Firefly, ispace lunar landers to share Falcon 9 launch

By Jeff Foust

Firefly, ispace lunar landers to share Falcon 9 launch

WASHINGTON -- Japanese lunar lander developer ispace has confirmed that its second mission to the moon will launch on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 as Firefly Aerospace's first lunar lander.

In an online presentation late Dec. 17 to discuss preparations for its Resilience lander, Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace, said that his company's mission would launch during a six-day window in mid-January on the same rocket launching Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 mission.

"The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will not only be carrying the ispace Resilience lander. Another private company's lander aiming to reach the moon will also be riding on the same rocket as us," he said. On-screen graphics stated that lander was Firefly's Blue Ghost.

Bloomberg first reported Dec. 11 that the two companies would share a launch based on sources familiar with the launch manifest. Previously, the companies were expected to launch their missions on separate Falcon 9 rockets, as ispace did with its first lunar lander mission two years ago. At that time, Firefly and ispace declined to confirm the report, referring questions to SpaceX.

SpaceX did not respond to questions submitted Dec. 11 about the launch. The company ignores most media inquiries.

Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, also declined to discuss if his company was sharing a launch with ispace during a Dec. 17 NASA media teleconference about the upcoming mission. "I would defer the answer to that to our launch provider, SpaceX," he said.

In the ispace presentation hours after the NASA briefing, Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace, said that Firefly's lander will separate first from the Falcon 9, after which the upper stage will perform another burn. After that, ispace's Resilience lander will be deployed.

The two spacecraft, while launched together, will take different routes to the moon. Blue Ghost will remain in Earth orbit for about 25 days before performing a translunar injection maneuver. While in orbit, controllers will commission the lander and begin collecting data from some of its payloads.

The lander will reach the moon four days after performing the translunar injection. It will spend 16 days in lunar orbit, calibrating its vision navigation system and moving into a low lunar orbit, before attempting a landing.

Resilience, by contrast, will take a much longer route, much like ispace's first lander. It will first operate in an elliptical transfer orbit, then use a lunar flyby to move into a low-energy transfer trajectory, taking it about one million kilometers away before returning to enter lunar orbit. On ispace's first mission, it took about four and half months from liftoff to its attempted landing. The spacecraft crashed during the landing because of a software flaw.

"It is not a race to the moon. For both of our first two missions, we designed a low-energy orbit to optimize payload capacity and better economize our fuel, resulting in longer transportation times," an ispace spokesperson said Dec. 12. "

The two missions also have different customers. Resilience is carrying a set of commercial payloads, primarily for Japanese companies. Among those payloads is a small rover developed by ispace.

Blue Ghost is carrying a set of 10 NASA science and technology demonstration payloads as part of the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Those payloads range from a camera to take images of the dust plume created by the lander during its descent to one designed to see if GPS and Galileo navigation signals can be used at the moon.

The only commercial payload revealed on Blue Ghost, Kim said at the NASA briefing, is a memory card carrying artwork from an organization called LifeShip. According to LifeShip's website, the payload is a "pyramid-shaped monument" whose base is slightly larger than a quarter that contains a plant seed bank, plant DNA bank and "knowledge archive."

The NASA CLPS task order for the Blue Ghost mission is valued at $101 million, up from $93 million at the time the agency awarded it in 2021. Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said at the briefing that NASA exercised options for additional data collection and updated payload interfaces that accounted for the increase, along with supply chain issues. "There was a variety of relatively small changes that, over several years, increased the contract value," he said.

Kim said he saw no potential conflicts between Firefly's lunar mission and others, including both ispace's Resilience and Intuitive Machines' IM-2 mission that is currently scheduled for launch in February. IM-2 is taking a direct route to the moon that with a landing planned about a week after launch, so its operations could overlap with Blue Ghost's.

"We call each other. We talk to each other. We root for each other," he said. "I don't foresee any conflicts in 2025."

"We wish Firefly the best of luck," the ispace spokesperson said Dec. 12, "because we have said this is not a competition but a venture to 'Expand our planet. Expand our future.'"

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