Two lunar landers are on the way to the Moon after SpaceX’s double moonshot

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers on separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months. The mission began with a middle-of-the-night launch from Kennedy at 1:11 am EST (06:11 UTC) Wednesday. It took about an hour and a half for the Falcon 9 rocket to release both payloads into two slightly different orbits, ranging up to 200,000 and 225,000 miles (322,000 and 362,000 kilometers) from Earth. The two robotic lunar landers—one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months. Firefly and ispace reported that their landers, each about the size of an SUV, were healthy as ground teams in Texas and Japan activated the spacecraft soon after their separation from the Falcon 9 launch vehicle. "On behalf of Firefly, we want to thank SpaceX for a spot-on deployment in our target orbit," said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. "The mission is now in the hands of the unstoppable Firefly team."

A busy few months at the Moon

This is the first lunar lander built by Firefly, which got its start in the rocket business. Firefly launches its own small-class rocket named Alpha and has partnered with Northrop Grumman to develop a larger medium-class rocket that could debut as soon as 2026. But Firefly officials want to expand beyond rocket development and launch services, and in 2021, NASA awarded the company a contract to deliver 10 research payloads to the Moon's surface as part of the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS, pronounced "clips") program. NASA established the CLPS program in 2018 to create a framework for the agency to purchase rides to the Moon on commercial spacecraft. Agency leaders intend for these uncrewed CLPS missions to deliver scientific instruments and tech demo experiments to the Moon at a lower cost than a government-led mission. Another important goal for CLPS is to foster the development of the commercial lunar landers themselves. With CLPS, NASA has become an anchor customer for companies getting into the lunar landing business. NASA has now booked rides with five companies for scientific payloads on 11 commercial missions to the Moon. Firefly's first Blue Ghost lander is the third of these 11 missions NASA currently has on contract. The first two CLPS missions launched in early 2024. The first CLPS lander, owned by a company named Astrobotic, failed to reach the Moon after a leak in its propulsion system. Intuitive Machines flew the second CLPS mission to the Moon a month later, and it achieved a successful soft landing but immediately tipped over. Engineers and scientists were still able to obtain images and scientific data from the lander's instruments. The landing by Intuitive Machines marked the first successful soft landing on the Moon by a US spacecraft since the last Apollo mission in 1972. And it was the first-ever time that a commercial spacecraft accomplished the feat. In the early days of the CLPS program, NASA officials likened their approach with commercial lunar missions to taking "shots on goal." None of the companies that have won CLPS task orders from NASA had ever sent a spacecraft to the Moon at the time of receiving their contracts. "We do understand with CLPS [that] a lot of these are first time vendors, first time flying to the Moon," said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's science directorate. "We know it's high risk. We accept it's high risk, but man, it’s high reward. So it is worth taking the risk because the science that we will get back from these missions is just going to be amazing." NASA is paying Firefly $101 million for its payloads to ride with Firefly to the Moon, plus another $44 million for developing the instruments themselves.

NASA's fourth CLPS mission is scheduled for launch in late February. This will be the second lander built by Intuitive Machines. More CLPS missions could head to the Moon later this year. Meanwhile, the lunar lander from ispace that launched in tandem with Firefly's Blue Ghost lander Wednesday is a purely commercial mission and isn't part of NASA's CLPS program. This lander, named Resilience, is ispace's second lunar mission, following a 2023 landing attempt that ended with a crash on the Moon. Engineers determined that the lander ran out of propellant after a software error caused the spacecraft to hover too long before making its final descent to the lunar surface. Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science missions for SpaceX, said it made sense to pair the Firefly and ispace missions on the same Falcon 9 rocket. "When we have two missions that can each go to the Moon on the same launch, that is something that we obviously want to take advantage of," Scheiman said. “So when we found a solution for the Firefly and ispace missions to fly together on the same Falcon 9, it was a no-brainer to put them together.” SpaceX stacked the two landers, one on top of the other, inside the Falcon 9's payload fairing. Firefly's lander, the larger of the two spacecraft, rode on top of the stack and deployed from the rocket first. The Resilience lander from ispace launched in the lower position, cocooned inside a specially designed canister. Once Firefly's lander separated from the Falcon 9, the rocket jettisoned the canister, performed a brief engine firing to maneuver into a slightly different orbit, then released ispace's lander. This dual launch arrangement resulted in a lower launch price for Firefly and ispace, according to Scheiman. "At SpaceX, we are really interested in and invested in lowering the cost of launch for everybody," she said. "So that’s something we’re really proud of."

The Blue Ghost and Resilience landers will take different paths toward the Moon. Firefly's Blue Ghost will spend about 25 days in Earth orbit, then four days in transit to the Moon. After Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, Firefly's ground team will verify the readiness of the lander's propulsion and navigation systems and execute several thruster burns to set up for landing. Blue Ghost's final descent to the Moon is tentatively scheduled for March 2. The target landing site is in Mare Crisium, an ancient 350-mile-wide (560-kilometer) impact basin in the northeast part of the near side of the Moon. After touchdown, Blue Ghost will operate for about 14 days (one entire lunar day). 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 Resilience lander from ispace will take four to five months to reach the Moon. It carries several intriguing tech demo experiments, including a water electrolyzer provided by a Japanese company named Takasago Thermal Engineering. This demonstration will test equipment that future lunar missions could use to convert the Moon's water ice resources into electricity and rocket fuel. The lander will also deploy a "micro-rover" named Tenacious, developed by an ispace subsidiary in Luxembourg. The Tenacious rover will attempt to scoop up lunar soil and capture high-definition imagery of the Moon. Ron Garan, CEO of ispace's US-based subsidiary, told Ars that this mission is "pivotal" for the company. "We were not fully successful on our first mission," Garan said in an interview. "It was an amazing accomplishment, even though we didn't have a soft landing... Although the hardware worked flawlessly, exactly as it was supposed to, we did have some lessons learned in the software department. The fixes to prevent what happened on the first mission from happening on the second mission were fairly straightforward, so that boosts our confidence." The ispace subsidiary led by Garan, a former NASA astronaut, is based in Colorado. While the Resilience lander launched Wednesday is not part of the CLPS program, the company will build an upgraded lander for a future CLPS mission for NASA, led by Draper Laboratory. "I think the fact that we have two lunar landers on the same rocket for the first time in history is pretty substantial," Garan said. I think we all are rooting for each other." Investors need to see more successes with commercial lunar landers to fully realize the market's potential, Garan said. "That market, right now, is very nascent. It's very, very immature. And one of the reasons for that is that it's very difficult for companies that are contemplating making investments on equipment, experiments, etc., to put on the lunar surface and lunar orbit," Garan said. "It's very difficult to make those investments, especially if they're long-term investments, because there really hasn't been a proof of concept yet." "So every time we have a success, that makes it more likely that these companies that will serve as the foundation of a commercial lunar market movement will be able to make those investments," Garan said. "Conversely, every time we have a failure, the opposite happens."