Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1

Firefly Aerospace (US, commercial) · Lander · 2025Success

Blue Ghost Mission 1 patch. Credit: Firefly Aerospace, via Wikipedia.

Success: landed upright in Mare Crisium Mar 2, 2025; 14 days of surface ops with 10 NASA payloads; mission concluded Mar 16, 2025.

When Blue Ghost touched down at 3:34 a.m. EST on March 2, 2025, it became the first commercial spacecraft to land on the Moon upright, intact, and fully operational. It was not the first commercial landing (Intuitive Machines' Odysseus reached the surface in February 2024 but tipped over); it was the first fully successful one, and it went on to run every one of its 10 NASA payloads through a complete lunar day.

Facts as of July 20, 2026, from the sources listed below.

14days

surface operations, plus 5 hours into the lunar night

119GB

data downlinked (51 GB of it science)

NASA payloads delivered and operated

100m

landing accuracy beside Mons Latreille

Blue Ghost seen from lunar orbit by LRO, days after landing. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.

Commonly wrong. English coverage routinely calls Blue Ghost 'the first commercial Moon landing'. It was not: Intuitive Machines' IM-1 Odysseus landed on February 22, 2024, but tipped onto its side. Blue Ghost's actual first is the first fully successful commercial landing (upright, stable, full mission completed). Two smaller recurring errors: the lander touched down next to Mons Latreille, not on it; and it did not die at sunset on a neat 14-day clock, it kept operating just over 5 hours into the lunar night before its final transmission late on March 16, 2025 UTC.

01Mission facts

Launch	January 15, 2025, 1:11 a.m. EST, Falcon 9 from KSC LC-39A
CLPS task order	About $93.3 million, awarded February 4, 2021
Transit	45 days, more than 2.8 million miles traveled
Landing	March 2, 2025, 3:34 a.m. EST (08:34 UTC), Mare Crisium
Landing accuracy	Upright, within its 100-meter target next to Mons Latreille
Site coordinates	18.5623 N, 61.8103 E, elevation -3650 m
Payloads	10 NASA science and technology payloads, all operated
Surface operations	346 hours of daylight plus just over 5 hours into lunar night; longest commercial lunar surface operations to date
Data returned	119 GB downlinked, including 51 GB of science and technology data
LuGRE first	First GNSS signal acquisition and tracking en route to and on the Moon; record distance 246,000 miles
LISTER first	Drilled up to 3 feet; deepest robotic planetary subsurface thermal probe
Eclipse and sunset imagery	Total solar eclipse imaged from the surface March 14, 2025; lunar sunset March 16, 2025
Mission end	Concluded March 16, 2025
Blue Ghost Mission 2	Targeted NET late 2026 (as of July 2026): far-side landing near Nassau crater with LuSEE-Night, Rashid 2 and SPIDER; Elytra Dark orbital relay with ESA Lunar Pathfinder

Site: 18.5623°N, 61.8103°E · Eastern Mare Crisium, beside Mons Latreille (source)

02Mission timeline

4 Feb 2021
NASA awards Firefly a $93.3M CLPS task order for the Mare Crisium delivery
15 Jan 2025
Launch at 1:11 a.m. EST on Falcon 9 from KSC LC-39A, sharing the ride with ispace RESILIENCE
2 Mar 2025
Touchdown at 3:34 a.m. EST in Mare Crisium: first fully successful commercial Moon landing
7 Mar 2025
LROC publishes orbital images pinpointing the lander at 18.5623 N, 61.8103 E
14 Mar 2025
Images a total solar eclipse from the lunar surface as Earth blocks the Sun
16 Mar 2025
Captures the lunar sunset, operates just over 5 hours into lunar night, and concludes the mission
NET Late 2026
Blue Ghost Mission 2 targeted to the lunar far side (as of Jul 2026)

Teal dots: events that physically happened in flight or on the Moon. Grey: announcements, namings, contracts, and targets.

03The mission

Blue Ghost Mission 1 flew under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, on a task order worth approximately $93.3 million awarded to Firefly on February 4, 2021 for a 10-payload delivery to Mare Crisium. It launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center's LC-39A at 1:11 a.m. EST on January 15, 2025, sharing the rocket with ispace's RESILIENCE lander, which took a slower route and was later destroyed in its own June 2025 landing attempt.

After a 45-day transit covering more than 2.8 million miles, Blue Ghost landed at 3:34 a.m. EST (08:34 UTC) on March 2, 2025, touching down within its 100-meter target zone next to Mons Latreille, an ancient volcanic cone in the more than 300-mile-wide Mare Crisium basin. LRO's cameras later pinpointed the lander at 18.5623 N, 61.8103 E, its shadow draped across the rim of a 12-meter crater, and captured before-and-after frames showing the engine plume's disturbance of the regolith.

The surface campaign delivered on essentially every payload objective. LISTER drilled up to 3 feet down, which NASA describes as the deepest robotic planetary subsurface thermal probe to date. LuGRE acquired and tracked GNSS satellite navigation signals en route to and on the Moon for the first time, with signal acquisition out to a record 246,000 miles. The Electrodynamic Dust Shield lifted regolith off surfaces electrostatically, the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder deployed sensors to probe the interior to depths of 700 miles, NGLR returned laser pulses from two Earth observatories, and SCALPSS captured roughly 9,000 images during descent and later at sunset.

Blue Ghost also became a witness to two celestial events. On March 14, 2025 it imaged a total solar eclipse from the lunar surface as Earth slid in front of the Sun, and on March 16 it documented the lunar sunset before operating just over 5 hours into the lunar night. In all, the mission logged 346 hours of daylight operations and downlinked 119 GB of data, including 51 GB of science and technology data, before it concluded on March 16, 2025.

Firefly's follow-up, Blue Ghost Mission 2, is set to launch no earlier than late 2026 (as of July 2026, per Firefly's mission page). It will attempt the first commercial far-side landing, near Nassau crater, delivering the NASA/DOE LuSEE-Night radio telescope, the UAE's Rashid 2 rover, and Fleet Space's SPIDER seismometer, while Firefly's Elytra Dark transfer vehicle, carrying ESA's Lunar Pathfinder comsat, stays in orbit as a relay. The flight hardware went through environmental testing at NASA JPL starting in October 2025.

Image note per the licensing policy: Firefly's own surface photos (the sunset shots and the eclipse 'diamond ring') are company copyright, Tier 3, so link out to fireflyspace.com for those. The LROC orbital views and NASA launch photography below are the self-hostable set.

04In pictures

Before and after: LRO frames blink between empty mare and the arrived lander. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.

Looking back toward the Sun: the landing site at high phase angle. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.

The landing site in context: eastern Mare Crisium beside Mons Latreille. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.

Liftoff from LC-39A, January 15, 2025. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett.

Tap a photo to enlarge.

05Sources

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