Falcon 9 lifts off from LC-39A carrying Blue Ghost and Hakuto-R. Credits: SpaceX

SpaceX Launches Two Lunar Landers on the Same Falcon 9

In a historic Falcon 9 launch, SpaceX sent two lunar landers, Firefly's Aerospace Blue Ghost and ispace's Hakuto-R Resilience, toward the Moon

On January 15, 2025, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Hakuto-R lunar landers launched on top of the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

Lift-off took place at 06:11 UTC. Two minutes later, the second stage separated and continued its journey in space, while booster B1085 turned back to the surface and landed six minutes later on the drone ship Just Read the Instructions.

After one hour into the flight, Blue Ghost was first deployed and inserted into orbit around Earth to begin its commissioning phase. Firefly’s lander will then reach the Moon where it will orbit the satellite for 16 days before landing on the surface after a total of 45 days of flight.

Half an hour later, it was Hakuto-R’s turn to separate from Falcon 9’s second stage. The Japanese lander will take a low-energy orbit, as done during Hakuto-R Mission1, with the landing planned for four to five months from now.

Today’s launch opens a year rich in missions on our satellite. For 2025, three other private missions, under NASA’s CLPS, are scheduled to be launched, two by Intuitive Machines and one by Astrobotic.


Advertisement

A ghost rider to deliver payloads on the Moon’s surface

With its first mission, Ghost Riders in the Sky, named after the famous song by Johnny Cash, Blue Ghost is a lunar lander developed by Firefly Aerospace under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. In February 2021, Firefly received a contract worth $93.3 million to build a lander capable of delivering ten payloads on the Moon’s surface.

The lander is shaped like a box with four landing legs and two decks to host the various spacecraft equipment and 155 kg of payload. Powered by solar panels mounted on its sides, it is designed to operate in lunar daylight (14 terrestrial days) and for several hours into the night.

Artistic view of Blue Ghost arriving at the Moon's surface. Credits: Firefly Aerospace
Artistic view of Blue Ghost arriving at the Moon’s surface. Credits: Firefly Aerospace

For Mission 1, Blue Ghhost hosts ten payloads as scientific instruments and technology demonstrators to provide useful data for the next lunar missions.

The Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) is a new pneumatic sample collector developed by HoneyBee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary. Once deployed on the surface, this particular vacuum cleaner will use a blast of gas to collect the regolith in its sorting chamber, where other experiments will demonstrate if gas jets are good cleaning agents and low-cost regolith collectors.

Lunar Planet Vac, or LPV, closeup. Credits: Firefly Aerospace
Lunar Planet Vac, or LPV, closeup Credits: Firefly Aerospace

A joint NASA-Italian Space Agency (ASI) device, the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) will collect the GPS and Galileo signals during the Earth-Moon flight and on the Lunar surface. It will demonstrate  GNSS-based positioning, navigation, and timing without building a dedicated system for the next Moon missions.

Blue Ghost’s arrival at Mare Crisium is planned for early March 2025, after 45 days of flight.


Advertisement

Hakuto-R strikes back with its second mission

Resilience is the second Hakuto-R attempting a soft landing on the Moon. Learning from the partial success of the previous mission, the new ispace spacecraft has been improved to ensure a correct landing in Mare Frigoris, after flying for four to five months in a fuel-saving trajectory.

The Tenacious micro-rover is one of the lander’s commercial payloads. Made by ispace Europe, it will explore the landing site, collect a sample of lunar regolith, and store it for NASA, fulfilling the first sale of a space resource ever.

ispace’s lander and micro rover of Hakuto-R M2 on the lunar surface. Credits: ispace
ispace’s lander and micro rover of Hakuto-R M2 on the lunar surface. Credits: ispace

Tenacious will also deliver to the surface of the Moon an artistic payload, the Swedish MoonHouse, a small red house envisioned in an epic story by artist Mikael Genberg to travel to the Moon.

The MoonHouse will not be the only cultural payload of Hakuto-R M2. The lander hosts a commemorative alloy plate by Bandai Namco Research Institute and a UNESCO memory disk containing 275 languages and other artifacts.


Advertisement

Share this article:
Giancarlo Albertinazzi

Giancarlo Albertinazzi

Space Ambassador, Terranaut, Future Spacepolitan, Writer of Becoming Spacepolitans Blog

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *