US firm Firefly scores its first moon landing

Firefly Aerospace succeeded in its first attempt to land on the moon with its uncrewed Blue Ghost spacecraft on Sunday, kicking off a two-week research mission as a handful of private firms compete to reach the frontlines of a global moon race.

The size of a compact car, the four-legged Blue Ghost carried 10 scientific payloads as it touched down at around 3:35am ET (0835 GMT) near an ancient volcanic vent on Mare Crisium, a large basin in the northeast corner of the moon's Earth-facing side.

Suspense and silence fell over a mission control room full of company staff inside Firefly's Austin, Texas headquarters as Blue Ghost descended toward the moon's surface at a gentle two miles per hour. Will Coogan, Firefly's Blue Ghost Chief Engineer, confirmed on a mission control live feed the spacecraft had entered lunar gravity.

"We're on the moon," Coogan declared moments later, prompting cheers in mission control.

Firefly became the second private firm to score a moon landing, though it declared itself the first company to make a "fully successful" soft landing. Houston-based Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander made a lopsided touchdown last year, landing mostly intact but dooming many of its onboard instruments.

Five nations have made successful soft landings in the past - the then-Soviet Union, the U.S., China, India and, last year, Japan. The U.S. and China are both rushing to put their astronauts on the moon later this decade, each courting allies and giving their private sectors a key role in spacecraft development.

Blue Ghost flew on a winding path over three times around Earth, totaling roughly 2.8 million miles, to get to the moon some 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Earth, reaching the surface a month and a half after launching atop a SpaceX rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The moonshot by Firefly, an upstart primarily building rockets, is one of three lunar missions actively in progress. Japan's ispace launched its second lander on the same rocket as Firefly's in January, before Intuitive Machines embarked on its second lunar mission on Wednesday.

Blue Ghost's three solar panels will power the lander's research instruments for a 14-day mission on the moon, before the frigid lunar night brings temperatures as low as minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 degrees Celsius).

Missions like Firefly's Blue Ghost represent low-budget precursor missions that will enable research into the lunar environment before the U.S. sends its astronauts there in a series of crewed missions beginning in 2027.

China, meanwhile, is making swift progress in its own moon efforts, with its robotic Chang'e lunar program and plans to put Chinese astronauts on the moon's surface by 2030. Also eyeing the moon are U.S.-aligned Japan and India, which made its first soft lunar landing in 2023.

Firefly has a $101 million contract for the Blue Ghost mission from NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which hopes to stimulate a private lunar market and make such treks lower-cost and routine.

Other countries eyeing the moon and deep space exploration have followed NASA's model for commercial spaceflight, with India investing in its private space sector while Europe funds multiple rocket launch startups.

"We're hoping to get lower-cost missions at a faster pace, and we just have proof it works," said NASA's CLPS chief Chris Culbert said. "We landed on the moon, almost perfectly."

The successful touchdown comes at a time of unease and uncertainty across the U.S. space industry, after President Donald Trump's looming shift of the U.S. space program's focus to Mars - a destination favored by SpaceX CEO and influential Trump ally Elon Musk.

Acting NASA administrator Janet Petro said at Firefly's landing event that the moon remains part of America's goal to "dominate" space.

On Blue Ghost, two onboard instruments will study the lunar soil and its subsurface temperatures in experiments by Honeybee Robotics, a firm owned by Blue Origin, which is developing its own lunar lander to send humans to the moon for NASA's Artemis program later this decade.

NASA's Langley Research Center has a stereo camera on board to analyze the lunar dirt plumes kicked up by Blue Ghost's landing engine, gathering data to help researchers predict the dusty surface material's dispersal during heavier moon missions in the future.