Commercial moon lander Blue Ghost sets sights on Sunday touchdown

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander closed in on the moon Saturday, on course for a nail-biting automated descent to touchdown early Sunday, the first of three private-sector robotic moon landers to reach its target after launches earlier this year.

The Blue Ghost lunar lander spent a month orbiting Earth after launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket in January, giving Firefly flight controllers in Austin, Texas, plenty of time to activate and test its systems and science payloads before heading to the moon.

Once there, the spacecraft spent 16 days in lunar orbit refining its trajectory and beaming back spectacular views of Earth from 240,000 miles away.

Now, after multiple thruster firings to reach the planned descent orbit, the 6.6-foot-tall spacecraft is poised for a rocket-powered drop to the surface. Touchdown at Mare Crisium — the Sea of Crisis — is expected around 3:34 a.m. EST, near an ancient volcanic feature called Mons Latreille.

The solar-powered lander is expected to operate for a full lunar "day," or 14 Earth days. If all goes well, it may continue operating on battery power for a few hours into the dark lunar night before finally going silent.

Firefly CEO Jason Kim said the Blue Ghost is the latest example of commercial technology provided by the private sector "really bringing down the cost and affordability of (space) systems."

"Once in a blue-moon long time ago, these type of lunar landers took billions of dollars and countries behind (them) to land on the moon," he said in a pre-launch interview with CBS News.

"This is Firefly Aerospace that's gonna land on the moon at fractions of the cost on a fixed-price contract, and doing it with the latest commercial technology," he said. "Just like Simone Biles stuck the landing in the Olympics, we're gonna do the same thing for the state of Texas, for America and for the world."

NASA paid Firefly Aerospace $101 million to carry 10 agency-sponsored science instruments, built at a cost of $44 million, to the moon as part of the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

The CLPS program is aimed at encouraging private industry to launch agency payloads to the moon to collect needed science and engineering data before Artemis astronauts begin work on the surface near the lunar south pole later this decade.

"One of these days, we're going to get there in terms of the commercial aspects of the moon," Kim said. "There's going to be a lot of business plans that are going to be self-sustaining and growing. It's a great location to frequently go and test out new missions to sustain life in space, and it's a stepping stone for Mars as well."

Sharing a ride to space with Blue Ghost aboard the same Falcon 9 rocket was another moon lander, a spacecraft called "Resilience" that was built by Tokyo-based ispace. The company sent another lander to the moon last year, but it crashed to the surface after running out of fuel due to a software glitch.

For ispace's second attempt, the appropriately-named Resilience took a long, low-energy route to the moon and is expected to make its landing attempt in May.

Yet another lunar lander, this one built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines and known as Athena, was launched last Wednesday by another Falcon 9 and is expected to touch down on the moon March 6.

Athena also was funded in large part by NASA's CLPS program, which agreed to pay the company $62.5 million to carry a sophisticated drill and mass spectrometer to the moon.

NASA awarded a $15 million technology "tipping point" contract to Nokia to test cellular communications on the moon and another $41 million to Intuitive Machines for a rocket-powered "hopper" that will jump into a permanently shadowed crater in search of ice deposits.

Firefly's lander is carrying 10 instruments, including cameras, a drill to bore into the surface below the spacecraft, a radiation-tolerant computer, equipment that will attempt to pull in GPS navigation signals from Earth, an experiment to learn more about managing lunar dust and one to monitor the dispersal of dust kicked up by the lander's rocket engines.

"One of the core purposes of the CLPS program with NASA is to be a precursor to Artemis, which is obviously sending humans back to the moon," said Ray Allensworth, Firefly's spacecraft program director.

"So our payloads are collecting data so we can figure out what does it feel like to be on the lunar surface, to operate on the lunar surface? So all that data will inform when we actually return humans to the moon."

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