As the private sector’s race to the moon heats up, SpaceX launched two commercial satellites carrying lunar rovers.
When the California-based company’s Falcon 9 rocket launched early Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it was carrying two probes.
Firefly Aerospace Inc., situated in Texas, is the source of one probe. Firefly is making its first lunar exploration attempt with its so-called Blue Ghost, and in roughly 45 days, the business plans to try landing on the moon.
The Hakuto-R probe from Tokyo-based Ispace Inc. is traveling on the same rocket as Blue Ghost. If everything goes according to plan, it should reach the moon sometime in the middle of the year. This is the startup’s second try at making history, having come dangerously near last April.
Because Ispace is choosing a less risky and energy-intensive path and looking for a flatter landing location on the moon’s surface this time, the Hakuto-R will take longer to reach its destination.
After India became the first nation to land a spacecraft close to the moon’s south pole in August 2023, the trips are the most recent in the commercial sector’s lunar competition. A few months later, in February 2024, the lander from Intuitive Machines Inc. became the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. It also approached the south pole, where scientists are keen to figure out where the moon’s water comes from.
In December, Firefly, a contractor for NASA’s Artemis program, which intends to send humans back to the moon, signed a $179 million deal that will allow them to send six NASA payloads to the moon by 2028.
Whereas Ispace’s sights are set on a vast, level plain known as Mare Frigoris — Sea of Cold — on the moon’s northern point, Blue Ghost will target a volcanic basin known as the Sea of Crises, or Mare Crisium.
After a string of devastating defeats to the country’s space goals, Japan successfully landed its first spacecraft on the moon almost a year ago.
After landing on a hillside that blocked sunlight from reaching its solar cells, that SLIM lander, known as Moon Sniper, was all but doomed. Afterward, it survived two weeks of freezing conditions on the moon’s dark side before being resurrected by the sun’s warmth and able to send crucial information back to Earth.
