USA Lander "Blue Ghost" has touched down gently on the moon
Around a year after the first commercial moon landing in space history, a second lunar module from a US company has touched down on Earth's satellite. The "Blue Ghost", which is about two meters high and three meters wide, successfully landed in the so-called "Mare Crisium", a lowland with a diameter of about 500 kilometers, as was shown in the livestream of the US space agency NASA and the company Firefly Aerospace. The lander will now spend around two weeks examining the moon with numerous scientific instruments.
02.03.2025, 10:40
SDA
Blue Ghost was launched in January with the help of a Falcon 9 rocket from tech billionaire Elon Musk's space company SpaceX. It took off from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida. The lunar lander "Resilience" from the Japanese start-up ispace was also on board the rocket. However, this lander is scheduled to fly to the moon on a different orbit and will not arrive there for several months.
First commercial moon landing in February 2024 with "Nova-C"
Moon landings are considered to be technically highly challenging and often go wrong. It was only in February last year that the US company Intuitive Machines achieved the first commercial landing on the moon in the history of space travel with 'Nova-C'.
Both "Nova-C" and "Blue Ghost" are part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program. With this program, the US space agency wants to gather as much knowledge as possible on its own way back to the moon comparatively cheaply and efficiently by awarding contracts for moon landings to private companies and working together with them.
