Early Wednesday morning, spaceflights were completed for the price of one rocket launch, equivalent to two moon missions.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1:11 a.m. ET, carrying the Blue Ghost lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and Japan's ISpace. It carried the Resilience Lander.
Why did the two lunar modules share one rocket?
This was the result of a scheduling accident by SpaceX and was not planned by Firefly or Ispace.
Firefly had purchased a Falcon 9 rocket to send the Blue Ghost lander to the moon. At the same time, Ispace asked SpaceX to carpool to save on mission costs. That meant hitchhiking the vehicle as a secondary payload for a rocket launch that was about to go in the right direction to get the Resilience Lander. To the moon. That became the journey of the Blue Ghost.
“It was easy to put them together,” Juliana Shaiman, SpaceX's director of NASA science missions, said at a news conference Tuesday.
After the Falcon 9 rocket reached orbit, the second stage ignited again for one minute, allowing Blue Ghost to deploy into an elliptical orbit around Earth about an hour after liftoff. Approximately 1.5 hours after liftoff, the rocket stage was ignited once more, for just one second, to adjust the trajectory for resilience deployment.
What are fireflies and blue ghosts?
Firefly Aerospace is one of the newer space companies that has sprung up in the last few years. He developed and launched a small rocket called Alpha several times. In 2023, Firefly demonstrated that it could prepare and launch a U.S. Space Force payload within days. This capability is something the Pentagon is considering developing to quickly replace attacked satellites.
Blue Ghost, named after the firefly species, is a robotic lander developed by Firefly to carry scientific instruments and other payloads to the lunar surface.
The mission will head to Mare Crisium, a plain formed when lava filled and solidified within a 345-mile-wide crater formed by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is located in the northeast quadrant of the moon's near side.
NASA will pay $101.5 million for Firefly if it delivers 10 payloads to the moon's surface, but slightly less if it is not fully successful. NASA's payload includes a drill to measure heat flow from the moon's interior to the lunar surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.
The lander will fly for about 14 days, the equivalent of one lunar day, until it reaches darkness at the landing site.
What is Ispace and resilience?
This is Ispace's second attempt to place a commercial lander on the lunar surface. The Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander attempted to land near Atlas Crater on the far side of the moon. However, the landing software became confused as it passed over the rim of a crater two miles higher than the surrounding terrain. After thinking it had landed, the spacecraft ended up hovering far above the ground, running out of propellant and crashing.
Resilience (also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander) is essentially the same design as the Mission 1 spacecraft, but with a different payload. Ispace officials said they are confident the mistakes that led to the 2023 crash have been corrected.
Resilience's payloads include an experiment with a water electrolyzer to separate hydrogen and oxygen molecules by Japan's Takasago Thermal Engineering Co., Ltd., and a small spacecraft named Tenacious developed and manufactured by Ispace's European subsidiary .
Although this is not a NASA mission, NASA collected two soil samples, one scooped up by the rover and the other just the soil deposited on the landing pad, for $5,000 each. It is planned to be sold.
This transaction has no scientific value, as the sample will remain on the moon. Rather, the U.S. government's position is that under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty no nation on Earth can claim sovereignty over the moon or any other part of the solar system, but that nations and corporations can own and profit from it. It is intended to strengthen the. Extract from the moon.
Resilience and Tenacious are designed to operate over one lunar day, or 14 Earth days.
Which mission will reach the moon first?
Blue Ghost is scheduled to be the first to reach the moon on March 2nd. The first 25 days will be spent circling the Earth while the company powers up and checks the spacecraft's systems before heading on a four-day trip to the moon. It will then orbit the moon for 16 days before attempting to land 45 days after launch.
The restoring force follows a longer, more winding path that consumes less energy and propellant, gradually lengthening the elliptical orbit until the farthest point of the orbit reaches beyond the moon. As the Falcon 9's secondary payload, it must perform a flyby of the Moon to reach the correct position to be captured into lunar orbit.
The vehicle is scheduled to land on a plain named Mare Frigoris about four to five months after launch.
Both Blue Ghost and Resilience could lose out to Houston-based Intuitive Machines' spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch by late February. Despite the slow start, it will take a direct and faster path to the moon.
Intuitive Machines landed the first lander, Odysseus, on the moon last year on a NASA-sponsored trip. Despite falling, it was able to make contact with Earth.
Why would a private company land on the moon?
By hiring private companies, NASA hopes to send more equipment to the moon at a lower cost to conduct experiments and test new technologies. The second objective of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program (CLPS) is to stimulate local commercial industries that would not otherwise develop.
NASA officials expect there will be failures along the way, and some have already occurred. The first CLPS mission by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh suffered a catastrophic propulsion failure shortly after liftoff and was unable to approach the moon. During the second CLPS mission, the second Intuitive Machine lander tilted, preventing its onboard scientific instruments from collecting data transmitted for measurements.
Ispace's U.S. subsidiary is collaborating with the Draper Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the CLPS mission, scheduled to launch next year.
