SpaceX Will Launch Two New Moon Landers on One Rocket: What to Know

Robotic vehicles from Firefly Aerospace of Texas and Ispace of Japan parted ways early Wednesday after being launched on the same SpaceX rocket. Both are aiming for the lunar surface.

A space twofer took place early Wednesday morning — two lunar missions for the price of one rocket launch.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1:11 a.m. Eastern time, carrying the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan.

Why did two moon landers share one rocket?

That was the result of fortuitous scheduling by SpaceX and not something that was planned by Firefly or Ispace.

Firefly had purchased a Falcon 9 launch to send its Blue Ghost lander to the moon. At the same time, Ispace, to save on the costs for the mission, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload on a rocket launch that was going roughly in the right direction to get its Resilience lander to the moon. That turned out to be Blue Ghost’s trip.

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

After the Falcon 9 rocket reached orbit, the second stage fired again for a minute so it could deploy Blue Ghost in an elliptical orbit around Earth, about an hour after launch. The rocket stage fired once more, for just a second, to adjust the orbit for the deployment of Resilience, about 1.5 hours after launch.

What are Firefly and Blue Ghost?

Firefly Aerospace is one of the new space companies that have popped up 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 United States Space Force within days — a capability that the Department of Defense is looking to develop so that it could quickly replace satellites that come under attack.

Blue Ghost — named after a species of fireflies — is a robotic lander that Firefly has developed to take scientific instruments and other payloads to the surface of the moon.

This mission is headed to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that 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 does not fully succeed. The NASA payloads include a drill to measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean off 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 at the landing site.

What are Ispace and Resilience?

This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a commercial lander on the surface of the moon. Its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander tried to set 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 the ground, after thinking it had landed, and then crashed when it ran out of propellant.

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

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

Although this is not a NASA mission, it will collect two soil samples — one scooped up 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 will remain on the moon. Instead, they are meant to help strengthen the United States government’s position that while no nation on Earth can claim sovereignty of the moon or other parts of the solar system under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, nations and companies can own and profit from what they extract from the moon.

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

Which mission will arrive at the moon first?

Blue Ghost should get to the moon first, on March 2. For the first 25 days, it is to circle around Earth as the company turns on and checks out the spacecraft’s systems, before heading on a four-day journey to the moon. Then it will orbit the moon for 16 days before trying to land, 45 days after launch.

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

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

Both Blue Ghost and Resilience might 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, quicker 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 successfully able to contact Earth despite tipping over.

Why are private companies landing on the moon?

By hiring private companies, NASA hopes to send more devices to the moon at a lower cost to perform experiments and test new technologies. A second aim of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or C.L.P.S., is to jump-start a commercial industry there that would not otherwise develop.

NASA officials expect failures along the way, and some have already occurred. The first C.L.P.S. mission by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh suffered a catastrophic propulsion failure soon after launch and never made it close to the moon. The tipping of the second Intuitive Machine lander during the second C.L.P.S. mission prevented the scientific instruments aboard from collecting the data they were sent to measure.

The American subsidiary of Ispace is collaborating with Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., for a C.L.P.S. mission that is scheduled to launch next year.

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