In the classic country ballad “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a cowboy receives a frightening vision: the devil’s herd of cows thundering through the clouds, chased by the souls of cowpokes who must “ride forever on that range up in the sky / on horses snorting fire.” At 1:11 A.M. EST on January 15 Blue Ghost, a lunar lander built by the Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace, rode its own fiery steed through the heavens, launching atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on a mission to become just the second U.S. soft landing on the moon since the end of the Apollo program.
Over the next four weeks, that mission—called Ghost Riders in the Sky, or Blue Ghost Mission 1—will see its spacecraft orbit around Earth at farther and farther distances. Carrying a suite of NASA-sourced scientific instruments, Blue Ghost will then make a run at the moon. The mission is flying under the U.S. space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which is encouraging private firms to take over the delivery of such instruments and lunar supplies as part of the nation’s ambitious Artemis moon program.
“[The moon] is kind of the gateway to our solar system; it’s this ‘easy’ spot to go to and learn how to be productive,” says Ray Allensworth, spacecraft program director at Firefly Aerospace. “The basic science that we’re gathering on these CLPS missions really has applications, not just to Artemis but also to becoming interplanetary.”
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Blue Ghost Mission 1 marks a new chapter for Firefly, which has developed and launched its own rocket but has never flown anything to the moon before. It’s also another major test for CLPS, which will pay out as much as $2.6 billion to private companies for lunar deliveries. NASA hopes to save substantial money through the program. In February 2021 Firefly received a NASA contract for Blue Ghost Mission 1 that is now worth $101 million, less than the agency would have spent to build its own lunar lander.
“A lander on the surface of the moon, done in the traditional way, is north of a half a billion [dollars]…. I’ve never seen a quote that’s less,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, who led NASA’s Science Mission Directorate as its associate administrator from 2016 to 2022 and championed the development of CLPS. “Every one of these shots on goal is doing it without that overhead and with their own systems.”
NASA also hopes that CLPS will increase the frequency of robotic moon missions. Blue Ghost is the third spacecraft launched under the CLPS banner since January 2024, and at least one more launch is on the books for later this year. Before CLPS, the last U.S. soft landings on the moon occurred during the Apollo program, which ended in 1972.
“There’s a significant portion of NASA and the scientific community who have not been alive, or at least not in the workforce, to see a landing on the moon,” says lunar scientist Ryan Watkins, a program scientist at NASA’s Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office. “To finally have a chance to get on the surface and get at some of these questions in situ is really exciting.”
But in exchange for lower costs and faster turnaround times, NASA is letting private companies design and operate their own lunar landers—a trade-off that, on balance, boosts the odds for any given CLPS mission failing. From the program’s inception, NASA leaders, including Zurbuchen, have emphasized that each initial CLPS mission has a roughly 50–50 chance of success.
As predicted, the program’s results so far have been mixed. Last January the Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic launched a moon lander with an assortment of NASA and non-NASA payloads, only for the spacecraft to suffer a critical anomaly soon after launch. Then, the following month, a robotic lander built by the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines flew a CLPS mission to the moon’s south polar region. Though the spacecraft survived the descent—a first for any commercial moon mission—one of its legs broke during touchdown, partially tipping the lander over.
“I want [CLPS] to work, but this is an experiment, and we don’t know that it’s going to work,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the nonprofit Planetary Society.
Standing about two meters tall and 3.5 meters wide—roughly the size of two Volkswagen Beetles parked side by side—Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander is designed to carry up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of payload to the moon’s surface. On Blue Ghost Mission 1, the lander is flying 10 NASA instruments, the largest number of agency payloads yet launched on a single CLPS mission.
For Firefly’s corps of engineers, many of whom are still in their 20s, building Blue Ghost has amounted to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—and challenge. “It’s kind of mind-blowing,” Allensworth says. “It is really special, but it also can be scary at times because none of us have built a lunar lander before.”
