by The “Blue Ghost” of Firefly Aerospace fell from the lunar circuit and fell into a top dipdown from rockets early Sunday, which drives the first completely successful moon landing through a commercially built and operated robot spaceship.
A dramatic photo that shines back from a camera on the Blue Ghost Lander shows the shadow of the spacecraft on the moon shortly after the touchdown with the earth in the room above the lunar horizon. / Credit: Firefly Aerospace
The stool landed fired in a circular 62 miles high orbit above the other side of the moon at 2:31 am.
The 6.6 foot high lander loosened the next 52 minutes before the use of its main engine and eight smaller reaction control system or RCS engines to reduce its speed of around 3,800 miles per hour to just 90 miles per hour, while moving in position over the landing site.
After the autonomous analysis of the boulder below for boulders, hanging and other dangers, the blue spirit rose with the performance of its eight reaction control system. The jets pulsed as needed to control the speed and orientation before the vehicle slowed down to only 2.2 miles per hour in the last 30 foot or so.
Firefly Aerospace employees and family members, who were described together as “fireflies”, observed telemetry stream on a large monitor near the Austin, Texas, headquarters and mission control center, undoubtedly approached the edges of their seats when the 11.5 feet wide spaceship approached.
“Eleven meters high,” said a flight controller at Firefly Mission Control Audio Loop. A moment later and surface contact sensors closed on the shock-absorbing lands of Blue Ghost that they were on the surface of the moon.
“Current engine falling,” checked a flight controller.
“Power is nominal, the vehicle invites (with its solar cells),” someone else interfered.
“IMU (inertia measuring unit) reports the gravity of the moon level and is stable,” said another controller and prompted the start of the applause of spectators.
Will Coogan, the chief engineer, then came with the official results: “They all found the landing! We are on the moon!”
The Blue Ghost Landing sequence. / Credit: Firefly Aerospace
The gathered fireflies immediately broke out into cheers, hugs and rough applause. A few minutes later, “re -gaber became great again”. The hats were distributed.
“Firefly successfully reached the moon in an upright, stable state and was the first trading company to complete a completely successful moon landing,” said Brigette Oakes, Vice President of Firefly.
Apollo 11 Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin said in a post on the social media platform X: “” Contact light, engine stop! “Congratulations, the aerospace of the Blue Ghosts today successful moon landing for Mission 1 of Mission 1!
Firefly Aerospace employees and family members cheer and welcome the successful landing of the Blue Ghost Lunar Lander. / Credit: NASA/ Firefly Aerospace
Started on January 15th, The landing was coordinated with the beginning of a two -week moon day. The solar -powered Blue Ghost will carry out 10 experiments sponsored by NASA while sunlight is available. If everything goes well, for a few hours on the moon night with a stored battery power. After that it will be silent.
“A long time ago in a blue moon blue moon, this type of moonlander landed billions of dollars and countries (you) on the moon,” Jason Kim, CEO from Firefly, told CBS News in an interview before the start.
“This is Firefly Aerospace, which ends up on the cost of a fixed price contract on the moon and does this with the latest commercial technology,” he said. “Just like Simone Biles, landing at the Olympic Games, we will do the same for the state of Texas, for America and for the world.”
For Ray Allensworth, program director of space vehicles at Firefly, the moon will never look the same.
“We have all dreamed so far that they have been stir -up for the (moon) and only imagine what it will be there,” she said. “But now you know it is there, and that’s a completely different feeling. So, yes, the next full moon, I’ll just not sleep. I’ll just starve it all night.”
NASA agreed to pay Firefly Aerospace $ 101 million for the scientific instruments and technology-demonstrations sponsored by agencies in the amount of Agency that were built for $ 44 million, as part of the agency (CLPS) of the agency (CLPS) of the agency.
The Blue Ghost Lander in a clean room before the start. / Credit: Firefly Aerospace
The CLPS program aims to encourage the private industry to start the payload of agencies to the moon in order to collect the necessary science and engineering data before Artemis -astronauts later start working on the surface near the moon -south poles.
“Before we can send our people back to the moon, we send a lot of science and a lot of technology in advance to prepare for them,” said Nicky Fox, director of space science at NASA headquarters.
“We have learned so many lessons in the Apollo era, and the technological and scientific demonstrations on board Firefly’s Blue Ghost become in our ability not only to discover more science, but also to secure the safety of our spatial vehicle instruments and, above all, the safety of our astronauts.”
Firefly’s instruments include three to examine how landing carriers disrupt the moon floor, how fine -grained dust particles adhere to space surfaces and whether electrodynamic techniques will function in the moon environment to remove the accumulated contamination.
A drill is drilled into the surface below the blue mind to measure the soil temperatures at different depths, while a new type of sample collection system tries to literally transform the surface particles into a detection device, which is dispensed with the need for robot arm access systems.
A radiation-tolerant computer is tested, another instrument will try to process GPS navigation satellite data from the earth, a retrorf-sector serves as a positioning goal for earth-based lasers, and another instrument contains X-ray images that show interactions between the sun wind and the magnetic field of the earth.
Together with her initial Blue Ghost Mission, Firefly holds a CLPS contract of $ 130 million for a second flight in 2026, on the other side of the moon with a Blue Ghost Lander and an orbital spaceship called Elytra. Another CLPS contract worth 179 million US dollars contributes to paying a Blue Ghost Lander, a Rover and another orbiter.
“One day we will get there about the commercial aspects of the moon,” said Kim. “There will be a lot of business plans that can be borne and grow. It is a great place to often test new missions to maintain life in space, and it is also a springboard for Mars.”
The impression of an artist from the Blue Spirit on the surface of the moon. / Credit: Firefly Aerospace
Blue Ghost is the first of three commercially developed landers, all of which have been brought onto the market in the past few months and a half to reach the surface of the moon.
Another moonlander, a spaceship called “Resilience”, which was built by Ispace in Tokyo, was a ride on board the Blue Ghost on board the same Falcon 9 rocket last January. The company sent its first lander to the moon last year, but it fell to the surface After the course of the fuel due to a software error.
The correspondingly named resilience led a different path to the moon as Blue Ghost, a low -energy trajectory that used the gravity of the moon level to achieve the desired parentage conversion for a landing attempt in May.
Another moonland, built by Intuitive machines from Houston And known as Athena, another Falcon 9 started last Wednesday and will probably land the moon on March 6. The company’s first country, Odysseus, successfully landed on the moon last year, but he could not exceed Touchdown and was not able to complete all planned research.
Athena was also largely financed by the NASA CLPS program, which agreed to pay the company 62.5 million US dollars for a demanding exercise and a mass spectrometer to the moon.
NASA awarded Nokia a “Tipping Point” contract for $ 15 million in order to enter mobile phone communication on the moon and another $ 41 million of intuitive machines for a small “hopper” that will start looking for ice inserts into a permanently shaded crater.
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