Two Private Moon Landers Have Launched at Once: What to Know
The New York Times
Robotic vehicles from Firefly Aerospace of Texas and Ispace of Japan launched from the same SpaceX rocket early Wednesday and will soon part ways. Both are aiming for the lunar surface.
A space twofer took place early Wednesday morning — two lunar missions for the price of one rocket launch.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan.
The launch took place at 1:11 a.m. Eastern time. SpaceX has been providing coverage on the social media platform X, and NASA has a live video stream of Blue Ghost and the payloads it is carrying for the agency, which you can watch in the video player above. Ispace has been providing coverage of its Resilience lander in English and Japanese.
That is the result of fortuitous scheduling by SpaceX and not something that was planned by Firefly or Ispace.
Firefly had purchased a Falcon 9 launch to send its Blue Ghost lander to the moon. At the same time, Ispace, to save on the costs for the mission, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload on a rocket launch that was going roughly in the right direction to get its Resilience lander to the moon. That turned out to be Blue Ghost’s trip.
“It was a no-brainer to put them together,” Julianna Scheiman, the director for NASA science missions at SpaceX, said during a news conference on Tuesday.
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