Cabo Cañaveral – A private lunar module that transports a drill, a vacuum and other experiments for NASA Alunizó on Sunday, adding to a series of companies that seek to boost businesses in the celestial neighbor of the Earth before the manned missions resume.
The Blue Ghost module of Firefly Aerospace descended from the lunar orbit automatically, pointing towards the slopes of an old volcanic crater in an impact basin on the northeast edge of the visible face of the moon.
The confirmation of the landing came from the company’s mission control, located near Austin, Texas, after the operation to about 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) away.
“Everyone achieved moon landing. We are on the moon, ”said Will Coogan, chief engineer of the Firefly module.
A soft and vertical position converts Firefly – a startup founded a decade ago – in the first private company to place a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or dumping. Even national projects have failed, and just five have achieved the feat: Russia, the United States, China, India and Japan.
Half an hour after the moon landing, Blue Ghost began sending images from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat affected by the Sun’s glow.
Two modules from other companies are very close to Blue Ghost, and the next one is expected to arrive later this week.
Blue Ghost – who receives that name for a rare species of US lightning – had its size and shape in its favor. The four -legged and low -height module measures 2 meters high and 3.5 meters wide, which gives additional stability, according to the company.
Dunned in mid -January from Florida, the two -meter high module took 10 experiments to the NASA. The space agency paid 101 million dollars for delivery, in addition to 44 million dollars for science and technology on board. It is the third mission under the NASA commercial delivery program, aimed at activating a lunar economy of competing private companies while the land is explored before sending astronauts at the end of this decade.
The experiments should work for two weeks, before the lunar day ends and the module goes out.
The module carries a vacuum to collect lunar soil for analysis and a drill to measure the temperature at depths up to three meters below the surface. It also includes a device to eliminate lunar abrasive dust, a plague for NASA Apollo Astronauts, which covered its space costumes and equipment.
On his way to the moon, Blue Ghost sent beautiful images of the earth. The module continued to impress once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the gray surface and full of satellite craters. At the same time, an on -board receptor tracked and acquired signs of the GPS constellations of the United States and Galileo of Europe, an encouraging step in navigation for future explorers.
Allyseed prepared the ground for a new avalanche of visitors looking for a piece of the lunar business.
Another module – a high and thin four -meter artifact built and operated by intuitive machines, based in Houston – plans to alunize Thursday. It points to the bottom of the moon, just 160 kilometers from the South Pole. That is closer to the pole than the company achieved last year with its first module, which broke a leg and overturned.
Despite the fall, the intuitive Machines module took the United States back to the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed the Apollo program in 1972.
A third module of the Japanese Ispace company will still take three months to arrive. He shared a rocket trip with Blue Ghost from Cabo Cañaveral on January 15, taking a longer and longer route. As Intuitive Machines, Ispace also tries its second to the landing. His first module crashed in 2023.
The moon is full of remains not only of Ispace, but of dozens of other failed attempts registered for several decades.
NASA wants to maintain a rhythm of two private lunar modules per year, and acknowledges that some missions will fail, Nicky Fox said, the main scientific responsible for the space agency.
Unlike the successful alunizages of the NASA Apollo program, which had billions of dollars and astronauts experts in command, private companies operate with a limited budget and robotic ships that must land on their own, said Firefly’s general director Jason Kim.
Kim said everything came out like a clock.
“We have lunar dust in the boots,” Kim said.