The impression of an artist from Blue Ghost landing on the moon
Firefly Aerospace
Two private spaceships aimed at landing on the Moon are ready to explode on a SpaceX rocket, as a sign of increasing commercial activity on the lunar surface.
The Blue Ghost Lander of Firefly Aerospace and Ispace resilience both went on the same Falcon 9 rocket, which should currently take off on January 15 at 6:11 a.m. GMT (1:11 a.m. Hne) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The launch will be the second attempt at Ispace to land on the Moon. His first ended with a failure when his Hakuto-R spaceship crashed in The lunar surface in 2023. The Japanese company says that it has since improved the hardware and software of resilience to avoid the errors that led to this crash.
Meanwhile, the American company Firefly Aerospace will make its first attempt. The company has a contract with NASA within the framework of the Agency's Lunar Pay (CLP) Trade Program, which pays private companies to achieve its scientific objectives.
Resilience will transport six useful loads to the lunar surface, including an experience to produce food on the moon using microalgae, and a micro-road that will wander, analyze and photograph the landing area. Blue Ghost should transport a mixture of 10 useful private and public charges on the moon, including a radiation -resistant computer, an exercise that will measure how heat crosses the surface of the moon and a satellite receiver that will try to establish a permanent link with the GPS network of the earth.
Resilience Lunar Lander is ready for the launch
Ispace
The two missions will reach the orbit land relatively quickly, in the minutes following the launch, but it will be much longer before reaching the moon. Blue Ghost will orbit the earth for 25 days, before shooting its engines to start a four -day trip to the Moon, where it will orbit 16 days. After that, he will descend independently and land, in a plain called Mare Crisium, where it will take two weeks to achieve his scientific objectives.
Resilience will take a more circuit route on a trip that will see him pass the moon a month after launch, sliding in a deeper space for months, before going back to the moon. Once he enters orbit, he must land in a plain called Mare fridge between four and five months after the launch.
If the missions succeed, they will become the second and third private spaceships to land on the Moon. The first was the Odysseus Lander of intuitive machines, which attenuated Last year.
The blue ghost and resilience are the first around a dozen spaceships Who hope to touch the lunar soil this year, widely pulled by the NASA CLPs, many of which designed to test and demonstrate the technology required for a future permanent human presence on the Moon. These include a second and a third mission of intuitive machines. The IM-2 will seek to drill near the southern lunar pole for a buried ice that could be used in future missions, as well as to deploy two exploratory Rovers and a lunar satellite to communicate with the earth.
