Falcon 9 set to launch two landers to the Moon on the same mission

SpaceX is set to fly not one but two lunar landers to the Moon on the same mission. A Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch during an instantaneous window on Wednesday, Jan. 15, at 1:11 AM EST (06:11 UTC) from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s HAKUTO-R M2 Resilience landers aboard, bound for different parts of the lunar surface.

The Falcon booster, B1085, will fly on a southeast trajectory out of the Cape. The two lunar landers will be sent on different trajectories to the Moon, and the booster will land on the Just Read the Instructions droneship. B1085 started its career with the Starlink 10-5 mission and has flown the Crew-9, Starlink 6-77, and GPS III-7 missions. This flight, the eighth Falcon 9 launch of 2025, will be the first time two lander spacecraft have launched to the Moon on the same rocket.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander

Firefly Aerospace developed the Blue Ghost lander to fly robotic missions to the lunar surface in response to NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. For its first CLPS mission, Blue Ghost is tasked with flying a science mission to Mare Crisium, an ancient volcanic basin on the near side of the Moon.

The Blue Ghost lander, named after a rare firefly species found in the southeast United States, was designed to carry experiments, including rovers, to the lunar surface. The Blue Ghost lander masses 150 kg, while a transfer vehicle mated to the lander would increase the combination mass to 2,700 kg.

The box-shaped lander is two meters tall and three and a half meters in diameter, with the body covered in golden-colored insulation to protect it against the temperature extremes found on the lunar surface and in space. Blue Ghost also features four fixed landing legs and three solar panels, providing up to 400 watts of power.

Infographic showing the Blue Ghost lander. (Credit: Firefly Aerospace)

Blue Ghost’s main engine will use liquid hypergolic propellants, providing 1,000 newtons of thrust for lunar orbit insertion and the braking burn before landing. The lander is also equipped with 12 cold gas attitude control thrusters and eight Spectre reaction control system thrusters, which also use hypergolic propellants. Together, these thrusters provide 1,600 newtons of thrust for orientation and use during the soft landing process.

Blue Ghost is equipped with one X-band and three S-band antennas for communications, allowing high-definition video and data to be downlinked to Firefly’s mission operations center in Texas. The lander will also use two navigation cameras to determine the safest landing site and identify nearby hazards on the surface.

Blue Ghost’s body has three decks, with the top deck providing views of the sky above the lander. The middle deck has mounting options for rovers, while the bottom deck has access to the lunar surface. The lander’s body extensively uses composite materials, with 49 struts used to provide a strong yet lightweight framework. The lander’s legs are also made of composite material and feature a crush core honeycomb to absorb impacts during touchdown. The legs are equipped with contact sensors to trigger engine shutdown after landing.

Infographic with various milestones of Blue Ghost’s first mission. (Credit: Firefly Aerospace)

Blue Ghost Mission 1: “Ghost Riders In The Sky”

The “Ghost Riders In the Sky” mission is Firefly’s first lunar landing mission and its first CLPS mission for NASA. Mission 1 will carry 10 experiments to the surface, with a landing site near Mons Latreille, within the Mare Crisium volcanic basin, at 18.56 degrees north and 61.81 degrees east.

Although future Blue Ghost flights are planned to use Firefly’s upcoming Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV) rocket, the company booked Mission 1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9. MLV is set to make its first flight no earlier than 2026. The existing Firefly Alpha rocket does not have the payload or performance capability to fly Blue Ghost to the Moon.

Mission 1’s journey to the Moon’s surface is scheduled to take up to 45 days, with the time in transit being used to conduct health checks on all systems and initial payload operations. The journey begins with a launch during a six-day window starting on Jan. 15, and system checkouts will start during an eight-hour commissioning process after lander separation from Falcon 9’s second stage.

Infographic of Blue Ghost’s landing sequence. (Credit: Firefly Aerospace)

The Mission 1 lander is scheduled to spend 25 days in Earth orbit before its trans-lunar injection burn and four-day transit to the Moon. After lunar orbit insertion, the spacecraft will orbit the Moon for 16 days before its one-hour descent and landing process. An on-time liftoff on Jan. 15 will see the lander reach lunar orbit in mid-February and land early in the first week of March.

