Blue Ghost

Mission specifications

Operator

Firefly Aerospace

Prime contractor

Firefly Aerospace

Launch

2025-01-15

Landing

2025-03-02

Landing site

Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille (lunar near side)

Customer

NASA-CLPS

Payload

10 NASA CLPS payloadsas of 2025-03-02^[2]

Contract value

$101.5Mas of 2025-03-02^[3]Initial 2021 CLPS Task Order to Firefly for 10 payloads

Key findings

• 1.Achieved the first fully successful commercial soft landing on the Moon, touching down upright at Mare Crisium on 2 March 2025 and delivering all 10 NASA CLPS payloads intact.
• 2.Operated the longest commercial surface mission to date — 346 hours of lunar daylight plus roughly 5 hours into the lunar night — before battery depletion, and met 100% of its mission objectives.
• 3.LuGRE recorded the first-ever GNSS fix on the lunar surface, tracking GPS and Galileo signals at a record distance of about 205,674 miles (~331,000 km) and proving satellite navigation can be extended to the Moon.
• 4.LISTER drilled roughly 1 meter (~3 ft) into the regolith — the deepest robotic planetary subsurface thermal probe — while LMS sounded the lunar mantle to depths of 700+ miles and the EDS payload demonstrated electrodynamic dust removal.
• 5.Downlinked more than 119 GB of data (51 GB of science and technology data), imaged the 14 March 2025 total lunar eclipse as a 'diamond ring' from the Moon, and earned the 2025 Collier Trophy.

Mission outcome

Blue Ghost Mission 1 ("Ghost Riders in the Sky") made Firefly Aerospace the first company ever to land a spacecraft on the Moon fully intact and complete a productive surface mission, a milestone earlier commercial attempts had missed. Landing at Mare Crisium on 2 March 2025, it ran all 10 NASA-sponsored CLPS payloads through more than 14 Earth-days of daylight and into the lunar night, returning over 119 GB of data and firsts including a lunar-surface GNSS fix and the deepest robotic thermal drill. The mission validated NASA's commercial-delivery model for Artemis-era science and was recognized with the 2025 Collier Trophy.