Firefly looks to punch NASA moon ticket with overnight SpaceX launch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A SpaceX mission set to lift off overnight marks a first for Firefly Aerospace under NASA’s plans to build up American companies to support its lunar goals.

A Falcon 9 targeting a 1:11 a.m.Eastern time, liftoff Wednesday from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A is carrying the Cedar Park, Texas-based company’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, making its first mission under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost is actually flying up with a second commercial company’s moonbound payload, the lunar lander Resilience with a rover named Tenacious for Japanese company ispace, which is following up a failed moon landing attempt in 2022.

Space Launch Delta 45’s weather squadron forecasts a 90% chance for good launch conditions, which falls to 60% in the event of a 24-hour delay, although booster recovery weather could be a concern both days. The first-stage booster for the mission is making its fifth flight and will attempt a recovery landing downrange on the droneship Just Read the Instructions stationed in the Atlantic.

It would be the sixth Space Coast launch of the year, all from SpaceX, although Blue Origin is aiming to launch its New Glenn rocket for the first time as early as Thursday morning.

Firefly’s lander, though, is scheduled to arrive months before the ispace lander, and build on the momentum seen in 2024 by fellow Texas company Intuitive Machines, whose commercial lander also flying under NASA’s CLPS program, had a partially successful soft landing on the moon.

Blue Ghost Mission One is the third CLPS mission to fly and first of three planned launches tied to CLPS missions so far for Firefly. NASA will pay Firefly up to $101.5 million from its 10-year pool of $2.6 billion set aside for CLPS missions to be awarded though 2028.

“We’ve always had three objectives for CLPS,” said Joel Kearns, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration under the Science Mission Directorate. “One is do really good science of the moon. … also do engineering technology demonstrations on the moon, … and then the third one by doing that, develop a group of American commercial lunar landing service providers so that Artemis could take advantage of them.”

Artemis is NASA’s program to return humans to the moon and eventually Mars, but it will need plenty of robotic missions to support it.

The first CLPS mission never made it to the moon. That came from Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology that launched its Peregrine lander in January 2024. Propellant issues, though, ultimately led the company’s decision to return the lander to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. A second Astrobotic mission remains on NASA’s calendar before the end of the year.

The second CLPS mission was partially successful, as Houston-based Intuitive Machines followed in 2024 with a February launch on the IM-1 mission with its Nova-C lander dubbed Odysseus, which touched down on the moon, but tipped over on landing, which limited some of NASA’s planned experiments’ performance. An IM-2 mission also with a Nova-C lander is slated to fly as early as late February.

Internationally, only two other commercial companies had attempted landings previously, including the failed Hakuto-R mission 1 from ispace in 2022 and an Israeli lander called Beresheet that crashed into the moon in 2019.

Firefly Aerospace, which is targeting a touchdown in the Mare Crisium basin located in the northeast quadrant of the moon as seen from Earth’s northern hemisphere, looks to break the cycle and manage both a successful soft landing and allow all of its payloads to do their job.

Blue Ghost has 10 NASA payloads along with a pair of private ones.

Among the NASA experiments are a couple of devices focused on the complexities of moon dust. Versions of both flew up on the IM-1 mission, but didn’t get to complete their job. One called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) looks to see what sort of dust plume is kicked up by landers while another, the Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS), looks to test out a way to stop dust surface accumulation.

As far as EDS, a team at Kennedy Space Center has been working on this concept for years that uses electromagnetic fields to clean off dust particles.

“I’ve referred to it a couple times as the poster child for dust mitigation technology,” said NASA’s Kristen John with the Space Technology Mission Directorate. “Just seeing that technology fly. … It’s a brilliant concept. When you see it in action, when you see videos of it, it’s just fantastic seeing the the dust repel. So the technology itself is really impressive. And so being able to finally see it demoed on the surface, I think will be really exciting and really validating for the team.”

Among the other NASA payloads are a tool to measure heat from the moon’s interior, a lunar regolith sample collector called PlanetVac, an inert laser reflector that will be able to be seen from Earth, a device to measure how lunar regolith sticks to various surfaces, a radiation-tolerant computer, an X-ray imager to measure solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field, a tool to measure the moon’s electric and magnetic fields, and an experiment that will communicate during flight, in lunar orbit and on the surface with the U.S. GPS and European Galileo systems.

The two commercial payloads are a memorial plaque, but with no human remains, for the company Beyond Burial, and a little pyramid with a seed bank and digital time capsule for the company LifeShip.

Blue Ghost’s mission profile calls for it to first orbit Earth for about 22 days before it finally makes a four-day trip to the moon where it will orbit for another two weeks in lunar orbit lowering down to an altitude of about 62 miles before the final descent, which should take about an hour. A Wednesday launch could mean an arrival in late February.

After landing, the plan is to spend about two weeks in daylight before lunar night puts the lander into darkness and the debilitating cold, although Firefly is looking to remain active for about five hours into the night before shutting down.

“We’ve done a tremendous amount of work in preparing for the landing and training for it, and doing the simulated landings, and doing the digital work and an analysis that goes into that,” said Kevin Scholtes, a future systems architect for Firefly has been working on Blue Ghost since 2021. “But we can’t test like you fly, because you can’t replicate the moon in a lab for a lander right now.”

The lander itself resembles those of the Apollo missions, and Scholtes said the company looked at the troubles seen both by other commercial landing attempts as well as government missions.

“We did a pretty extensive deep dive,” he said. “For the most part, the lessons learned that we gathered from them, we’ve been able to incorporate into our program. … We’ve been leaning forward very much on trying to make sure that we are not ignoring the opportunity to learn from those events.”

For one thing, the lander is much more broad at its base with a low center of gravity, which Scholtes said is to counteract the challenge of low gravity that can lead to tipping.

“It’s a completely different kind of kind of force there, and you see that in the videos of astronauts walking around and tipping over,” he said. “There’s a lot of counterintuitiveness in that. That makes it easy to design structures that are lighter for the moon, but strangely enough, makes it harder to make them tall.”

Firefly, which has successfully launched its own Alpha rocket and is working with Northrop Grumman to redesign the Antares rocket, also has a lease at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 20, where it could bring launches in the future.

While it moves forward with its own rocket and engine program, it began receiving task orders for its lunar program as well, including landers, rovers and orbiting spacecraft.

“I think probably our greatest strength is actually the diversity of our company,” Scholtes said. “In terms of being a company that provides complete end-to-end services. … I think NASA has been paying close attention to us as we’ve been executing on our contracts over the years.”

As far as competition, though, including sharing a ride to space with ispace, Schotles is all for it.

“We’re excited to see that there are multiple commercial solutions, because we want there to be competition,” he said. “We want there to be a rich economy for us to go after the moon. The moon’s a big enough place.”

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