The lander is set to spend one lunar day (14 Earth days) operating on the surface, including a few hours during lunar night. If all goes as planned, the ten experiments onboard will work on the lunar surface during this time. Various NASA centers, universities, and corporations sponsor these experiments.

The Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) is designed to observe the solar wind and its interaction with Earth’s magnetic field. Its vantage point will allow it to observe and provide the first global images of the edge of Earth’s magnetic field. LEXI is sponsored by Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

The LEXI instrument being packed at Boston University. (Credit: Michael Spencer/Boston University)

GSFC also sponsors the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), which is being conducted in cooperation with the Italian Space Agency. LuGRE is designed to receive and track GPS and Galileo signals during Blue Ghost’s flight to the Moon and after landing on the lunar surface. This experiment may lead to the use of Global Navigation Satellite System navigation and timing signals during lunar missions.

NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed the Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) experiment. This instrument uses stereo imaging to observe rocket plumes from Blue Ghost’s thrusters on the lunar regolith during landing. The high-resolution stereo images are intended to help measure lunar regolith erosion during landing events, which could become important as larger payloads are landed.

The Southwest Research Institute’s Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder measures electric and magnetic fields on the Moon. These measurements are intended to characterize the structure and composition of the Moon’s mantle, the roughly 1,350 km thick layer of rock underneath the lunar crust, with an average thickness of around 50 km.

The EDS instrument for Blue Ghost at the Kennedy Space Center. (Credit: NASA/Cory Huston)

The Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS), developed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, uses electric fields to move dust and to prevent dust buildup on surfaces. The EDS, which does not have moving parts, will be demonstrated for the first time on the lunar surface. Future applications include self-cleaning thermal radiators and glass surfaces, as dust accumulation becomes problematic for lunar and Martian missions.

Honeybee Robotics and Blue Origin have collaborated on two experiments for this mission. The Lunar PlanetVac is testing a lunar sample retrieval technology based on gas jets rather than robotic arms, while the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity will drill up to two to three meters below the lunar surface to measure heat flow.

The University of Maryland’s Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector is designed to allow for sub-millimeter range measurements of the Earth’s distance to the Moon, improving on Apollo-era measurements. Aegis Aerospace developed the Regolith Adherence Characterization instrument, which will expose various materials to the lunar regolith to measure its effects.

The Intuitive Machines IM-1 “Odysseus” tipped but operating on the lunar surface. (Credit: Intuitive Machines)

Finally, Montana State University’s Radiation Tolerant Computer, already tested in low-Earth orbit, will be tested as it passes through the Van Allen belts. Further tests will occur in the space between Earth and the Moon and on the lunar surface. For Mission 1, the total dry mass of the lander and its payloads is 490 kg, while the total mission mass, including propellants, is 1,517 kg.

The “Ghost Riders In The Sky” mission aims to become the first United States lunar lander to successfully conduct a nominal, upright landing on the Moon’s surface since the December 1972 Apollo 17 mission. Two previous CLPS missions failed to do this: Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One did not reach the Moon, and Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 broke a landing leg and tipped 30 degrees, though it otherwise had a successful mission on the lunar surface.

The HAKUTO-R Resilience lander and Tenacious rover before flight. (Credit: ispace)

HAKUTO-R

The Japanese company ispace developed the HAKUTO-R lander to fly payloads to the lunar surface as part of its business plan to sell transportation and other services related to the Moon. The company was a spinoff of engineer Andrew Barton’s effort to win the Google Lunar X Prize, with Japanese members of Barton’s White Label Space continuing an effort to land a private mission to the Moon.

“Hakuto” is Japanese for “white rabbit,” with the R in the lander’s name standing for “reboot.” Massing around 1,000 kg, the lander is a boxy structure sporting fixed landing legs. It is just over two meters tall and two and a half meters wide, and its dry mass (without fuel) is 340 kg. It is designed to house various payloads, including a micro rover.

