Blue Ghost Mission 1

Key facts

Mission & specifications

Mission

Blue Ghost Mission 1 made history quietly, and almost perfectly. Firefly Aerospace's lander — flight name “Ghost Riders in the Sky” — launched on 15 January 2025 and, on 2 March 2025, set down gently in Mare Crisium, a lava plain in the Moon's north-east. It was the first time a private company achieved a fully successful, upright soft landing on the Moon; the earlier commercial attempt had tipped over. Flying under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program — the agency's strategy of buying rides for its instruments rather than building whole landers itself — Blue Ghost carried ten NASA payloads that drilled into the regolith, tested dust-resistant coatings, caught GPS signals at the Moon, and studied how a lander's engine plume disturbs the surface. It operated through an entire lunar day, about two Earth weeks, then photographed a lunar sunset and kept working a few hours into the freezing night before its batteries gave out — an ordinary-sounding ending to an extraordinary first.

1. 2025Launch on a Falcon 9Launch

   Firefly's “Ghost Riders in the Sky” lander lifts off from Kennedy Space Center toward the Moon.

2. 2025First fully successful commercial Moon landingMilestone

   Touches down upright in Mare Crisium — the first private lander to succeed fully — and begins operating ten NASA payloads.

3. 2025Lunar sunset and mission endMission end

   After a full lunar day of operations, it photographs a lunar sunset and falls silent a few hours into the freezing night.

Images

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