Magnificent desolation The Moons next robotic visitor is lining up for landing this weekend The first lunar lander built by Firefly Aerospace is on quite a trip, and has the selfies to prove it. Stephen Clark Feb 27, 2025 7:00 am | 3 A crescent Earth hangs over the Moon's horizon in this view from Firefly's Blue Ghost lander in lunar orbit. Credit: Firefly Aerospace A crescent Earth hangs over the Moon's horizon in this view from Firefly's Blue Ghost lander in lunar orbit. Credit: Firefly Aerospace Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreCEDAR PARK, TexasEarly 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.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.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 opportunitiesspacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a medium-class rocketto go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.From a business perspective, Firefly's foray into lunar transportation has been worth the effort. NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has awarded the company three contracts to deliver experiments to the Moon's surface. Under the first deal, NASA is paying Firefly about $101 million to transport 10 payloads to the Moon on the company's first Blue Ghost lander.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 percent6-for-11and two of the successful landers either tipped over or landed upside-down.Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO, is confident that Blue Ghost will work. In an interview with Ars, Kim cited the lander's development team, design, and "robust" testing on the ground before Blue Ghost went to the launch pad as reasons for his optimism."At the end of the day, it's those three things," Kim said. "It's the people. Are you trained up? Are they committed? Are they responsible and own it? Two, it's the design with margin, really good designs with margin, then taking into account all the lessons learned (from other lunar missions)."And then, three, the qualification program, testing it and testing it and testing it," Kim said. "That's what gives everyone confidence that we're going to stick this landing."Moon in 4KAssembled 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's Resilience lander at a separate location in the next few months.You can find Blue Ghost's 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.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.Firefly released a time-lapse video Monday from one of Blue Ghost's 12 cameras showing the spacecraft's top deck, with the Moon's cratered terrain unrolling beneath it. In the distance, a crescent Earth disappears behind the Moon's curved horizon, then reemerges in an Earthrise reminiscent of iconic imagery captured by astronauts during the Apollo program.This week, Firefly is preparing for a final series of maneuvers this weekend to prepare for landing early Sunday. First, Blue Ghost will fire its engines for 19 seconds to drop its orbit closer to the Moon. About 11 minutes prior to touchdown, the spacecraft will ignite its engines again to decelerate from about 3,800 mph of lateral velocity to less than 100 mph (1.7 km/second to 40 m/second).Blue Ghost will then pitch over to point its thrusters down toward the lunar surface and pulse a set of eight smaller reaction control system thrusters to slow its vertical descent. This phase of the landing sequence will begin with the spacecraft about 1,600 feet (500 meters) above the surface."Our RCS thrusters will continue to pulse as needed to control that descent to make sure that we are landing in a good orientation," said Farah Zuberi, Firefly's director of spacecraft mission management. "That reduces our descent rate to about 1 meter per second, and then our vision navigation system further tracks crater slopes (and) rocks to automatically select a hazard-free site within the landing zone that was identified by NASA."Then we will touch down onto the lunar surface," Zuberi said. "Well use our shock absorbing legs to stabilize the lander as it touches down, and then there are contact sensors on the footpads to signal engine shutdown, and thats when we will know that we have nominally landed."The lander's four shock-absorbing legs have some give, sort of like the crush zone of a car, according to Will Coogan, Firefly's chief engineer for the Blue Ghost lander. The legs have an aluminum honeycomb material inside, and they connect to bowl-shaped footpads with a ball-socket joint to give the spacecraft some flexibility in case it comes down on a slope or a rock. Ideally, the lander's navigation instruments will guide Blue Ghost to a flat landing site without any major obstacles."These footpads do bend," Coogan told Ars during a visit to see the Blue Ghost lander in its Texas factory. "They will bend a little bit around a rock, but theyll also rotate to find the most stable position." Firefly's Blue Ghost lander inside the company's spacecraft manufacturing facility in Cedar Park, Texas. Two of the spacecraft's Spectra reaction control system thrusters and its central main engine are visible here, along with two of its four landing legs and curved footpads. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica Early results from Blue GhostAfter landing, Firefly's ground controllers hope to switch from a low-bandwidth communications link to a higher data rate X-band system. If all goes according to plan, Blue Ghost could be streaming live video from the surface of the Moon back to Earth in as little as 30 minutes after touchdown.Blue Ghost will operate for about 14 days (one entire lunar day) after landing. The instruments aboard Firefly's lander include a subsurface drill, an X-ray imager, and an experimental electrodynamic dust shield to test methods of repelling troublesome lunar dust from accumulating on sensitive spacecraft components. The spacecraft will drain its batteries after the Sun sets at Mare Crisium for the two-week-long lunar night.A few of the NASA-funded experiments on Blue Ghost have already produced preliminary results. For example, an experimental receiver aboard the Blue Ghost lander acquired and tracked navigation signals from GPS satellites for the first time in lunar orbit, where these signals are 361 times weaker than on Earth. This is twice the distance of the previous record for the farthest GPS signal acquisition.Future Moon missions, including human expeditions, will require precise positioning data to help spacecraft and astronauts navigate to pinpoint landings and rove across the lunar surface. NASA's network of ground stations can provide navigation services for Moon missions, but their capacity is limited and oversubscribed by other spacecraft in deep space. Relying on existing satellite navigation signals would