SpaceX's moon launch marks another win for private space companies

In the early morning hours of Jan. 15, a Blue Origin Falcon 9 lifted off from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, bearing not one but two expeditions to the moon.

Firefly, an American company that is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, is mounting its first lunar landing attempt. Its lander is called Blue Ghost and the mission is designated Ghost Riders in the Sky. 

Blue Ghost will take 45 days to voyage to the moon. The plan is to land in the Mare Crisium, northeast of the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed, and spend an entire lunar day of 14 Earth days conducting experiments and taking images.

Blue Ghost’s instruments include:

• Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity- Honeybee Robotics (Blue Origin)
• Lunar PlanetVac- Honeybee Robotics (Blue Origin)
• Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector- University of Maryland
• Regolith Adherence Characterization- Aegis Aerospace
• Radiation Tolerant Computer- Montana State University
• Electrodynamic Dust Shield- NASA Kennedy Space Center
• Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager- Boston University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University
• Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder- Southwest Research Institute
• Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment- Italian Space Agency, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies- NASA Langley Research Center

A Japanese company called iSpace is launching its second lunar landing attempt, the first having failed in April 2023. The company will attempt to touch down on the lunar surface with a tiny lander dubbed Resilience, which will then deploy a tiny rover called Tenacious. 

The probe will spend 45 days voyaging to the moon and will spend four to five months in lunar orbit before attempting a landing. While Resilience conducts experiments, Tenacious will collect lunar soil samples for later retrieval.

Resilience’s payloads include:

• From artist Mikael Genberg, a small red house known as the “Moonhouse,”
• Water electrolyzer equipment from Takasago Thermal Engineering Company
• A self-contained module for food production experiments from Euglena Company
• A deep space radiation probe developed by the Department of Space Science and Engineering, National Central University, Taiwan
• A commemorative alloy plate modeled after “Charter of the Universal Century” and developed by Bandai Namco Research Institute, Inc

With the successful launch of these two separate expeditions to the lunar surface, the proof that they can succeed will consist of successful landings. Thus far, the record of attempted landings by private companies has been spotty at best.

As hitherto mentioned, the first attempt at a lunar landing by iSpace met with failure. Firefly’s Blue Ghost, as part of CLPS, is following two attempts under that program, one by Astrobotic Technology, which met with failure, and the other by Intuitive Machines, which achieved partial success. A successful landing by either iSpace or Firefly or both would go a long way toward proving the model of private exploration of the moon.

Intuitive Machines is scheduled to make a second moon landing attempt in February and Astrobotic later in 2025. iSpace will make a third attempt in 2026 as part of the CLPS program.

The model that relies on private companies to send robotic probes to the lunar surface would not be viable were it not for the revolution in space launch technology started by SpaceX. While SpaceX is not the sole new launch company, it has set the pace for reducing the cost and increasing the reliability of space launches. 

Companies like Rocket Lab have started to compete with Elon Musk’s company. The Blue Origin New Glenn, now in development, will provide more capability.

However, as mentioned previously, the SpaceX Starship, which promises to surpass all existing or soon-to-exist launch vehicles, is in development. Starship is Elon Musk’s instrument to fulfill his dream of establishing a settlement on Mars. A version of the massive rocket will land Americans back on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

CLPS is likely to have been concluded by the time a lunar base is established as a result of the Artemis program. Both human and robotic explorers will fan out across the lunar surface from that first outpost on another world.

Still, probes sent to the moon by companies such as Firefly, Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic and others will be remembered in history as the opening phase of reclaiming the moon as a venue of human activity for the betterment of all humankind.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.