SpaceX Will Launch Two New Lunar Landers On One Rocket: What To Know

On By Littum

A two-way trip to space took place early Wednesday morning – two lunar missions for the price of one rocket launch.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. ET, with the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace in Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander by Ispace in Japan.

It was the result of haphazard planning by SpaceX and not something planned by Firefly or Ispace.

Firefly had purchased a Falcon 9 launcher to send its Blue Ghost lander to the moon. At the same time, in order to save on the costs of the mission, Ispace had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is to say, to hitch a ride as a secondary payload on a rocket launch that went roughly in the right direction to get its Resilience to land on the moon. It turned out to be Blue Ghost’s turn.

“It was a no-brainer to put them together,” Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA’s science missions at SpaceX, said during a news conference Tuesday.

After the Falcon 9 rocket reached orbit, the second stage fired again for one minute, allowing it to insert Blue Ghost into an elliptical orbit around Earth, about an hour after launch. The rocket stage fired once more, for just one second, to adjust the orbit for the deployment of Resilience, approximately 1.5 hours after launch.

On Wednesday morning, Firefly and Ispace announced that their spacecraft successfully powered up, established communications with ground stations on Earth and was operating as expected.

Firefly Aerospace is one of the new space companies that have emerged over the past few years. It has developed and launched a small rocket called Alpha several times. In 2023, Firefly demonstrated that it could prepare and launch a payload for the U.S. Space Force within days — a capability the Defense Department is seeking to develop to quickly replace satellites that come under attack.

Blue Ghost – named after a species of firefly – is a robotic lander developed by Firefly to take scientific instruments and other payloads to the lunar surface.

This mission is headed for Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed by lava that was filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

NASA will pay Firefly $101.5 million if it takes 10 payloads to the lunar surface, and a bit less if it doesn’t fully succeed. The NASA payloads include a drill to measure heat flow from the lunar interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.

The lander will operate for about 14 days — the length of a lunar day — until darkness descends on the landing site.

This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a commercial lander on the lunar surface. Its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander attempted to touch down near the Atlas crater on the near side of the moon. But the landing software was confused when it passed over the crater rim, which is two miles higher than the surrounding terrain. The spacecraft ended up hovering far above Earth after thinking it had landed, then crashed when it ran out of propellant.

Resilience – also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander – has largely the same design as the Mission 1 spacecraft, but with different payloads. Ispace officials said they were confident the errors that led to the 2023 crash had been fixed.

The payloads on Resilience include a water electrolyzer experiment, which splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, from the Takasago Thermal Engineering Company of Japan, and a small rover named Tenacious, which was developed and built by Ispace’s European subsidiary.

Although this is not a NASA mission, it will collect two soil samples — one retrieved by the rover, the other just soil that settles on the landing pads — and sell them to the agency for $5,000 each.

The transactions have no scientific value because the samples remain on the moon. Instead, they are meant to help reinforce the US government’s position that while no nation on Earth can claim sovereignty over the moon or other parts of the solar system under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, nations and corporations can own and take advantage of what they extract from the moon.

Resilience and Tenacious are also designed to work for one lunar day or 14 Earth days.

Blue Ghost was not supposed to reach the moon until March 2nd. For the first 25 days, it will circle Earth while the company powers up and checks the spacecraft’s systems before embarking on a four-day journey to the moon. It will then orbit the moon for 16 days before attempting to land, 45 days after launch.

Resilience will take a longer, tortuous path that consumes less energy and propellant, gradually stretching out its elliptical path until the farthest point of the orbit reaches beyond the moon. As a secondary payload on the Falcon 9, it must perform a flyby of the moon to get into the correct position to be captured in lunar orbit.

The vehicle should land on a plain named Mare Frigoris about four to five months after launch.

Both Blue Ghost and Resilience could be beaten by a spacecraft from Intuitive Machines of Houston that is not scheduled to launch until late February. Despite its later start, it will take a direct, faster path to the moon.

Intuitive Machines placed Odysseus, its first lander, on the moon in a trip sponsored by NASA last year. It was still able to contact Earth even though it tumbled.

By hiring private companies, NASA hopes to send more devices to the moon at a lower cost to conduct experiments and test new technologies. Another purpose of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS (pronounced “clip”), is to spark a commercial industry there that would otherwise not develop.

NASA officials expect mistakes along the way, and some have already happened. The first CLPS mission from Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology suffered a catastrophic propulsion failure shortly after launch and never made it close to the moon. The tilt of the first Intuitive Machine lander during the second CLPS mission prevented the science instruments on board from collecting the data they were sent to measure.

The U.S. subsidiary of Ispace is collaborating with Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., on a CLPS mission scheduled to launch next year.