Firefly Aerospace Is Trying To Land On The Moon
With so much going on throughout the entire space industry, it can be hard to keep track of everything. This includes progress on new launch vehicles, missions, and ambitious plans for the future involving NASA, other agencies, and many commercial companies. Firefly Aerospace for example is not only close to its second orbital test flight but also a mission to the Moon.
For a while now the company has been working on Blue Ghost, which is a lunar lander meant to transport and support multiple payloads on the surface of the Moon. Early last year, Firefly was awarded over 90 million dollars to deliver a suite of payloads for NASA to the Moon. Since then, the company has made some impressive progress and continues to work on its future.
This being said, it is not easy by any means to land on the surface of the Moon. Firefly will need to ensure every aspect of this lunar lander is perfect in order for the mission to be a success. Here I will go more in-depth into some of the recent progress the company has made, the plan for Blue Ghost, and the opportunities it presents for Firefly’s future.
Update & Payload
Firefly Aerospace has been very busy as they work towards multiple ambitious goals. This includes Blue Ghost and attempting to safely land on the Moon. Since being awarded a significant amount of money for the mission, Firefly has continued to work and make progress. Recently, they provided some additional updates on what they have been up to. The first came in the form of a tweet on May 31st saving, “Lunar Update: More hardware coming to fruition as our partner @SolaeroTech delivered the three flight solar panels that will support our Blue Ghost M1 landing on the Moon early 2024. Learn more about our @NASA sponsored mission.”
In addition to this development on the lunar lander itself, NASA also released more information on one of the specific payloads Blue Ghost is intended to land on the Moon. The agency points out that as the Artemis missions journey to the Moon and NASA plans for the long voyage to Mars, new navigation capabilities will be key to science, discovery, and human exploration. Through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, will deliver an experimental payload to the Moon’s Mare Crisium basin. NASA’s Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) payload will test a powerful new lunar navigation capability using Earth’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals at the Moon for the first time. GNSS refers to satellite constellations commonly used for position, navigation, and timing services on Earth. GPS — the GNSS constellation operated by the U.S. Space Force — is the one many Americans are familiar with and use on a daily basis.
“In this case, we are pushing the envelope of what GNSS was intended to do — that is, expanding the reach of systems built to provide services to terrestrial, aviation, and maritime users to also include the fast growing space sector,” said J.J. Miller, Deputy Director of Policy and Strategic Communications for NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program. “This will vastly improve the precision and resilience of what was available during the Apollo missions, and allow for more flexible equipage and operational scenarios.”LuGRE — developed in partnership with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) – will receive signals from both GPS and the European GNSS constellation, Galileo, and use them to calculate the first-ever GNSS location fixes in transit to the Moon and on the lunar surface. “Space missions close to Earth have long relied on GNSS for their navigation and timekeeping,” said Joel Parker, LuGRE principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “In recent years, NASA and the international community have pushed the boundaries of what was considered possible by using these techniques in the Space Service Volume and beyond.”
Missions in the GNSS Space Service Volume — from about 1,800 miles to 22,000 miles in altitude — receive signals that spill past Earth’s edge from GNSS satellites on the opposite side of the planet. The first Space Service Volume experiments occurred around the dawn of the new millennium. Since then, numerous missions in the Space Service Volume have reliably used GNSS to navigate. In 2016, NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) employed GPS operationally at a record-breaking 43,500 miles from Earth. Then, in 2019, MMS broke its own record by fixing its location with GPS at 116,300 miles from Earth — nearly halfway to the Moon. At these extreme altitudes, missions need extremely sensitive GNSS receivers. The LuGRE mission will use a specialized weak-signal receiver developed by Qascom, an Italian company specializing in space cybersecurity and satellite navigation security solutions, and funded by ASI. LuGRE teams are now testing the payload in preparation to deliver it for integration onto the Firefly “Blue Ghost” lander in November of this year. Launch is currently slated for no earlier than 2024 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This is only one of the many payloads expected to make a valuable contribution to the future of space exploration and access.
Blue Ghost Timeline
As I partially mentioned prior, Firefly has made quite a lot of progress on Blue Ghost since being awarded over $93 million in early 2021. One of the first big announcements after this award came only a few months later in May. Here, Firefly announced that it had awarded a contract to SpaceX to launch its Blue Ghost lunar lander in 2023. At the time, Shea Ferring, Firefly Senior Vice President of Spacecraft, said, “Firefly is excited to fly our Blue Ghost spacecraft on the highly reliable Falcon 9, which will deliver NASA instruments and technology demonstration payloads that support NASA science goals and NASA’s Artemis program. The high performance of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle permits a lunar transit using minimal Blue Ghost propulsion resources, thereby allowing the lander to deliver more than 150 kg of payload to the lunar surface.”
Towards the end of 2021, Firefly reached a major milestone with the successful completion of the Critical Design Review (CDR) of their Blue Ghost lunar lander. This CDR began paving the way for the construction of the Blue Ghost lander, which is scheduled to touch down in the Mare Crisium lunar basin in September of 2023 carrying ten NASA payloads as part of the $93.3-million Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract secured by Firefly earlier this year. The lander will also take several commercial payloads to the lunar surface. The 2023 Blue Ghost mission will be the first of what are expected to be yearly lunar surface missions for Firefly. “This milestone marks another step in an aggressive schedule and meeting it continues to showcase our spacecraft team’s ability to consistently deliver incredible work,” stated Dr. Tom Markusic, Firefly’s CEO. “This mission is a forerunner of what we see as a growing cadence of recurring data and payload service missions in cis-lunar space that will kickstart a lunar economy, and we’re honored to be demonstrating our ability to deliver these services for NASA and for our commercial customers.” Blue Ghost will operate a variety of payloads through lunar transit and orbit, as well as while on the lunar surface. These payloads will explore the region’s regolith properties, geophysical characteristics, and interaction of the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field. There are also several key technology demonstrations related to navigation and sample collection.
Finally, just a few months ago, Firefly completed the Integration Readiness Review (IRR) of Blue Ghost M1, showcasing the company’s ability to drive program readiness under an aggressive schedule. During the review, held recently at its headquarters in Cedar Park, TX, the team marked key progress milestones across multiple areas, including, Structures, Fluids, Propulsion, Core Avionics, Battery Production, Harness Production, FlatSat progress, MGSE, EGSE, and Facilities readiness to support lander integration. “Passing IRR indicates we have the necessary team, hardware, equipment, and documentation to support lander integration,” said Ray Allensworth, Blue Ghost Program Manager, who led the review process, “This team continues to overcome obstacles and perform at the highest levels, helping us pave our path to landing on the Moon in 2024,” she continued. This leads up to today as more information comes out on the payloads using Blue Ghost and some of the construction on the lander. While the company still has a lot of work to do, they have made some consistent progress over time.
Conclusion
Throughout the space industry, we are watching a large group of companies working to complete a lot of firsts. Whether this is reaching orbit, landing on the Moon, or reusing a rocket, this industry is filled with ambitious ideas. Firefly is one of them, and is continuing to work on Blue Ghost as the launch date gets closer and closer. We will have to wait and see how it progresses and the impact it has on the space industry.