Early Wednesday morning, SpaceX launched two commercial lunar landers on a single Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. Both landers will now coast their way to the Moon over the next month or more, with hopefully one taking the crown for the first soft landing on the Moon.
In what was SpaceX’s eighth launch of 2025, SpaceX launched not one but two lunar landers to the Moon. On top of the stack was Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, the first flight of the lander for the company. This mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Service Payload contract, a low-cost program for robotic missions to the Moon’s surface as part of the Artemis Program.
Onboard Firefly’s first lunar lander are ten experiments for NASA that all have the goal of further gaining knowledge about our Moon. Some will interact with the surface, testing ways to clean lunar regolith off surfaces, see how the regolith attaches to different kinds of materials, or testing ways of collecting it.
Another payload will research the interactions of Earth’s magnetic field and solar winds that take place out near the Moon’s orbit. This payload received a special two-axis gimbal to point its sensor upward.
Also on the top deck of the lander, the University of Maryland is hoping to place the next generation of lunar retroreflectors on the lunar surface with Blue Ghost. Following up on the reflectors left behind on the Apollo missions, this new reflector will simply reflect pulses of light back to receivers on Earth. This simple tool can tell us a lot about our Moon, such as its molten core.
Actually, Dr. Douglas Currie, the principal investigator for the reflector, designed the original reflectors for Apollo. Talk about sticking to a career.
Hakuto-R taking a backseat
Situated below Blue Ghost was i-space’s Hakuta-R lunar lander. This is the secondary payload but is also heading to the lunar surface, although to a different part of the Moon. Onboard are more scientific experiments, including an in-house designed and built micro-rover.
The company’s objectives are to simply land on the lunar surface; operations beyond that would be a plus. This is Hakuto-R’s second trip to the Moon; its first ended in failure back in 2022. Sadly, the issue turned out to be a software bug that caused the spacecraft to stop trusting its altitude measurements, so it reverted to preloaded estimates, which were inaccurate. This caused the lander to hover far above the surface before running out of fuel and crashing into the lunar surface.
Given no other issues are found along the way, Hakuto-R has a pretty solid chance to complete a soft landing on the Moon. While Firefly is confident in its ability to land on the surface too, a first-time lander has a lot more unknowns compared to a second-time lander.
If Firefly’s lander performs as expected, it will potentially land on the Moon in about 45 days. i-space is taking much longer, not arriving at the Moon for another four to five months.
