1 of 4 | Carrying a suite of NASA science and technology payloads to the Moon, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 touched down on the lunar surface at 3:34 a.m. EST on Sunday. A Firefly photo shows Blue Ghost's shadow on the moon's surface. Photo via Firefly Aerospace/UPI |
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March 2 (UPI) -- A Texas space company has successfully completed the first successful commercial moon landing, as Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost touched down on the lunar surface and began operating on Sunday.
"You all stuck the landing. We're on the moon," Blue Ghost chief engineer Will Coogan said on a livestream of the landing, prompting cheers from the mission control room.
Buzz Aldrin, a pioneering U.S astronaut, celebrated the Blue Ghost's achievement in a Facebook post.
"Contact light, engine stop! Congratulations Firefly Aerospace, for Blue Ghost's Mission 1 successful moon landing today!" Aldrin said in the post.
This is the latest in a series of attempts by commercial companies to land on the moon, but until now, none have operated successfully. Houston-based Intuitive Machines launched a commercial mission to the lunar surface last year, but the craft landed on its side near the moon's South Pole and stopped working.
The Odysseus was the first U.S. lunar module to land on the moon's surface in half a century, but came in too fast and caught one of its legs on the lunar surface and fell over, rendering it incapable of transmitting data back to Earth.
In 2023, a module operated by Japanese company ispace crashed onto the surface of the moon and was largely inoperable.
Cedar Park, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, said Blue Ghost's touchdown makes it the "first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful soft-landing on the moon."
While it is a commercial mission, the Blue Ghost expedition is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, in which the administration contracts with third parties to carry scientific hardware and other technology to the moon's surface. Blue Ghost is carrying instruments for 10 NASA-based scientific research projects.
The manned Artemis program is part of the same initiative. Blue Ghost is also scheduled to capture images of a total solar eclipse on March 14 when the Earth passes between the moon and the sun.
Not long after landing early Sunday, Blue Ghost began transmitting images from the lunar surface back to waiting scientists on Earth. It was one of two lunar landers that launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan.15. The other one, called Resilience, is scheduled to land on the moon in late May or early June.
