Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander softly touched down in Mare Crisium carrying 10 NASA instruments. Photo: Firefly Aerospace

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander successfully touched down on the Moon’s surface in the early hours of Sunday morning. 

Firefly said the mission, named Ghost Riders in the Sky, is the first fully successful soft-landing on the Moon by a commercial company. 

As part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, Blue Ghost Mission 1 landed in Mare Crisium, near the volcanic feature Mons Latreille, with 10 NASA instruments. Firefly is now commanding the lander from its mission operations center in Cedar Park, Texas.

SpaceX launched the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission 1 in January of this year. After a weekslong journey, the lander touched down on the Moon at 2:34 a.m. CST on March 2. 

“Firefly is literally and figuratively over the Moon,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly. “Our Blue Ghost lunar lander now has a permanent home on the lunar surface with 10 NASA payloads and a plaque with every Firefly employee’s name.”

Over the next 14 days, Blue Ghost will support various NASA science and technology demonstrations. These include lunar subsurface drilling, sample collection, X-ray imaging, and dust mitigation experiments. On March 14, the mission will capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse and will observe the lunar sunset on March 16, providing data on lunar dust behavior. Blue Ghost will operate into the night and continue to capture imagery.

Firefly CTO Shea Ferring commented: “Just through transit to the Moon, Firefly’s mission has already delivered the most science data to date for the NASA CLPS initiative. CLPS has played a key role in Firefly’s evolution from a rocket company to a provider of launch, lunar, and on-orbit services from LEO to cislunar and beyond.”

During its 45-day trip to the Moon, Blue Ghost traveled more than 2.8 million miles and downlinked over 27 GB of data. The mission supported payload science operations, including signal tracking from the Global Navigation Satellite System with the LuGRE payload, radiation tolerant computing through the Van Allen belts with the RadPC payload, and magnetic field measurements with the Learning Management System payload.

NASA Acting Administrator Janet Petro said: “The technological and science demonstrations onboard Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 will improve our ability to not only discover more science, but to ensure the safety of our spacecraft instruments for future human exploration – both in the short term and long term.”