Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeting landing no sooner than 3:34 am US Eastern time (0834 GMT) on Sunday, aiming for a site near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in Mare Crisium on the Moon’s northeastern near side.
Nicknamed “Ghost Riders in the Sky,“ the mission comes just over a year after the first-ever commercial lunar landing and is part of a NASA partnership with industry to cut costs and support Artemis, the program aiming to return astronauts to the Moon.
Blue Ghost carries ten instruments, including a lunar soil analyzer, a radiation-tolerant computer and an experiment testing the feasibility of using the existing global satellite navigation system to navigate the Moon.
On March 16, it will record a lunar sunset, offering insights into how dust levitates above the surface under solar influence -- creating the mysterious lunar horizon glow first documented by Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.
Blue Ghost’s arrival will be followed on March 6 by Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission, featuring its lander Athena.
However, the success was tempered by a mishap: the lander came down too fast, tipped over on impact, leaving it unable to generate enough solar power and cutting the mission short.
Athena launched on Wednesday aboard a SpaceX rocket, taking a more direct route toward Mons Mouton -- the southernmost lunar landing site ever attempted.
NASA’s private Moon fleet
Instead, spacecraft must rely on precisely controlled thruster burns to slow their descent.
Now, the United States is working to make private lunar missions routine through NASA’s $2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
The missions come at a delicate moment for NASA, amid speculation that it may scale back or even cancel its Artemis lunar program in favor of prioritizing Mars exploration -- a key goal of both President Donald Trump and his close advisor, SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
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