Firefly Aerospace employees gathered at a watch party in Cedar Park overnight Saturday, anxiously watching a livestream as Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander slowly inched toward the moon's surface.
"It's such an intense feeling. ... You have to surrender control," Kevin Scholtes, a future systems architect who's spent the past four years working on the project, said. "You have no control over what happens – but you can't tell your body that."
Then came confirmation of the lander's touchdown: "You all stuck the landing. We're on the moon," Will Coogan, chief engineer for the lander, said over the livestream.
Cheers erupted. Scholtes pumped his fist in the air before turning to hug his wife.
"You feel just about every emotion imaginable all at once," he said. "If anything comes through, with clarity in the end, it's the immense pride and gratitude."
The Blue Ghost was carrying 10 science and technology instruments to collect data for NASA. It landed softly in an "upright, stable configuration" within the Mare Crisium, a more than 300-mile-wide basin located on the moon’s near side (the side you can see from Earth), around 2:34 a.m., according a press release.
The achievement makes Firefly only the second commercial company to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon — and the first to ever do so without a hitch. Last year, Houston-based Intuitive Machines sent a spacecraft to the moon, but it stopped working after landing on its side.
Firefly was contracted by NASA to deliver 10 science and technology instruments to the lunar service. Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, compared the mission to a "delivery service" of sorts.
"We give a challenge, and we want you to land in [a] place and take all these instruments, because ... they are perfectly chosen for the region," she said. "You pick the place you want the package to go, and that's just what we did with Firefly."
Firefly is under contract for two more lunar missions with NASA, with the next projected to launch sometime next year.
"I just wanted to thank the White House administration and NASA for entrusting in Firefly for these lunar lander missions and the Blue Ghost mission today," Jason Kim, the company's CEO, said. "This initiative [has] really helped Firefly evolve from a rocket company to an end-to-end, responsive space company that does launch, land, and orbit, and we're going to continue doing those missions."
The Blue Ghost mission also lays some of the groundwork for NASA's Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts back to the moon by mid-2027.
"We wanna be able to prepare for our future astronauts to go and keep them safe, and so we chose these science instruments perfectly to go to this incredible place on the moon," Fox said.
The Blue Ghost will spend the next lunar day (about 14 Earth days) using these instruments to collect data.
"Our goal is going to be to capture as much data as possible," Ray Allensworth, Firefly's spacecraft program director, said. "We're going to continue to operate the lander as long as our batteries have a state of charge. ... There's a lot of really interesting phenomena that will happen, particularly at sunset, that we really want to make sure and capture."
You can keep up with the lunar lander's journey on Firefly's website.
