‘Here Lies Blue Ghost:’ Private Lander Powers Down After Successful Moon Mission

The Latin phrase—which roughly translates to “through hardships to the stars”—closes out the final lunar transmission from the Blue Ghost lander, which according to developer Firefly Aerospace achieved the “longest commercial operations on the moon to date” during its approximately two-week mission. The historic sojourn came to an end Sunday evening when the lander powered down after beaming its final data to NASA.

Decades after the Apollo era, robotic lunar landings remain a monumental challenge. These missions have long been the domain of state-run space agencies, and only five nations have achieved a successful landing. In recent years, landers from the U.S., Russia, India, Israel, and Japan have crashed or otherwise been unable to reach the surface.

But increasingly, governments are turning to commercial providers. NASA’s commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) program, for example, contracts private firms such as Firefly to deliver science and research to the moon.

So far, those efforts have been a mixed bag. Intuitive Machines, another CLPS contractor, was the first commercial company to build and land a vehicle on the moon. But that lander, Odysseus, tipped over shortly after making moonfall. A second Intuitive Machines vehicle, “Athena,” landed on its side last week. Astrobotic’s “Peregrine” was derailed on its way to the moon during a CLPS mission in 2024.

Blue Ghost, however, survived landing and completed “100 percent of its mission objectives,” per Firefly. That makes the mission—which deployed 10 NASA payloads, beamed more than 119 gigabytes of data down to Earth, and captured historic images of a solar eclipse and lunar sunset—the most successful CLPS endeavor so far.

“We want to extend a huge thank you to the NASA CLPS initiative and the White House administration for serving as the bedrock for this Firefly mission,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly, in a postmission update. “It has been an honor to enable science and technology experiments that support future missions to the moons, Mars, and beyond.”

The car-sized lander touched down near the moon’s Mons Latreille, a 4-mile wide mountain, on March 2 following a six-week journey after launching aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15. Within four days, eight of its NASA payloads had completed all of their mission objectives. That includes the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), which tracked GPS signals on the moon’s surface for the first time. The Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER), meanwhile, drilled about three feet into the lunar surface.

“This pneumatic, gas-powered drill is now the deepest-reaching robotic planetary subsurface probe,” Firefly said Monday.

Among other stunning imagery, Blue Ghost last week captured high-definition photos of the “diamond ring” of a total solar eclipse, marking the first time a commercial company operating on the moon was able to observe the event. The lander also recorded video of the lunar sunset on March 16, which may shed light on the phenomenon of levitating lunar dust witnessed by Apollo astronauts. NASA and Firefly shared imagery and findings from that operation during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

“This team continues to make near-impossible achievements look easy, but there is no such thing as an easy moon landing, especially on your first attempt,” said Will Coogan, Firefly’s chief engineer for Blue Ghost. “We battle tested every system on the lander and simulated every mission scenario we could think of to get to this point.”

With Blue Ghost Mission 1—also called “Ghost Riders in the Sky”—a wrap, Firefly is already gearing up for future missions.

Blue Ghost Mission 2, slated for 2026, aims to land on the far side of the moon and deploy an orbiting satellite. According to Firefly, the vehicle could potentially reach the “farthest lunar landing site ever achieved.” A third mission planned for 2028 would explore the moon’s Gruithuisen Domes, which NASA describes as a “geologic enigma.”

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