Blue Ghost Mission 1
Blue Ghost Mission 1 (“Ghost Riders in the Sky”) — the first fully successful commercial soft landing on the Moon. Firefly Aerospace's lander touched down in Mare Crisium on 2 March 2025 under NASA's CLPS program, delivered ten NASA payloads, operated through a full lunar day, and captured imagery of a lunar sunset before nightfall ended the mission.
Key facts
Mission & specifications
Mission
- Operator
- Firefly Aerospace / NASA
- Launched
- January 15, 2025
- Status
- Completed
Trajectory
- Distance from the Sun
- 1 AU
- Computed from the cached position
- Distance from Earth
- 0.56 AU
- Computed from cached positions
- Distance from Venus
- 0.5 AU
- Computed from cached positions
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.
- 2025Blue Ghost launches toward the Moon on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocketLaunch
Firefly's “Ghost Riders in the Sky” lander lifts off from Kennedy Space Center toward the Moon.
Touches down upright in Mare Crisium — the first private lander to succeed fully — and begins operating ten NASA payloads.
- 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
Images from open archives · credit shown per image