CEDAR PARK, Texas—Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away.
These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace hope that their robotic spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, will become the second commercial mission to complete a soft landing on the Moon, following the landing of a spacecraft by Intuitive Machines last year. This is the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace, a company established in 2014 to develop a small satellite launcher.
Since then, Firefly has undergone changes in ownership, a bankruptcy, and a renaming. Recognizing that the company had to diversify to survive, Firefly executives began pursuing other business opportunities—spacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a medium-class rocket—to go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.
From a business perspective, Firefly’s foray into lunar transportation has been worth the effort. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has awarded the company three contracts to deliver experiments to the Moon’s surface. Under the first deal, NASA is paying Firefly about $101 million to transport 10 payloads to the Moon on the company’s first Blue Ghost lander.
Now, Firefly is about to find out if its lunar program is a technical success. Landing on the Moon is risky. In the last decade, the success rate for lunar landing attempts is a little above 50 percent—6-for-11—and two of the successful landers either tipped over or landed upside-down.
Jason Kim, Firefly’s CEO, is confident that Blue Ghost will work. In an interview with Ars, Kim cited the lander’s development team, design, and “robust” testing on the ground before Blue Ghost went to the launch pad as reasons for his optimism.
“At the end of the day, it’s those three things,” Kim said. “It’s the people. Are you trained up? Are they committed? Are they responsible and own it? Two, it’s the design with margin, really good designs with margin, then taking into account all the lessons learned (from other lunar missions).
