Blue Ghost and HAKUTO-R Take Flight

Two robotic moon landers shared a ride into space in the early morning of Wednesday, January 15th. Hours earlier, Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace in the United States, and HAKUTO-R, built by ispace of Japan, were comanifested in the fairing of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, stacked one on top of the other. Now, both landers are flying free in space. Though these two spacecraft hail from distinct backgrounds, and will take very different paths to the Moon, each bears an important role in the future of commercial space exploration.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A in Florida at 1:11 AM EST, completing a familiar-looking flight into space. The first stage booster, B1085, landed downrange on SpaceX’s drone ship Just Read The Instructions, completing its fifth flight. The first burn of the Falcon 9 upper stage placed both landers into an initial parking orbit around the Earth 8 minutes after launch.

Following a second burn of the upper stage an hour into flight, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander separated, coasting off into space. Shortly afterwards, the can-shaped structure that supported Blue Ghost during launch detached, revealing ispace’s HAKUTO-R lander beneath it. Finally, after a third burn from the upper stage, Hakuto-R separated, completing the deployment of both landers just over an hour and a half after launch.

A Tale of Two Landers

Despite sharing a rocket, the two spacecraft are the product of different circumstances, and have markedly divergent journeys ahead of them.

Texas-based Firefly Aerospace was founded in 2017 to enter the small satellite launch market. Their Alpha launch vehicle has found some early successes, and the company has since expanded into on-orbit services with their Elytra space tug. Now, Blue Ghost aims to extend their presence to the Moon in support of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. This mission, nicknamed Ghost Riders in the Sky, is the first of three missions spanning four task orders under NASA contract. Aboard the spacecraft are 10 research and technical payloads for NASA, university, and commercial customers, including technology demonstrations aiming to inform the design of future Moon landers. Firefly has advertised their intent to support annual services to the lunar surface, making their first landing attempt a prudent milestone to secure.

Blue Ghost will spend 25 days making adjustments to its phasing orbits, then burn on a 4-day transit to the Moon. After capturing into lunar orbit, the lander will spend 16 days in cislunar space before its final descent. Altogether, this puts Blue Ghost on the Moon on March 2nd, 45 days after launch. Its surface mission is set to last for 14 days, the length of daytime on the lunar surface, and end a few hours after sunset when the lander runs out of solar power.

Japan’s ispace has had a winding history, tracing its origins to the Google Lunar X-Prize. The HAKUTO-R lander has evolved into a technology demonstrator for the company, which now has offices in the United States and Europe. The company attempted their first landing in 2023 with HAKUTO-R Mission 1, but the lander failed in the final phase of descent. For Mission 2, the lander, dubbed RESILIENCE, has been built in Japan, rather than in Europe as on Mission 1. The European branch has contributed a small rover, named TENACIOUS, which will be deployed if landing is successful. While ispace-U.S. is set to develop the APEX-1.0 lander with Draper to support NASA’s CLPS initiative, HAKUTO-R is primarily meant to demonstrate landing and build experience for these later missions. HAKUTO-R is among the first private moon landers to make a second attempt at landing, so the outcome of this mission will test one of the fundamental principles of NASA’s CLPS initiative—that practice makes perfect at the Moon.

Following a similar profile to its first mission, HAKUTO-R will inject into its lunar transfer orbit just 1-2 days after launch, but will take a long, low-energy trajectory to get there. The spacecraft will take 4 months to reach the Moon and spend about 2 weeks in orbit, landing 4.5 months after launch, sometime in May or June. Since the primary objective of this flight is to land on the Moon at all, its post-landing timeline is notably subject to change.

More Landers Than Answers for CLPS

The double launch of Moon landers comes as the United States’ lunar ambitions remain suspended in uncertainty. Indicators of the incoming Trump administration’s attitudes towards NASA and Artemis have been mixed at best. However, a subtler trend in the past few months has become evident: the importance of CLPS in the near term is eroding.

The CLPS initiative was pitched as a means for NASA to encourage U.S. industry to develop commercial Moon landing capabilities, with failure an acceptable outcome as companies iterate towards success. But in addition to minor research and technology demonstration payloads, NASA had hoped to use CLPS to send important cargo to the surface in support of the Artemis campaign. The poster child of this effort was VIPER, an ice-hunting rover which would prospect for resources to be used by future astronauts. But NASA cancelled VIPER last year, shortly before its completion, in a shortsighted attempt to spare funding for other CLPS missions.

Meanwhile, NASA has continued to invest in dedicated landing systems for other lunar payloads. The Human-Class Delivery Lander will carry large crewed elements, while a new mid-sized lander will deliver logistics and power systems—use cases previously, albeit notionally, assigned to CLPS. This leaves CLPS with precious little to do, though a few high-profile science instruments, like the PRIME-1 drill, are still set for delivery at time of writing. So while NASA has stressed that it is deliberately accepting risk with the CLPS initiative, its more daring ambitions have quietly slipped elsewhere.

In the meantime, Blue Ghost and HAKUTO-R continue to chase the basic premise of CLPS: to prove whether commercial companies can learn to deliver payloads to the Moon. Since the launch, both Firefly and ispace have established contact with their spacecraft and completed initial checkouts. With these early victories secured, each team will soon turn to the challenges of translunar flight in the weeks ahead. Time will tell whether Firefly can hit the ground running with its crowded manifest, and whether ispace can turn lessons from its first failure into a success for their second chance.

Edited by Scarlet Dominik