched its second lander–Athena–last week ahead of its lunar-landing attempt Thursday near the Moon's south pole.
Firefly touched down inside its 100-meter (330-foot) target zone in Mare Crisium near a volcanic dome named Mons Latreille, which has sat dormant for billions of years after volcanic activity ceased on the Moon.
"We’re landing at a place that is of great scientific interest, but it was also a very achievable place to land," said Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's science mission directorate.
There are 10 NASA-sponsored payloads aboard Firefly's first Blue Ghost lander, which stands about 2 meters (6.6 feet) tall. Its four landing legs span about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) wide. The solar-powered vehicle will remain stationary on the lunar surface and operate for about 14 days until the Sun sets on Mare Crisium, plunging temperatures to levels too low for the lander to survive.
The instruments include an electrodynamic dust shield, developed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to demonstrate technology using electric fields to remove lunar dust particles and prevent accumulation on sensitive components of the spacecraft.
Another payload, called PlanetVac, will extend from the bottom of the lander to contact the lunar surface, where it will fire a cartridge of high-pressure gas to force soil and dust into a collection chamber for inspection. PlanetVac was developed by Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin, and NASA funded the cost of its ride to the Moon.
"There’s no digging, no mechanical arm to wear out requiring servicing or replacement—it functions like a vacuum cleaner," said Dennis Harris, who manages the PlanetVac payload for NASA, in a statement. "The technology on this CLPS payload could benefit the search for water, helium, and other resources and provide a clearer picture of in situmaterials available to NASA and its partners for fabricating lunar habitats and launch pads, expanding scientific knowledge and the practical exploration of the solar system every step of the way."
"There are studies that range from studies of the Sun that we’ll conduct from the surface of the Moon, studies of the abrasive dust, the regolith," Kearns said. "We’re going to drill into the surface, we’re going to pick up regolith. It's going to answer so many questions over this one lunar day-long mission. It’s going to really be one for the history books."
