Firefly Aerospace's lunar lander is one step closer to reaching the moon

CEDAR PARK, Texas - A Cedar Park company is another step closer to reaching the moon. Firefly Aerospace announced engineers have completed environmental testing on its Blue Ghost Lunar Lander.

Firefly's Blue Ghost Lunar Lander is now being prepared for a mid-December ground trip to Florida after spending August, September and part of October in California undergoing tests. 

Flight Director Jaxon Liebeck told FOX 7 the lander was successful in showing that it can survive a launch and operate in the harsh conditions of space.

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"Once it's separated from the rocket, and it's in Cislunar space, we can't touch it anymore. Right. So, we need to make sure that every single component is ready for the journey that it's about to take," said Liebeck.

The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander is currently back at Firefly's main building in Cedar Park where it was assembled. The next step takes the Texas made lander to Florida. Once there, it will be attached to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The goal is to launch Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral sometime in mid-January. There is a six-day launch window.

"All the engineers are extremely excited. We're all really confident in the work that we've done and us passing all of our tests at JPL, all those environmental tests, have just added to that confidence and excitement. We can't wait for the lander to ship out mid-December," said Liebeck.

"Ghost Riders in the Sky" is the name of this upcoming mission. NASA selected Firefly in 2021 to help prepare the space agency for missions to return humans to the moon.

"It's amazing. It's sort of like hard to believe in a lot of senses because most of us want to live. When we went to the moon in the 60s, and so, we only knew it from watching movies and reading stories. And to actually be contributing, going back to the moon, especially working with NASA as our customer. We're bringing their payloads back to the moon, and we're contributing just like they did back in the 60s," said Liebeck.

Blue Ghost, after blastoff, will orbit earth for 25 days. The trip to the moon will last four days. After 16 days of lunar orbit, Blue Ghost will land. 

There was a lot of attention, during assembly, to the landing gear after what happened back in February to a lander built by a Houston company. That lander, known as Odysseus, fell on its side when it came in at an angle. Liebeck is confident they will stick the landing.

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"Absolutely. We've designed footpads that have sort of hexagonal shaped tubes inside that actually soften the blow. They crumble on purpose for any type of landing, whether we're going a little bit more sideways or a little bit faster downwards. We designed it so that the lander should stay upright, and we can withstand a lot of velocity and force," said Liebeck.

Ten onboard payloads will perform experiments that include drilling into the surface and analyzing samples. There's even an experiment that may solve a mystery that dates to the Apollo days.

"One of the astronauts on the Apollo missions described that lunar dust in the nighttime actually starts to levitate, and we've never been able to prove it. And so, one thing that Firefly is trying to do at the end of the lunar day is prove and actually capture images of that dust floating as the sun goes below the horizon," said Liebeck.

From launch to landing, the entire mission is to last about two months. It will be controlled from Firefly’s "Mission Operations Center", which is in Cedar Park.

Blue Ghost will operate for 14 days while on the lunar surface.