Two private landers headed to the moon to help future NASA astronauts

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday morning, sending two private lunar landers into orbit to support NASA's future Artemis landing crews. The Blue Ghost and Resilience landers, built by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Japan's iSpace Aerospace Corporation respectively, are designed to provide data about the lunar environment and test technologies to help one day return astronauts to the lunar surface.

SpaceX's launch and private lander contracts are the latest under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, the first phase of the Artemis lunar exploration program that will launch its first mission in April 2026 Manned mission. Following the successful separation and return to Earth after the launch of the first stage of Falcon 9, the Blue Ghost was sent into the lunar transfer orbit by the rocket's second stage approximately 65 minutes after liftoff, and elastically deployed approximately 30 minutes later.

Blue Ghost Mission 1 will now take about 45 days to travel to the moon and then aim to land near a volcanic feature within the 300-mile-wide Mare Crisis basin. There are 10 payloads from NASA-funded customers on the lander, which will conduct various environmental tests to study lunar dust, electric and magnetic fields, and satellite navigation signals.

Here's the route and mission plan for Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander.

Image: Firefly Aerospace

Resilience has a longer way to go. The lander uses a more energy-efficient gravity propulsion route and takes about 4-5 months to land on the lunar surface. Once there, it will need to deploy six commercial payloads, including radiation detectors, water electrolysis equipment, food production experiments and a camera-equipped "micro-rover" to collect lunar samples. The material collected will become the "exclusive property of NASA" for use by the Artemis program, but the agency has not determined how to retrieve the samples.

Despite hitching a ride in space with Blue Ghost, Resilience will arrive at the moon much later than Blue Ghost.

Image source: iSpace

The two private landers will have a full lunar day (approximately two weeks) to conduct research operations, and the severe cold of the lunar night is expected to render them inoperable.

"This mission exemplifies the audacious spirit of NASA's Artemis program, a program driven by scientific exploration and discovery," said NASA Associate Administrator Pam Melroy. "We Every flight we participate in is an important step in the larger picture of establishing a responsible, sustained human presence on the moon, Mars and beyond. Every demonstration of scientific instrumentation and technology brings us closer. Realizing our vision.”