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 2023, 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.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, seen here inside the company’s spacecraft manufacturing facility in Cedar Park, Texas.
Credit:
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
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.