offload some of the demand for these ground stations and perhaps reduce the need for a dedicated fleet of navigation satellites in lunar orbit.So far, the navigation experiment on Firefly's Blue Ghost shows this might be possible. In a few days, the receiver will try again to acquire GPS and Galileo navigation signals from the lunar surface, another first.Engineers also gathered data on the performance of a radiation-tolerant flight computer as the spacecraft transited through the Van Allen radiation belts in the weeks following launch. Firefly's Blue Ghost lander will land in Mare Crisium, an impact basin on the near side of the Moon. Credit: NASA/Lunar and Planetary Institute Regional Planetary Image Facility Fireflys place in CLPSThere's a reason Moon landings aren't easy. Landers like Firefly's Blue Ghost operate autonomously, ingesting cues from lasers or cameras to guide themselves toward a smooth landing. The Moon lacks an atmosphere to help spacecraft slow down during descent. More than 50 years elapsed between the last US landing on the Moon and the Intuitive Machines mission a year ago. One could argue lunar landing expertise atrophied in the United States.Countless design decisions go into developing and building a spacecraft. Early on, Firefly's engineers had to determine what materials, engines, and electronics to use on Blue Ghost.Most fundamentally, engineers needed to decide on the lander's shape. This matters. Firefly officials say their lander's design makes it less vulnerable to tipping over after a wonky landing. The Odysseus lander built by Intuitive Machines snapped one of its legs and fell over on its side after arriving on the Moon last year. The altimeter on Odysseus failed, causing it to come down with too much horizontal velocity.The spacecraft continued operating and returned some scientific data from the Moon, so it qualified as at least a partial success. But the tumble prevented the spacecraft from recharging its batteries, and the Odysseus shut down a few days after landing. A second lander from Intuitive Machines, named Athena, is scheduled to launch to the Moon as soon as Wednesday and reach the surface on March 6, just four days after Firefly gets there.The landers designed by Intuitive Machines are tall and skinny. Firefly's Blue Ghost is "short and squatty" in shape, which should make it harder to tip over, said Kim, who took over as Firefly's chief executive last year.Coogan said Blue Ghost's designers intentionally chose a shape for the spacecraft that puts the center of mass as low to the ground as possible. Intuitive Machines stacked their two fuel and oxidizer tanks on top of each other, resulting in a taller vehicle. The four propellant tanks on Blue Ghost are arranged in a diagonal configuration, with two containing hydrazine fuel and two holding an oxidizer called nitrogen tetroxide.This trade-off means Firefly's lander is heavier, with four tanks instead of two. By going with a stockier lander design, Firefly needed to install four tanks because the spacecraft's fuel and oxidizer have different densities. If Firefly went with just two tanks side-by-side, the spacecraft's center of mass would change continually as it burns propellant during the final descent to the Moon, creating an unnecessary problem for the lander's guidance, navigation, and control system to overcome."You want to avoid that," Coogan said. "What you can do is you can either get four tanks and have fuel and oxidizer at diagonal angles, and then you're always centered, or you can stay with two tanks, and you can stack them."Firefly's approach requires fewer landing legs than Intuitive Machinesfour instead of two. And engineers designed Blue Ghost's landing legs to be more forgiving in uneven terrain or during an off-balance landing. "The lower your center of mass, is really the best," Coogan said. "There are only so many outcomes of this engineering trade." Jaxon Liebeck, a Blue Ghost flight director, describes the finer points of Firefly's lunar lander to the author before the spacecraft shipped to Cape Canaveral for launch. Credit: Firefly Aerospace NASA set up the CLPS program in 2018 to provide an avenue for companies to bid on opportunities to transport payloads to the Moon. While there are tangible scientific and engineering payoffs from the experiments aboard the CLPS landers, the initial salvo of commercial lunar missions has more sweeping goals. In this phase of the CLPS program, NASA wants contractors to show that they can reliably land on the Moon to foster a commercial lunar economy, facilitating a range of business pursuits to go along with the government's Artemis lunar program.NASA has made 13 industrial teams eligible to compete for CLPS missions. The space agency has placed firm orders with five of these providersAstrobotic, Blue Origin, Draper Laboratory, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machinesfor 11 lunar missions. Intuitive Machines and Firefly have won the most CLPS task orders, with four and three missions, respectively.Kim said he has talked with the other CLPS companies since becoming Firefly's CEO. They each are pursuing different technical solutions, but they face the same daunting challenges in getting to the Moon. While they compete for NASA's money, the CLPS competitorsor what Kim calls "competimates"have a mutual interest in seeing one another succeed. A series of failures might cause NASA to restructure or cancel the CLPS program and wouldn't do anything to cultivate the lucrative business environment sought by all the CLPS companies."I've spoken to NASA Headquarters, and they give the same advice: 'Hey, go talk to the different CEOs of those different companies and learn from them and share with them as well,'" Kim said. "I've spoken to each of the CEOs. I've also done my own homework and research."Thomas Zurbuchen, the former head of NASA's science mission directorate, was instrumental in getting the CLPS program up and running. Early in the program, Zurbuchen guessed the first group of CLPS lander missions might have a 5050 chance of success. Borrowing from a sports metaphor, NASA officials likened CLPS to taking "shots on goal" with a regular cadence of missions, allowing contractors to try new ways of doing business, overcome potential failures, and try again in an iterative development cycle.With the small sample size of two missions in the books, the CLPS program is batting .500, just as Zurbuchen predicted. The outcome of this weekend's landing attempt will determine whether CLPS moves ahead or behind the Zurbuchen curve.Stephen ClarkSpace ReporterStephen ClarkSpace Reporter Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the worlds space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet. 3 Comments