Blue Ghost Mission 1

Blue Ghost Mission 1 was a robotic Moon landing mission by Firefly Aerospace that launched on January 15, 2025, and successfully soft-landed on the lunar surface on March 2, 2025, at 08:34 UTC. With this achievement, Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial company to complete a fully successful soft landing on the Moon (In February 2024, Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 became the first commercial mission to successfully soft-land on the Moon but the lander tipped to an unplanned 30 degree angle after touchdown). As part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, the mission delivered ten scientific and technological experiments to advance future human exploration under the Artemis program. Approximately 5 hours after sunset at the end of the lunar day on March 16, 2025, the solar-powered lander's batteries depleted, communications were lost, and end of the spacecraft's mission was officially declared at 23:25 UTC.

The Blue Ghost lunar lander was launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket that also carried the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander. It delivered 10 payloads to Mare Crisium, a 500-kilometer-wide (310 mi) lunar basin. Its 60-day mission aimed to analyze lunar regolith, study geophysical characteristics, and investigate interactions between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field. The lander's scientific payloads included a regolith adherence characterization experiment, a lunar retroreflector for precision distance measurements, a radiation-tolerant computer, thermal exploration probes, and more.