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The space double mission is scheduled to take place early Wednesday morning — two lunar missions for the price of one rocket launch.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander from Japan’s Ispace.
When is the presentation and how can I watch it?
The launch is scheduled for Wednesday at 1:11 a.m. ET. Forecasts predict a 90 percent chance of favorable weather.
SpaceX will provide coverage of the launch on the X social media platform starting approximately one hour prior to liftoff, or approximately 12:10 a.m. At 12:30 p.m., NASA will launch a live video feed about Blue Ghost and the cargo it carries for the agency, which you can watch in the video player above. Ispace will provide a broadcast of its Resilience lander in English and Japanese starting at 00:20
If needed, a backup launch time is available on Thursday at 1:09 a.m., although the weather is less favorable.
Why do two moon landers share one rocket?
This is the result of haphazard planning by SpaceX, not something planned by Firefly or Ispace.
Firefly bought a Falcon 9 launch to send its Blue Ghost lander to the moon. At the same time, Ispace, in order to save on mission costs, asked SpaceX to rideshare as a secondary payload on a rocket that was headed roughly in the right direction to get its Resilience lander to the moon. It turned out to be the way of the Blue Spirit.
“It was a simple matter of putting them together,” said Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA’s science missions at SpaceX, during a news conference Tuesday.
After the Falcon 9 rocket reaches orbit, the second stage will reactivate for a minute to deploy Blue Ghost into an elliptical orbit around Earth approximately one hour after launch. Then the rocket stage will fire once more, for just one second, to adjust the orbit for Resilience development about 1.5 hours after launch.
What are Firefly and Blue Ghost?
Firefly Aerospace is one of the new space companies that have emerged in the last few years. It has developed and launched the small Alpha rocket several times. In 2023, Firefly demonstrated that it could prepare and launch a payload for the United States Space Force within days — a capability the Defense Department wants to develop so it can quickly replace satellites that come under attack.
Blue Ghost — named after a species of firefly — is a robotic lander developed by Firefly to carry scientific instruments and other payloads to the lunar surface.
This mission goes to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed by lava that filled and solidified inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is located in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the Moon.
NASA will pay Firefly $101.5 million if it lands 10 payloads on the lunar surface, and a little less if it fails completely. NASA’s payload includes a drill to measure heat flow from the Moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.
The lander will operate for about 14 days — the length of a lunar day — until darkness descends on the landing site.
What are Ispace and Resilience?
This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a commercial lander on the surface of the Moon. Its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander attempted to land near the Atlas Crater on the near side of the Moon. But the landing software was confused when it passed over the rim of the crater, which is two miles higher than the surrounding terrain. The craft ended up hovering well above the ground after it thought it had landed, then crashed when it ran out of propellant.
Resilience — also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander — is essentially the same design as the Mission 1 spacecraft, but with different payloads. Ispace officials said they are confident the bugs that led to the 2023 crash have been fixed.
Payloads on Resilience include a water electrolysis experiment, which separates hydrogen and oxygen molecules, from the Takasago Thermal Engineering Company in Japan, and a small rover called Tenacious developed and built by Ispace’s European subsidiary.
Although this is not a NASA mission, it will collect two soil samples — one picked up by the rover and the other just soil that settles on the landing pads — and sell them to the agency for $5,000 each.
The transactions have no scientific value because the samples will remain on the moon. Rather, they should help reinforce the United States government’s position that while no nation on Earth can claim sovereignty over the moon or other parts of the solar system under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, nations and companies can own and profit from what they extract from the moon .
Resilience and Tenacious are also designed to work for one lunar day or 14 Earth days.
Which mission will reach the moon first?
Blue Ghost is scheduled to be the first to reach the Moon on March 2. It will orbit Earth for the first 25 days while the company powers up and checks the spacecraft’s systems, before embarking on a four-day journey to the moon. It will then orbit the moon for 16 days before attempting to land, 45 days after launch.
The drag will take a longer, winding path that uses less energy and propellant, gradually stretching its elliptical orbit until the farthest point of the orbit reaches the far side of the Moon. As a secondary payload on the Falcon 9, it will have to perform a lunar flyby to get into the correct position to be captured in lunar orbit.
The vehicle should land on the plain of Mare Frigoris about four to five months after launch.
Both Blue Ghost and Resilience could be beaten by Houston-based Intuitive Machines’ spacecraft, which is not due to launch until late February. Despite the later start, it will take a direct, faster route to the Moon.
Intuitive Machines placed Odysseus, its first lander, on the moon during a NASA-sponsored trip last year. It still successfully contacted Earth despite the tumbling.
Why are private companies landing on the moon?
By hiring private companies, NASA hopes to send more devices to the moon at a lower cost to conduct experiments and test new technologies. Another goal of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS, is to start a commercial industry there that would otherwise not have developed.
NASA officials expect setbacks along the way, and that’s what happened. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology’s first CLPS mission suffered a catastrophic propulsion failure shortly after launch and never got close to the Moon. The capsize of Intuitive Machine’s second lander during the second CLPS mission prevented the science instruments on board from collecting the data they sent for measurement.
Ispace’s American subsidiary is working with Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the CLPS mission, which is scheduled to launch next year.
