Firefly Aerospace successfully landed its first robotic spacecraft on the moon on Sunday in partnership with NASA, marking the second time a commercial lander has pulled off the feat as more companies attempt to reach the lunar surface ahead of future human landings.
After journeying to the moon since its launch on January 15, 2025, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander touched down at 3:34 a.m. New York time. The spacecraft is carrying 10 tools and experiments built by NASA, including a drill that will bury itself into the lunar soil to test the moon’s temperature.
The maneuver is a major milestone for the startup Firefly, a Texas-based rocket and spacecraft maker, and the second by a commercial company after Houston-based Intuitive Machines Inc. landed a robotic spacecraft intact on the lunar surface in 2024. The Intuitive Machines lander tipped over during its touchdown, forcing an early end to the mission, but Blue Ghost appeared to land upright as intended.
Blue Ghost landed in a large basin on the moon’s near side, called Mare Crisium. If all goes well, the lander’s mission is slated to last as long as two weeks — roughly the length of one lunar day.
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Firefly’s mission is partially funded by NASA as part of the agency’s renewed efforts to put humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. NASA has financed the private development of robotic landers by several companies, including Firefly, to transport experiments and learn more about the moon’s south pole before future astronauts attempt to land there.
“I could see us launching and landing on the moon every year and starting to look into creating an ecosystem on the moon,” Firefly Chief Executive Officer Jason Kim said in an interview with Bloomberg ahead of the landing attempt.
Blue Ghost is one of three lunar landers aiming to touch down on the moon in the next two months. Intuitive Machines will make an attempt on its second lander on March 6, while Japanese firm Ispace is poised to land its craft in April, after its first one crashed into the moon in 2023.
So far, NASA’s effort to fund commercial moon landers has had mixed results.
An agency-funded lander built by Astrobotic Technology Inc., a Pittsburgh-based startup, suffered a tank leak after launch that prevented it from landing on the moon. Other companies have gone bankrupt or pulled out of their partnerships with NASA, citing costs and technical difficulties.
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