CEDAR PARK, Texas — A Central Texas aerospace company is making final preparations before blasting off to the stars. Early Wednesday morning, the lunar lander built by Firefly Aerospace is set to launch from Florida and head to the moon.
The “Blue Ghost” lander will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral around 12:11 a.m. Central Time. The lunar lander is currently powered off and locked in at the top of the rocket, sitting on the launch pad and ready to go.
“We’re kind of in this limbo phase where we don’t have anything to do besides wait for it to launch,” Ray Allensworth, the spacecraft program director for Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, said.
Allensworth is part of the team that is in Florida for the launch.
“The last few days, all these critical milestones are happening, “Allensworth said. “We’re stacking it, we’re encapsulating it. It’s on the pad. It’s going vertical. Each time your heart rate kind of spikes a little bit.”
The team is also busy at the Mission Operations Center in Cedar Park, where they will control the mission after the launch.
“They’re working with our ground station provider to start communicating with Hawaii, our first downstream antenna,” Allensworth said. “They’re just checking our systems, ensuring everything is functioning and ready to receive that first communication from the lander.”
The lander is part of a NASA initiative that could eventually lead to future human missions to the moon.
For the team who has worked on this project for years, this last step is bittersweet. They said goodbye to the lander they spent long days and nights developing.
“I felt like we spent four years pushing the lander out the door, and now it kind of feels like it’s pulling us along with it,” Allensworth said. “The only thing you think about for four years is getting ready for launch, and now we’re here. It’s a surreal feeling.”
As the hatches closed and the lander was locked into place in the rocket, it was the last time any human would see it on Earth.
“You just get these waves of emotion, feeling so proud and scared,” Allensworth said. “It’s this thing that you’ve loved and spent so much time working on for so many years, and it’s exciting to see it ready to launch.”
After launch
After launch, Blue Ghost will separate from the SpaceX rocket and begin a 45-day journey to the moon. Thirty days of that journey will be in Earth orbit.
“We’ll be doing land or safety, checkouts, health and safety,” Allensworth said. “It’s a lot easier, or maybe faster, to communicate with the lander in an Earth orbit.”
The lander is largely operated out of Cedar Park, but it is all autonomous as it comes around the moon’s far side and descends on March 2.
The targeted landing site is Mare Crisium, which is near Mons Latreille.
“That will be the first time in orbit where all the operators go hands-off. The lander will no longer accept commands even in that time,” Allensworth said. “All of our onboard software, vision, navigation software and cameras are operating the spacecraft to get us safely on the lunar surface.”
The lunar lander will be there one lunar day, or 14 Earth days.
“We will operate a few hours into that lunar night, which will be exciting,” Allensworth said. “We expect to see this phenomenon where the lunar regolith levitates off the lunar surface. We’re hoping to be able to capture imagery and video of that happening at the very end of our mission.”
The lander will perform experiments that include drilling, dust mitigation and X-ray imaging of Earth’s magnetic field. It also hopes to capture data during lunar sunset for future moon missions.
“They have operations where they’re gathering data in orbit, and then we go to land on the lunar surface and the rest of the payloads come to life,” Allensworth said. “Every single payload has a distinct objective, and they’re all gathering this different data to help inform us about what it’s like, what the environment is, and what it means to land, operate and exist on the moon.”
The hope is to launch the lunar lander on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during the window, but the long orbit gives it some flexibility if there is a delay.
“If something happens, there’s a weather event and we have to push to our backup day tomorrow, we will still land on March 2, our target landing date,” Allensworth said. “We’re able to adjust the trajectory in orbit to always land at the beginning of that lunar day.”
Aerospace industry booming in Texas
In November, Firefly Aerospace announced its Blue Ghost lunar lander completed rigorous testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Testing included simulated extreme conditions that Blue Ghost would face during launch, transit and mission. The lander passed tests for temperature, vibration, acoustics and electromagnetic compatibility.
The space economy has been booming in Texas over the past few years, and it has been led by companies like SpaceX, Boeing and Blue Origin. The Austin area has a handful of companies that work in space-related fields, including Firefly Aerospace.
After spending more than two decades at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Robert Ambrose is now a professor and the Texas A&M Space Institute associate director.
“I’ve been in the space industry in Texas for a long time, and it feels different,” he said. “We’re in a moment now that it feels different in a very good way.”
It is a new era for private space flight as the private space industry grows and the race for companies to reach the moon heats up.
“We’re kind of in a moment in space where things that used to be done only at a government lab are now being done in universities and in industry.,” Ambrose said.
The state recently created the Texas Space Commission and invested $350 million to foster more businesses involved in space technology in Texas.
The commission is accepting grant applications for $150 million for businesses and nonprofits participating in the Texas space industry. The grant proposals received so far seek $2.9 billion, far outweighing the amount of funding available. Ambrose said this is a sign of the robust and budding industry.
“Space is in so much of the Texas economy right now,” Ambrose said. “Oil exploration, food, any and all aspects of agriculture, transportation, medicine, construction, just so many of the heavy hitter industries in Texas are now counting on space.”
The Texas Space Commission allocated $200 million for the Texas A&M Space Institute, which university leaders broke ground on in November. Ambrose said the facility will allow them to do advanced research and simulations on landings and living on the moon and Mars. It will also play a role in research on lunar landers, rovers and other space equipment.
This is the first of three scheduled NASA missions for Firefly. The next one is scheduled for 2026 and will go to the far side of the moon.