For the first time in lunar exploration, two robotic landers, from two different countries, will launch to the Moon aboard a single rocket.
But although Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based ispace share a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the two missions take very different paths and timelines to reach the lunar surface.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is scheduled for Jan. 15 at 1:11 a.m. EST (06:11 UTC). This will be SpaceX’s 100th orbital launch from the historic platform once used by Apollo and the Space Shuttle.
Launch weather officers with the 45th Weather Squadron estimate a 90 percent chance of favorable conditions for liftoff, saying winds could be a problem at launch time.
“Rain showers and overcast conditions will clear the Space Coast early this afternoon. Wind speeds will decrease throughout the day today,” meteorologists wrote. “Early Wednesday morning and during the main launch window, winds will be 15 to 20 mph with occasional gusts up to 25 mph. This will result in a small risk of takeoff winds and a violation of the cumulus cloud rule.
Thursday’s backup launch window would offer calmer winds, but the forecast calls for mid-level cloud cover to bring another possible weather constraint. They drop their chance of good weather on Thursday to 60 percent.
SpaceX will use the Falcon 9 first stage booster designated B1085 for this mission, which will be launched for the fifth time. Its previous launches were Crew-9, GPS 3 SV07, Starlink 10-5 and Starlink 6-77.
Nearly 8.5 minutes into the flight, B1085 will attempt to land on the droneship, “Just read the instructions.” If successful, this will be the 107th JRTI landing and 398th booster landing to date.
“Ghost Riders in the Sky”
The launch scheduled for Wednesday morning marks the first mission to the Moon for Firefly Aerospace. Its Blue Ghost lunar lander was designed following the company’s selection in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
The goal of CLPS is to bring NASA’s scientific knowledge to the surface of the Moon without the agency having to build the landers or procure launch vehicles. NASA has several contracts with various CLPS suppliers, with Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission 1 and Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 flights taking place in early 2024.
Blue Ghost has a dry mass of 469 kg (1,034 lb) and weighs approximately 1,500 kg (3,300 lb) when filled with fuel. It uses a combination of MMH hypergolic propellant and MON-3 oxidizer to power the main engine and thrusters during its journey.
It is designed to deliver ten NASA science payloads to the surface of the Moon, the largest demonstration on a single lander under CLPS to date.
Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said that once all 10 instruments were small enough to fly on a single lander, the agency was looking for a company that could execute all scientific operations over 14 days (one lunar period).
“Firefly and several other bidders rose to this challenge. They came up with a really credible mission plan to conduct all the experiments we want on our instruments,” Kearns said.
In a pre-launch interview with Spaceflight Now, Brigette Oakes, vice president of engineering for Firefly, said the company has incorporated lessons from previous lunar missions.
“We also learned many lessons from previous missions. I mean, we did a full, in-depth review of every lunar mission that took place, whether it was commercial or NASA and we learned a lot from it, and then we basically tweaked and adapted the Firefly model. with the additional product. lines and then took the best of what previous companies did before us.
Firefly also took lessons and hardware from its Alpha rocket and incorporated them into Blue Ghost as well.
“There is a lot of wisdom, experience and lessons learned in this business. We have rockets and satellites in our company. So there is a lot of commonality between the two parts of our business and a lot of lessons learned are shared,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly.
“As we ramp up to speed on our Alpha rocket, a lot of these lessons learned, even reaction control propulsion, are lessons learned for our Blue Ghost lander, because we have ACS and RCS thrusters on our Blue Ghost lander that have heritage from the Alpha rocket So there’s a lot of crosstalk within our company. So that really helps programs like Blue Ghost have confidence.
As Firefly makes its first landing attempt, scheduled for March 2, Kim said one of the key tools on this lander is a quartet of cupped tips on the landing legs.
“These landing areas are carefully designed with crumple zones,” he said. “If you think about the honeycomb and its crunchiness, it’s built into the structure itself. And so when it lands, it will – much like you’re a car in an accident – it will deliberately collapse. This is what this design implies.
The mission, called “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” will take a little longer to reach the surface of the Moon, compared to the last CLPS mission from Houston-based Intuitive Machines. Flight IM-1 took about seven days from takeoff to landing, while the Blue Ghost lander takes about 45 days to complete its journey.
Once on the surface, it will operate for about two weeks with instruments including a sample collection tool called Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) from Honeybee Robotics; a navigation demonstration called the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) from the Italian Space Agency and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; and Aegis Aerospace’s Regolith Adhesion Characterization (RAC), which will study how lunar regolith adheres to a variety of materials.
The lander is also designed to survive a few hours in the lunar night to capture sunset and other data in the lunar darkness.
“Never quit the moon quest”
Beneath the Blue Ghost lunar lander, inside a specially designed payload container, is the ispace lander called Resilience. This will be the second time that the Japanese side of the company will launch a lander to the Moon.
Its first launch attempt, Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1), was launched on a dedicated flight on a Falcon 9 in December 2022 and failed in April 2023.
In a pre-launch interview with Spaceflight Now, Ron Garan, former NASA astronaut and current CEO of ispace-US, said it was a software glitch that prevented the first landing. He said the radar altimeter detected a large jump in altitude as they approached the crater they were targeting, which caused the lander to misinterpret where it was in the mission profile.
He then made what he thought was a soft landing, but was actually about 5,000 meters above the crater floor and remained parked there until he ran out of fuel and s ‘crushed.
“We’ve obviously fixed all of that software, we’re not landing at the bottom of a deep crater this time and so our confidence level is much higher on this one,” Garan said.
For the Hakuto-R 2 mission, titled “Never Quit the Lunar Quest,” the Resilience lander will target a landing in a region called Mare Frigoris – the “Sea of Cold” – which is in the northern part of the Moon.
The mission will take much longer to reach the Moon than Firefly’s Blue Ghost. While Firefly’s lander will be dropped into a highly elliptical Earth orbit and take 25 days for a gradual orbital approach before performing a translunar injection burn, Resilience will take a slower path to the Moon using the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket to place it. on the path to low energy transfer to the Moon.
Essentially, it will fly past the Moon, travel about a million miles through deep space, and then synchronize with the Moon again for its landing.
“What low-power transfer allows us to do is trade fuel for a margin of payload capacity,” Garan explained. “It just gives us more capacity to bring to the lunar surface.”
The lander carries with it several scientific instruments, including a food production experiment and another designed to demonstrate electrolysis.
“Electrolysis is really exciting because of its implications. If we are actually able to do electrolysis on the Moon, then we will be able to produce rocket fuel on the Moon,” Garan said.
The mission will also use a small rover, called Tenacity, which will be deployed to operate autonomously after landing. It includes an HD camera that will be used to capture, among other things, images of an art installation called “Moon House,” which is a replica of a Swedish house that will be placed on the surface.
Garan said the rover came from ispace’s European division.
“The rover itself is really critical to the future of our company. The fact that the rover is efficient and the data that comes out of it will be very valuable to us as we continue to perfect our design on the surface mobility side of the business,” Garan said. “And so, that’s really exciting too.”
The rover and lander will operate on the Moon’s surface for about two weeks as the Moon enters lunar night. Garan said they are investigating various methods to achieve this, from orbiting solar concepts to nuclear options and beyond.
“To start a cislunar economy, you have to be able to survive at night. There are millions and millions and millions of dollars that are invested in these missions and if they only operate for two weeks, that’s not a very good return on investment,” Garan said. “So we want to be able to do surface operations for months or years at a time and to do that you have to be able to survive at night.”