SpaceX set to carry two moon landers on one rocket (original) (raw)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set for takeoff early Wednesday will launch not one, but two spacecraft on separate missions to the moon.

The launch, scheduled for 1:11 a.m. Eastern time at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, will carry a Blue Ghost lunar lander built by the Austin-based start-up Firefly Aerospace. Also hitching a ride will be the Resilience lander from the Japanese space-tech company ispace.

The two spacecraft are part of a recent push by private companies — with funding and know-how from government organizations — to undertake robotic, uncrewed missions to explore the moon. So far, one private company, Intuitive Machines, has pulled off a moon landing, in February of last year.

NASA is counting on private space companies to do some of the technical groundwork for the space agency’s most ambitious lunar program, Artemis, which seeks to put astronauts back on the moon after a more-than-half-century absence.

The program, initiated under the first Trump administration and continued under the Biden administration, aspires to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole by mid-2027. Artemis 1 was an uncrewed mission that sent NASA’s Orion capsule around the moon and back to Earth without landing. Artemis 2, scheduled for 2026, will send astronauts on a similar mission to fly around the moon, the farthest journey for humans since Apollo 17 in 1972. Artemis 3 is the first landing of a crew.

“NASA leads the world in space exploration, and we are bringing humanity back to the moon before going on to Mars,” associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Nicola Fox said in a call with reporters Tuesday.

Wednesday marks the start of a six-day launch window, as the flight could be delayed because of weather or other factors. If this week’s launch window is missed entirely, another opportunity would be available the following month.

Unless weather or technical issues disrupts the flight plan, the rocket will deploy the two landers after clearing Earth’s atmosphere, starting with Firefly’s Blue Ghost. Then the SpaceX spacecraft will initiate another burn to a new location, and Resilience will start its path to the moon from a different “injection point,” NASA and company officials said in the Tuesday media call.

Both landers are designed to stay on the surface of the moon and transmit data back to scientists on Earth.

The Firefly-led mission, termed Ghost Riders in the Sky, will take a planned 45 days to get from its drop-off point to the moon before attempting to land near the Mons Latreille, a mountain in a lava plain known as Mare Crisium (the “Sea of Crises”). If the landing succeeds,it will deliver 10 payloads to the lunar surface carrying scientific instruments.

NASA says it hopes to investigate heat flow from the moon’s interior, as well as plume-like surface interactions and certain electric and electromagnetic fields. It will test a method to control lunar dust using electrodynamic fields, something that NASA officials hope will make future crewed missions easier.

The space mission is the company’s second moon landing attempt; the first attempt, in April 2023, ended with the company losing contact with its moon lander after it free-fell to the moon’s surface.

The second landing attempt, scheduled for late May or early June, will take a somewhat different approach, with ispace conducting a “flyby” to slingshot around the moon and then reapproaching it. The company plans to deploy a small micro-rover to drop an art installation called “moon house,” which will be photographed and sent back to Earth. In addition, a “water electrolyzer” machine will attempt to separate a drop of water into its elements. And ispace will take a sample of the moon and sell it back to NASA for a few thousand dollars, part of a NASA program to sow the seeds of a legal system for commerce on the surface of the moon.

Joel Achenbach contributed to this report.