SpaceX is launching Blue Ghost and Resilience landers to the moon

Two private spacecraft aiming to land on the moon are set to blast off onboard a SpaceX rocket, in a sign of increasing commercial activity on the lunar surface.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander and ispace’s Resilience lander have both got a ride on the same Falcon 9 rocket, which is currently scheduled to liftoff on 15 January at 6.11am GMT (1.11am EST) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The launch will be ispace’s second attempt at landing on the moon. Its first ended in failure when its Hakuto-R spacecraft crashed into the lunar surface in 2023. The Japanese company says it has since upgraded Resilience’s hardware and software to avoid the mistakes that led to this crash.

Meanwhile, US company Firefly Aerospace will be making its first attempt. The firm has a contract with NASA as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, which pays private companies to achieve its scientific goals.

Resilience will carry six payloads to the lunar surface, including an experiment to produce food on the moon using microalgae, and a micro rover that will roam, analyse and photograph the landing area. Blue Ghost is set to carry a mixture of 10 private and public payloads to the moon, including a radiation-resistant computer, a drill that will measure how heat flows through the moon’s surface and a satellite receiver that will try to establish a permanent link with Earth’s GPS network.

Both missions will reach Earth orbit relatively quickly, within minutes of launch, but it will be much longer before they reach the moon. Blue Ghost will orbit Earth for 25 days, before firing its engines to start a four-day journey to the moon, where it will orbit for 16 days. After this, it will autonomously descend and land, in a plain called Mare Crisium, where it will take two weeks to perform its scientific goals.

Resilience will take a more circuitous route on a journey that will see it fly past the moon a month after launch, glide in deeper space for months, before then angling back towards the moon. Once it enters orbit, it is due to land in a plain called Mare Frigoris between four and five months after launch.

If the missions succeed, they will become the second and third private spacecraft to land on the moon. The first was Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander, which touched down last year.

Blue Ghost and Resilience are the first of around a dozen spacecraft that are hoping to touch lunar soil this year, largely driven by NASA’s CLPS, with many designed to test and demonstrate technology required for a future permanent human presence on the moon. These include a second and third mission from Intuitive Machines. IM-2 will look to drill near the southern lunar pole for buried ice that could be used in future missions, as well as deploy two exploratory rovers and a lunar satellite to communicate with Earth.