In the classic country ballad “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a cowboy receives a frightening vision. A herd of demonic cows roars through the clouds, chased by the spirits of cowpoke, who must “ride forever upon those mountains in the sky.” The horse is breathing fire. ” At 1:11 a.m. ET on January 15th, the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace, took to the skies on its own fiery horse and flew into the United States. It was the second mission to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Since the end of the Apollo program, soft landings on the moon have continued.
Over the next four weeks, the mission, called Ghost Riders in the Sky or Blue Ghost Mission 1, will see the spacecraft orbit the Earth in increasingly farther orbits. Loaded with an array of scientific instruments supplied by NASA, the Blue Ghost will race toward the moon. The mission is being flown under the U.S. space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to deliver such equipment and lunar supplies as part of the country’s ambitious Artemis moon program. Private companies are encouraged to take over.
“(The moon) is kind of a gateway to the solar system. It’s this ‘easy’ place to go and learn how to be more productive,” said Ray Allen, spacecraft program director at Firefly Aerospace. Zwarth says. “The basic science we’re collecting on these CLPS missions has real-world applications, not just to Artemis, but to interplanetary realizations.”
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Blue Ghost Mission 1 marks a new chapter for Firefly, which has never before flown anything to the moon, although it has developed and launched its own rockets. This is also a big test for CLPS, which will pay up to $2.6 billion to private companies for deliveries to the moon. NASA expects significant cost savings through the program. In February 2021, Firefly received a contract from NASA for the Blue Ghost Mission 1, which is currently valued at $101 million, the amount NASA would have spent building its own lunar lander. lower than.
“The cost of a conventional lunar lander is over $500 million. … I’ve never seen an estimate lower than that,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, who led NASA’s science mission. say. From 2016 to 2022, he served as Deputy Administrator in the Directorate General and supported the development of CLPS. “Every shot on goal is successful with a unique system with no overhead.”
NASA also hopes CLPS will increase the frequency of robotic lunar missions. Blue Ghost is the third spacecraft to launch under the CLPS flag since January 2024, with at least one more launch planned for later this year. Prior to CLPS, the last soft landing by the United States on the moon occurred during the Apollo program, which ended in 1972.
“A significant portion of NASA and the scientific community are people who have never been on the moon, or at least have never worked on it,” said Dr. Kremlin, a program scientist in NASA’s Exploration, Science, Strategy and Integration Directorate, who worked on the moon. says face scientist Ryan Watkins. office. “It’s really exciting to finally have the opportunity to get on the ground and answer these questions in the field.”
But NASA is allowing private companies to design and operate their own lunar landers in exchange for lower costs and faster turnaround times. This is a trade-off that ultimately increases the likelihood that the CLPS mission will fail. From the beginning of the program, NASA leaders, including Zurbuchen, have emphasized that early CLPS missions had a roughly 50-50 chance of success.
As expected, the program has had mixed results so far. Last January, the Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic launched a lunar lander carrying a variety of NASA and non-NASA payloads, but the spacecraft experienced a serious anomaly shortly after liftoff. Then, the following month, a robotic lander built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines flew a CLPS mission to the moon’s south pole region. Although the spacecraft survived the descent, one of its legs broke during landing, causing the lander to partially topple over, a first for commercial lunar exploration.
“We hope it (CLPS) works, but this is an experiment and we don’t know if it will work,” said Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the nonprofit Planetary Society.
At approximately 2 meters high and 3.5 meters wide, it’s about the same size as two Volkswagen Beetles parked side by side. Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander is designed to carry payloads of up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds) to the lunar surface. In Blue Ghost Mission 1, the lander is flying 10 NASA instruments. This is the largest number of government payloads ever launched on a single CLPS mission.
For Firefly’s army of engineers, many of whom are still in their 20s, building Blue Ghost is both a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a challenge. “It’s kind of shocking,” Allensworth says. “It’s really special, but also scary at times because none of us have ever built a lunar module before.”