HAKUTO-R’s first mission, Mission 1, was the company’s first effort to land on the Moon and the first Japanese spacecraft to attempt a lunar landing. Mission 1 was launched successfully aboard a Falcon 9 on Dec. 11, 2022, and the spacecraft reached lunar orbit in March 2023 after taking a fuel-conserving route to Earth’s natural satellite.

Image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the HAKUTO-R Mission 1 crash site. (Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)

Mission 1 attempted to land at Atlas Crater in the Mare Frigoris basin on the lunar near side on April 25, 2023, but failed after the onboard computer incorrectly marked altimeter data as faulty and ignored it. The lander hovered five kilometers over the surface before running out of fuel near Atlas Crater.

Mission 1 was the first Japanese lander to attempt a soft landing on the lunar surface. The SLIM mission, developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, successfully soft-landed on the Moon on Jan. 19, 2024, though it tipped on its nose during the landing. This mission made Japan the fifth nation to land a spacecraft on the Moon.

HAKUTO-R Mission 2

After Mission 1’s failure, ispace worked to determine the cause of the failure and to refine its lander systems to prevent a recurrence. The company then started building a new HAKUTO-R lander named Resilience shortly after.

Infographic of the HAKUTO-R Mission 2. (Credit: space)

Resilience is scheduled to start communicating with the ground within hours of its launch and to conduct its first orbital control maneuver within one to two days after it reaches space. The lander will take a similar low-energy trajectory to the Moon that Mission 1 used, conducting a flyby of the Moon one month after launch.

The lander is scheduled to reach lunar orbit and attempt its landing around four to five months after its launch. Mission 2’s landing site, like Mission 1’s, is in the Mare Frigoris volcanic basin on the lunar near side, south of the lunar north polar region. The specific landing site is at 60.5 degrees north latitude and 4.6 degrees west longitude, in the middle of the basin, allowing for continuous communications with Earth.

Resilience is carrying a five-kilogram micro rover called Tenacious. This rover was designed and built by ispace in its Luxembourg facilities, and the Luxembourg Space Agency co-funded it. The Luxembourg National Space Programme, LuxIMPULSE, received funding from a European Space Agency contract.

Infographic showing the TENACIOUS rover and its objectives. (Credit: ispace)

NASA is also involved in Mission 2, as the rover contains a soil scoop to collect lunar regolith. Ownership of this regolith will be transferred to NASA in situ. The rover also contains an artwork by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg called “Moonhouse.” The lander itself will take the micro rover and three other experiments to the surface along with a commemorative plaque.

Takasago Thermal Engineering Company developed water electrolyzer equipment to fly on the lander, while the Euglena Company is flying a self-contained module for food production experiments. The National Central University of Taiwan is flying a deep space radiation probe, and Bandai Namco is flying a “Charter of the Universal Century” commemorative plaque.

Mission 2’s motto is “Never Quit the Lunar Quest,” and ispace is planning additional landing missions to the Moon with greater frequency in the coming years, starting with Mission 3. Firefly intends to fly Blue Ghost missions regularly, with three CLPS task orders for landing missions already planned. The second Blue Ghost mission, scheduled for 2026, is set to land on the far side of the Moon, while the third Blue Ghost flight, in 2028, will land in the Gruithuisen Domes region.

Artist’s impression of the Firefly Blue Ghost lander and Elytra space tug during a future mission. (Credit: Firefly Aerospace)

As the commercial sector expands its robotic lunar landing activities in cooperation with government agencies, it faces technical and budgetary challenges. The canceled VIPER rover has been offered to the commercial sector, while companies that have flown missions to the Moon are learning from the technical issues encountered by their spacecraft.

Firefly is hoping to succeed with its first-ever lunar mission, while ispace is making another attempt to land on the lunar surface. Their success or failure likely will impact future landing timelines for the companies and the timely availability of transportation services to the lunar surface for space agencies, research institutes, and corporations eager to send payloads to the Moon.

(Lead image: The Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander prior to payload fairing encapsulation. Credit: Firefly Aerospace)

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