American, Japanese robotic landers share rocket launch to the Moon

For the first time in lunar exploration, two robotic landers, from two different nations launched to the Moon on one rocket.

But despite Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based ispace sharing one SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the two missions are taking very different paths and timelines to reach the lunar surface.

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center happened Jan. 15 at 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 UTC). The flight was the 100th orbital launch for SpaceX from the historic pad formerly used by Apollo and the Space Shuttle.

Minutes after deployment, Firefly confirmed acquisition of signal from its lander, officially allowing 45-day trek to the Moon to proceed.

Launch weather officers at the 45th Weather Squadron put the odds of favorable conditions for liftoff at 90 percent, stating that winds could be an issue at launch time.

“Rain showers and overcast conditions will clear the Space Coast by early this afternoon. Wind speeds will decrease throughout the day today,” meteorologists wrote. “By early Wednesday morning and the primary launch window, winds will be at 15-20mph with occasional gusts to 25mph. This will cause a small chance for liftoff winds and a Cumulus Cloud Rule violation.”

SpaceX used the Falcon 9 first stage booster designated B1085 on this mission, which launched for a fifth time. Its previous launches were Crew-9, GPS 3 SV07, Starlink 10-5 and Starlink 6-77.

Nearly 8.5 minutes in to the flight, B1085 landed on the droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ marking the 107th landing for JRTI and the 398th booster landing to date.

‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’

The Wednesday morning launch marked the first Moon-bound mission for Firefly Aerospace. It’s Blue Ghost lunar lander was conceived following the company’s selection as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Program.

The objective of CLPS is to get NASA science to the surface of the Moon without the agency having to build the landers or procure launches. NASA has multiple contracts with a variety of CLPS providers, with Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission 1 and Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 flights occurring in early 2024.

Blue Ghost has a dry mass of 469 kg (1,034 lbs) and weighs roughly 1,500 kg (3,300 lbs) when fueled. It uses a combination of MMH hypergolic propellant and MON-3 oxidizer to power the main engine and thrusters during its journey.

It’s designed to carry ten NASA science payloads to the surface of the Moon, which so far is the most manifested on a single lander as part of CLPS.

Joel Kearns, the Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said once the 10 instruments were small enough that they could fly on one lander, the agency looked for a company that could execute on all the science operations over 14 days (one lunar daylight period).

“Firefly and several other bidders took up that challenge. They’ve come up with a really credible mission plan to conduct all the experiments we want on our instruments,” Kearns said.

In a prelaunch interview with Spaceflight Now, Brigette Oakes, the vice president of Engineering for Firefly, said the company incorporated learnings from previous lunar missions.

“We really also took a lot of lessons learned from previous missions. I mean, we did a full, thorough review of every lunar mission that went up, whether it was commercial or NASA and took a lot of lessons learned from that and then essentially just kind of fine tuned and adapted for Firefly’s model with the additional product lines and then took the best of what previous companies have done before us.”

Firefly also took learnings and hardware from its Alpha rocket and folded those into Blue Ghost as well.

“There’s a lot of great wisdom and experience and lessons learned at this company. We have rockets and satellites at our company. So, there’s a lot of commonality between the two different parts of our company and there’s a lot of lessons learned that get shared,” said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.

“As we go to cadence on our Alpha rocket, a lot of those lessons learned, even the reaction control propulsion, that’s stuff that’s lessons learned for our Blue Ghost lander because we have ACS and RCS thrusters on our Blue Ghost lander that have heritage from the Alpha rocket. So, there’s a lot of crosstalk within our company. So that really helps programs, like Blue Ghost have confidence.”

As Firefly goes in for its first landing attempt, set to take place on March 2, Kim said one of the key tools on this lander is a quartet of cup-shaped ends on the landing legs.

“Those landing pads are designed carefully with crumple zones,” he said. “If you think of honeycomb and how crunchy it is, it’s got that built into the actual structure. And so, when it lands, it’s going to – kind of like you’re car when you get into an accident – it crumples deliberately. That’s what that design entails.”

The mission, called ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky,’ will take slightly longer to reach the surface of the Moon, compared to the last CLPS mission from Houston-based Intuitive Machines. The IM-1 flight took about seven days from liftoff to landing, while the Blue Ghost lander is taking roughly 45 days to make its journey.

Once on the surface, it will operate for about two weeks with instruments including a sample collection tool called the Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) from Honeybee Robotics; a navigational demonstration called the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) from the Italian Space Agency and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and the Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) from Aegis Aerospace, which will study how lunar regolith sticks to a variety of materials.

The lander is also designed to survive for a few hours in the lunar night to capture sunset and other data in lunar darkness.

‘Never Quit the Lunar Quest’

Beneath the Blue Ghost lunar lander, inside a specially designed payload canister, was ispace’s lander called Resilience. This was the second time the Japan-based part of the company launches a lander to the Moon.

Its first launch attempt, Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) launched as a dedicated flight on a Falcon 9 in December 2022 and made a failed landing attempt in April 2023.

In a prelaunch interview with Spaceflight Now, former NASA Astronaut and current CEO of ispace-US, Ron Garan, said it was a software glitch that prevented the first landing. He said the radar altimeter saw a big jump in altitude as they approached the crater they were aiming for, which caused the lander to misinterpret where it was in the mission profile.

It then made what it thought was a soft landing, but was actually about 5,000 meters above the bottom of the crater and hovered there until it ran out of fuel and crashed.

“We’ve obviously fixed all that software, we’re not landing in the bottom of a deep crater this time and so, our confidence level is a lot higher on this one,” Garan said.

For Hakuto-R Mission 2, with the mission name ‘Never Quit the Lunar Quest,’ the Resilience lander will target a touchdown in a region called Mare Frigoris – the ‘Sea of Cold’ – which lies in the northern part of the Moon.

The mission will take considerably longer to reach the Moon than Firefly’s Blue Ghost. While Firefly’s lander will be dropped off in a highly elliptical Earth orbit and take 25 days for a phased orbital approach before performing a translunar injection burn, Resilience will take a slower path to the Moon using the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket to put it on a path for a low-energy transfer to the Moon.

Essentially, it will do a flyby of the Moon, go out about a million miles into deep space and then synch up with the Moon again for its landing.

“What the low-energy transfer allows is us to trade fuel for payload capacity margin,” Garan explained. “It just leads to more capacity for us to bring to the lunar surface.”

The lander carries with it several science instrument, including an a food production experiment and one designed to demonstrate electrolysis.

“The electrolysis is really exciting because of the implications. If we’re able to really do electrolysis on the Moon, then we’re able to produce rocket fuel on the Moon,” Garan said.

The mission will also take a small rover, called Tenacity, which will be deployed to operate on its own after landing. It features an HD camera that will be used to capture, among other things, imagery of an art installation called the ‘Moon House,’ which is a replica of a Swedish home that will be placed on the surface.

Garan said the rover comes from the European division of ispace.

“The rover itself is really critical to the future of our company. That the rover is efficient and the data that’s going to come off the rover is going to be really valuable to us as we continue to hone our design on the surface mobility aspect of the business,” Garan said. “And so, that’s really exciting too.”

Both the rover and the lander will operate on the surface of the Moon for about two weeks when the Moon slips into lunar nighttime. Garan said they are looking at a variety of methods for how to potentially achieve this, from orbiting solar concepts to nuclear options and beyond.

“To start a cislunar economy, you have to be able to survive the night. There’s millions and millions and millions of dollars that are put into these missions and if they only operate for two weeks, that’s not a very good return on investment,” Garan said. “So we want to be able to do surface operations for moths or years at a time and in order to do that, you have to be able to survive the night.”