At around 3:34 a.m. ET yesterday (March 2), Texas-based Firefly Aerospace became the second private space company to land on the moon, and the first to do so without falling. Eight years ago, this wasn’t even a viable company. For a company facing lawsuits and forced ownership, this historic landing marked a significant shift, resurrected from bankruptcy not long ago. “Literally and figuratively, fireflies are on the moon,” said Jason Kim, the company’s CEO, in a statement.
Firefly’s blue ghost, Lunar Lander, is gently touched in the Moon’s Mare Crisium basin, sits next to the volcanic feature called Mons Latreille. “You all stick to landing,” Will Coogan, chief engineer of Blue Ghost, was on the live broadcast of the landing — an announcement that there was a cheer in the company’s mission control room.
The landing cap is a 45-day Blue Ghost Journey launched into orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The landcraft will land more than 2.8 million miles of the moon in the next two weeks, and in the next two weeks, a variety of surface operations of private actions (clps) by NASA’s commercial Lunar Poyload Services (clps), a private private enterprise that is private.
A vacuum that sucks moonlight dust and X-ray imager absorbs the effects of solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field, one of the 10 payloads of Blue Ghost. Firefly’s lander (already selfies with Earth) can also capture images of solar eclipses and lunar sunsets later this month.
Firefly Aerospace Challenging Journey
Shooting the Moon is not always shooting for fireflies, the company was founded in 2014. Three years later, the company encountered financial troubles after an investor exited, and Firefly’s then-CEO Tom Markusic, a former aerospace engineer (SPECEX), SpaceX and Blue Origin, were allegedly stolen lawsuits for theft trade.
Firefly filed for bankruptcy in 2017 but was rescued by Ukrainian tech entrepreneur Max Polyakov, who acquired his assets at the auction and reportedly dumped more than $200 million to restore the company. But Polikov’s ownership ended in 2022 after potential national security issues in the U.S. government forced him to sell his share to a private investment firm AE Industrial Partner. Last year, Polyakov was released from government conditions and prevented him from investing in the U.S. space and defense industries.
During turbulent times, Fireflies managed to continue developing spacecraft and sign valuable government contracts. In 2021, Blue Ghost won a CLPS contract with NASA, worth approximately $100 million. The company has more CLPS delivery down from the pipeline, and its Blue Ghost Lander is scheduled to land far away on the moon next year and in the 2028 Gruithuisen Domes volcanic region.
Firefly’s Lunar Landing is NASA’s second CLPS mission. The first was last year, when the intuitive machine (another Texas-based private space company) was tilted to the moon in February 2024. However, the company’s lander collapsed after landing, limiting every aspect of the mission.
The intuitive machine will be successful later this week and is expected to arrive on the moon on March 6. There is another Lunar Lander, this time the Japanese company Ispace, which can join Blue Ghost in three months. Ispace’s spacecraft actually hitchhiked with Firefly’s Blue Ghost on the same Falcon 9 in January, but it extended the fuel-intensive route along the moon.