Perhaps no system onboard Blue Ghost exemplifies this challenge more than the rocket engines responsible for placing the lander on the moon’s surface. Shortly after completing a major overhaul of Blue Ghost’s design in October 2021, Firefly engineers needed to build a unique Reaction Control System (RCS) thruster to control the spacecraft’s orientation and stabilize its position. I noticed that there is. In August 2024, less than three years after work began, a team led by engineer Ryan Cole completed flight qualification of the engine.
“Conventional wisdom would say, ‘You can’t build an RCS engine in three years,'” Cole says. “But none of us had it in our heads that it wasn’t possible.”
Blue Ghost now faces a journey of about six weeks to put these engines to the ultimate test. After orbiting Earth for 25 days, the lander will fly towards the moon over a four-day period. It will then spend another 16 days in lunar orbit, before attempting to land in early March. Coincidentally, the Blue Ghost isn’t the only spacecraft traveling to the moon. The lander shared a launch with Hakuto-R Mission 2, a lunar lander and rover developed by Japan’s ispace, but its first lunar landing will be in April 2023, just a few kilometers above the lunar surface. We’re screwed.
At the request of NASA, Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeting a landing site on Mare Crisium. Mare Crisium is a dark basin about 560 kilometers (350 miles) in diameter that was formed long ago when lunar lava filled then-fresh impact craters. This region is thought to better represent the average composition of the Moon than the Apollo landing sites. The Blue Ghost’s goal is to remain there for 14 days, including up to five hours of night during the long, brutally cold months.
Some of Blue Ghost’s payloads demonstrate new technologies. As an example, Blue Ghost is flying equipment to test whether a lunar lander can detect and use signals from GPS satellites orbiting Earth. Another payload will use electric fields to try to knock lunar dust – small, jagged particles that are terrifying to astronauts and hardware alike – off the surface.
Other instruments will study the moon’s interior. One of them, called LISTER (Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity), is designed to measure how heat leaves the Moon, which is similar to our natural satellite. It should help elucidate the deep structure and its evolution over the years. The device has a thermometer attached to the tip of the rover and uses compressed gas to excavate up to 3 meters of lunar soil. If successful, LISTER will set a record for the deepest depth ever drilled into the lunar surface.
“Gas in a vacuum is like a grenade. … So we thought, ‘Why not dig a deep hole with gas?'” said the Blue Origin-owned company. Chris Szakny, Vice President of Exploration Systems, said. Lister. “It’s like pointing a garden hose at the soil to make a trench.”
Regardless of what happens in Blue Ghost Mission 1, whether it lands alone or in groups on the moon, experts will be interviewed scientific american At this point, many believe that the CLPS initiative will probably last until President-elect Donald Trump’s second term, when he takes office on January 20th. Like Artemis overall, CLPS was established during the first Trump administration and continued under the Biden administration. . This is the first time since Apollo that America’s ambitious moon program has survived a presidential transition intact.
“I believe that this launch itself should not change the program, no matter what[the outcome]is,” Zurbuchen said. “If everything worked out the way we wanted, we’d be more excited. … If it didn’t work out, I’d just basically say, ‘Hey, I We never said you needed any of them to be successful. ”
“(CLPS) is not a national standard program,” Dreier added. “In some ways, if it works, it creates fundamentally new capabilities.”
However, we may see further changes in Artemis’ structure this time around. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, an enthusiastic supporter of the Mars-first human space exploration strategy, is a key supporter of President Trump’s 2024 election campaign and has significant input into the incoming administration’s policy agenda. have influence. Last December, Ars Technica reported that President Trump’s transition team has announced plans for Artemis and NASA, including the possibility of canceling the space agency’s expensive Space Launch System rocket, the linchpin of the current Artemis program. He suggested that he is considering major changes to the system.
However, such a proposal would have to pass Congress, which has repeatedly said it prefers a month-to-month strategy consistent with Artemis’ current status. Major changes also risk disrupting existing agreements with commercial companies and other countries’ space agencies. “You know, I’m frustrated that (Artemis) doesn’t optimize the results. It’s optimized for politics. But ultimately you have to work with politics,” Dreier said. say. “We should not abandon the coalition we worked so hard to build like this.”
