A busy year of lunar missions will begin this week with the launch of two private lunar landers on the same rocket.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the missions has a six-day window starting early Wednesday morning (Jan. 15). Liftoff from Launch Complex-39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida is set for 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 GMT).
Both landers will be transported by Falcon 9 to Earth orbit, where they will start separate journeys to the moon. The goal of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar lander, Ghost Riders in the Sky, is to transport scientific payloads to the moon’s surface as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Resilience, the second lander, is the second mission that the Japanese corporation ispace has undertaken in an attempt to land on the moon. Blue Ghost will be followed by iSpace’s Mission 2, which will take almost four times as long to finish.
In order to set its course toward the moon, Blue Ghost will orbit the Earth for 25 days before an engine fire. If all goes according to plan, the lander will autonomously land in Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) after another 20 days, which includes 16 days in lunar orbit and four days in transit, to start two weeks of lunar science.
About five hours after nightfall on the lander’s site, Blue Ghost’s 60-day journey from Earth to the moon would come to an end. Before shutting down, the spacecraft will use its remaining battery power to take a picture of the lunar sunset.
After launch, the Resilience lander is expected to settle four to five months later on a significantly slower trajectory. Based on the lessons acquired during Hakuto-R Mission 1, ispace’s second mission, Resilience, has been outfitted with both software and hardware enhancements. In April 2023, the mission’s attempt to land was unsuccessful due to a malfunctioning altitude sensor on the lander, which caused a crash on the lunar surface. The mission had successfully reached lunar orbit.
With Hakuto-R Mission 2, ispace is adopting a methodical approach, outlining a 10-step list of milestones Resilience will accomplish en route to the moon, along with an additional checklist for objectives accomplished after a successful lunar landing. In the northern hemisphere of the moon, the lander is headed for Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold), where it will start surface operations. As part of a contract with NASA, the lander will deploy an onboard microrover called Tenacious to gather a sample of regolith, or moon dust.
Future months will see more moon missions
Another lunar laundering operation, this time from the only private corporation to land on the moon so far, will follow this week’s Falcon 9 mission to the moon in a short period of time.
In February 2024, Intuitive Machines launched Odysseus, its first Nova-C lander, carrying six NASA CLPS payloads along with six additional commercial payloads. Odysseus made a largely successful landing on that mission, called IM-1, close to the crater Malapert A, which is roughly 190 miles (300 kilometers) from the lunar south pole.
IM-2 is scheduled to launch in February and will similarly travel to the south pole area of the moon, namely to a ridge close to Shackleton Crater. Among the several CLPS payloads that IM-2 will transport for NASA is an experiment known as PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1), which will assist in verifying the region’s water ice abundance.
Later in 2025, a third Nova-C lander is scheduled to fly on the IM-3 mission, bringing another round of CLPS experiments and technology demonstrations on the lunar surface for the space agency.
Another probe carrying NASA CLPS payloads, Griffin Mission One, is another project that Pittsburgh-based startup Astrobotic is aiming for this year. A fuel leak prevented the company’s Peregrine lunar lander from reaching the moon after it launched last year. The probe was instead returned to Earth by its handlers, where it burned up during atmospheric descent over the Pacific Ocean.
The goal of NASA’s several CLPS contracts is to advance the agency’s Artemis program, which intends to send humans to the moon in 2027 and eventually establish a base in the southern polar area of the moon, where water ice seems to be abundant. NASA gave Human Landing Services (HLS) contracts to businesses to transport astronauts to the moon’s surface, much like CLPS did. In 2025, SpaceX’s Starship rocket—which was awarded NASA’s first HLS contract—is anticipated to do dozens of test flights, maybe including one around the moon.
By using its Blue Moon lander to transport humans to the lunar surface for missions beyond Artemis 3, Blue Origin was awarded NASA’s second HLS contract.Blue Origin’s MK1 Lunar Lander pathfinder mission is on track for a potential 2025 launch after the company’s New Glenn rocket launched successfully on January 12.