In January 2025, another private vehicle will attempt the moon landing. It is the Blue Ghost 1 from the Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace. It was announced by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team, which confirms that it has completed all the necessary tests. Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be used for the launch.
Blue Ghost 1 will be the second private lander in history to set down on the lunar surface. Launched after Odysseus by the Intuitive Machine company, also from Texas, Odysseus successfully completed the lunar landing last February 2024. Ten experiments, fine-tuned for the mission by the U.S. Space Agency, which will have a total duration of sixty days including forty-five days of travel, will be carried out aboard the lander. To set down on the Moon, Blue Ghost 1 will begin its journey in orbit around the Earth. It will then gradually drift away to enter lunar orbit and land near a volcanic structure within the so-called Mare Crisium located in the northeastern part of the moon.
In the meantime, Intuitive Machines is working on a new lander that is more powerful than the previous Odysseus. In fact, in February, the U.S. company plans a new launch again by means of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which, however, should follow an even more optimized–and thus shorter and more direct route–to the Moon. This means it should complete the lunar landing in an even shorter time than the previous one–i.e., in just one week from launch. The successor to Odysseus could thus be much more efficient than Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 in terms of speed.
