Mark Megahan
Blue Ghost lunar lander “touched down on the moon’s near side” around 3:34 a.m. ET on Sunday, March 2. Not only did it land, it’s properly positioned, on target and transmitting data. That’s a huge success for Firefly Aerospace of Texas. They’re only the second “private-sector company” to pull it off.
Blue Ghost lands safely
The Blue Ghost lunar lander doesn’t have a crew onboard. Not even any tardigrades. An Israeli team had some of those aboard when their lander crashed in August of 2022.
Those critters are tough enough to survive both the impact and the airless environment and should still be there now.
CNN points out that “a parade of lunar landers developed by the private-sector have launched this year, part of a convoy of robotic spacecraft that NASA and its partner agencies hope will pave the way for astronauts to return to the moon’s surface later this decade.”
Blue Ghost fared better than most. NASA’s latest effort also made it to the moon, a few days later. Mission Control isn’t saying much other than that because it apparently crashed, isn’t positioned properly and ended up a cripple.
Success for Blue Ghost was “far from guaranteed.” The only other private company to land a capsule on the moon is also based in Texas.
Intuitive Machines holds the record of “first private-sector company to soft-land a vehicle on the moon.” The average success rate is half of all the attempts “have ended in failure.”
Stable and upright
Firefly CEO Jason Kim was grinning from ear-to-ear as they broke out the Champaign. Blue Ghost, he announced, was “stable and upright” after landing. Hooray! The team cheered. “Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed.” He was especially happy that they “got some moon dust on our boots.” That means something.
It’s sitting up there where we can see it with a really, really good telescope, “on the far eastern edge of the moon’s visible face just north of the equator.” They call that the Sea of Crises.
Blue Ghost has special sensors on each of its four feet. They’re “designed to immediately confirm when they had touched lunar soil.” There was only one minor snag to the entire mission.
“When the spacecraft touched down, the webcast showed only three of the vehicle’s four landing legs confirmed contact.” That’s okay, it’s still stable. It had to make two “hazard avoidance” maneuvers “during its final descent that included boulders and rocks.”
Ray Allensworth, the program director for Blue Ghost, says they’re not too worried about that. First off, they aren’t sure the reading is accurate. There’s a good chance “that the software just ignored — threw the data out — from that sensor because maybe it tripped early. I’m not 100% sure.”
They’ll go back and look at the data to be sure but it’s not crucial. “It is abundantly clear that Blue Ghost is sitting upright. What’s more, all signs so far point to the fact that Blue Ghost touched down within its expected 330-foot target.“
