"Y'all stuck the landing. We're on the moon," Will Coogan, the lander's chief engineer, told the control room in suburban Austin after confirming the 330-pound craft was safely on the surface.
The feat makes Firefly Aerospace the first private space firm to achieve a fully successful moon landing. Another Texas company's craft made it to the moon last year but tipped over after landing. Other recent attempts have crashed on the surface or failed before reaching the moon.
The feat marks the end of Blue Ghost's 45-day journey and the beginning of its mission to collect data about the moon using 10 scientific instruments it's carrying for NASA, including one from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
A half hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface. The first was a selfie obscured by the sun's glare. The second shot included Earth, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space.
Blue Ghost could soon have company. It was one of three lunar landers headed to the moon at the same time — a first. Resilience, a lander from Tokyo-based ispace, flew to space with Blue Ghost aboard the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15. And Houston-based Intuitive Machines' Athena lander launched aboard another Falcon 9 on Thursday.
Having multiple spacecraft headed to the moon is "a proof point that Texas is the capital of lunar landers right now," said Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO.
Initial data showed Blue Ghost touched down within its 100-meter landing target next to the Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in the Mare Crisium, a large basin on the near side of the moon.
'We're on the moon'
Firefly hosted a late-night watch party at a Cedar Park concert venue where hundreds of employees and guests watched a livestream of the landing.
Sitting at tables with glowing moon centerpieces or standing under oak trees, they clapped and shouted as the mission, dubbed "Ghost Riders in the Sky," passed each milestone toward its landing.
Kevin Scholtes, a future systems architect at Firefly who's worked on the program since it began, said watching Blue Ghost approaching its landing was "a weird combination of incredibly satisfying and incredibly terrifying."
Its descent appeared to be effortless.
While flying 62 miles above the moon about an hour before touchdown, Blue Ghost fired its engines to begin the descent. For the next 50 minutes the craft coasted to an altitude of about 12 miles above the moon.
Cheers rang out when Firefly controllers made the decision to land. Another engine burn slowed it from more than 3,800 mph to about 90 mph as it continued to 1,640 feet above the moon. Finally, at about 2 mph, the craft made its final maneuvers and touched down.
A graphic on Firefly's live feed showed Blue Ghost's orientation, altitude and airspeed. Green circles representing the craft's landing legs turned blue as they touched the surface.
"Three contact sensors tripped, engine shutdown confirmed," mission control said.
When controllers announced "lunar gravity and it is stable," applause and cheers began to build.
When Coogan said "we're on the moon," the crowd went wild.
'Moon dust on our boots'
"How about them Fireflies?" Kim said. That's what the company calls its workers.
He said all of those at mission control "were fired up" — after the landing.
"They were just pent up, holding it all in, because they were calm and collected and cool the whole time. Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed," Kim said. "And then after we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up. We got some moon dust on our boots."
Having the lander stable and upright is critical to its successful operation.
Last year, Intuitive Machines' moon lander, Odysseus, tipped over on touchdown, hindering its scientific work.
Janet Petro, NASA's acting administrator, said Blue Ghost and the other landers enroute or being planned will help keep America at the forefront of space exploration.
"I think this administration really wants to keep America first, and I think the way that we keep America first is by dominating in all the domains of space," she said.
The $93.3 million Blue Ghost mission is part of NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon.
Known as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Providers initiative, the $2.6 billion program has contracted with several U.S. space companies to deliver science and technology payloads to various places on the moon over eight missions. It's intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while learning more about the moon before astronauts show up later this decade.
"This initiative really helped Firefly evolve from a rocket company to an end-to-end responsive space company that does launch, land and orbit, and we're going to continue doing those missions," Kim said.
14 Days
On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back striking pictures of its home planet. The lander's photography continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, too, transmitting detailed shots of the moon's gray pockmarked surface.
With its journey to the moon completed, the hard work of keeping the craft healthy as it performs its NASA experiments now begins.
"This next 14 days is going to be really challenging, and we're going to work to provide all the science data from all the payloads," Kim said. "But I'm confident that the team will get through it, and this is positioning Firefly to continue to provide value to the cislunar economy."
The instruments it carries will collect data about the moon's surface, geophysical characteristics and the interactions with solar winds and Earth's magnetic field.
SwRI's $4.8 million Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder will measure electric and magnetic fields from solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere to help scientists study electrical conductivity of the moon's interior.
Blue Ghost's other instruments come from Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin; the University of Maryland; Aegis Aerospace; Montana State University; Boston University; Johns Hopkins University, the Italian Space Agency and several NASA research centers.
The lander's payloads are expected to operate on the moon's surface for one lunar day, about 14 Earth days, before Blue Ghost loses its solar power in the extreme dark and cold of lunar night. The craft will remain on the moon after its batteries are depleted.
The NASA deal, penned in 2021, originally called for the mission to launch in 2023. It's one of four NASA such missions Firefly is working on.
© 2025 the San Antonio Express-News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