Perhaps no system onboard Blue Ghost exemplifies this challenge more than the rocket engines responsible for setting the lander on the moon’s surface. Soon after completing a major review of Blue Ghost’s design in October 2021, Firefly engineers realized that they needed to build their own reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, which control a spacecraft’s orientation and stabilize its position. In August 2024—less than three years after starting its work—a team led by engineer Ryan Cole finished qualifying the engines for flight.
“Conventional wisdom would have said, ‘Well, you’re never going to make an RCS engine in less than three years,’” Cole says. “But none of us had it in our heads that that was impossible.”
Blue Ghost now faces a roughly six-week journey before putting those engines to the ultimate test. After 25 days orbiting Earth, the lander will spend four days flying toward the moon. It will then spend another 16 days in lunar orbit before making a landing attempt in early March. As it happens, Blue Ghost isn’t the only spacecraft that is journeying to the moon. The lander shared its launch with Hakuto-R Mission 2, a lunar lander and rover developed by the Japanese company ispace, whose first landing attempt in April 2023 failed just kilometers above the moon’s surface.
At NASA’s request, Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeting a landing site at Mare Crisium, a dark-colored basin some 560 kilometers (350 miles) across that formed long ago when lunar lava filled a then fresh impact crater. The area is thought to better represent the moon’s average composition than the Apollo landing sites. Blue Ghost’s goal is to operate there for 14 days, including up to five hours of the long and brutally cold lunar night.
Some of Blue Ghost’s payloads will demonstrate new technologies. For one, Blue Ghost is flying an instrument that will test whether moon landers can detect and make use of signals from GPS satellites orbiting Earth. Another payload will try to combat moon dust—tiny, jagged particles that are awful for astronauts and hardware alike—by using electric fields to knock it off of a surface.
Other instruments will study the lunar interior. One, called LISTER (Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity), is designed to measure how heat flows out of the moon, which should help clarify the deep structure of our natural satellite and its evolution over eons. The device consists of a thermometer at the tip of a probe that will drill up to three meters into the lunar soil by puffing out blasts of compressed gas. If successful, LISTER will set the record for the deepest that any mission has ever dug into the lunar surface.
“Gas, in vacuum, is like a grenade…. So we thought, ‘Why not excavate deep holes with it?’” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin–owned firm that developed LISTER. “It’s sort of like taking a garden hose pointing into the soil and creating a trench.”
Regardless of what happens with Blue Ghost Mission 1—whether it lands on the moon’s surface in one piece or several—experts interviewed by Scientific American say that for now, the CLPS initiative probably will survive into the second term of incoming U.S. president Donald Trump, who assumes office on January 20. Along with Artemis as a whole, CLPS was created during the first Trump administration and continued during the Biden administration. This was the first time since Apollo that an ambitious U.S. moon program survived a presidential transition intact.
“I believe this particular launch should, by itself, not change the program, no matter what the [outcome] is,” Zurbuchen says. “We would feel all more excited [if] it went all down the middle, exactly like we hoped…. If it was not successful, I would just basically say, ‘Hey, we never said that any one of those things needs to be successful.’”
“[CLPS] is not a national standard-bearer program,” Dreier adds. “In a sense, if it works, it creates a fundamentally new capability.”
That said, the structure of Artemis may see more changes this time around. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who ardently supports a Mars-first human space exploration strategy, was a major backer of Trump’s 2024 campaign and has enormous influence on the incoming administration’s policy agenda. An Ars Technica report last December suggested that Trump’s transition team was considering changes to Artemis and NASA writ large, including the possible cancelation of the space agency’s costly Space Launch System rocket, a linchpin of the current Artemis plan.
Any such proposal will have to make it through Congress, however, which has repeatedly stated its preference for a moon-first strategy in line with Artemis’s status quo. Major changes could also risk disrupting existing agreements with commercial firms and other countries’ space agencies. “There’s frustration, you see, that [Artemis] is not optimized for results; it’s optimized for politics. But you’ve got to work with politics at the end of the day,” Dreier says. “We should not throw away a hard-earned coalition like this.”
