Firefly Blue Ghost : Mission 1 : January 2025 and forward (landing Mar. 2)

[Phil Stooke]

The Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium is having its spring meeting now, and there is a lot of coverage of the recent CLPS missions (plus ispace's Resilience). See some sessions on Youtube, linked from here:  https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/Events/Agenda/index.php?id=611    (go to near the end of the day 1 and day 2 sessions, about 2 hours in)

[spacexplorer]

You have to have enough thrust to slow down

Apollo missions stopped in mid air and landed in freefall, as for plans (that's what the "contact light" was for: "once one of the booms on the legs touches the ground, cut off engine and wait").

[daedalus1]

You have to have enough thrust to slow down

Apollo missions stopped in mid air and landed in freefall, as for plans (that's what the "contact light" was for: "once one of the booms on the legs touches the ground, cut off engine and wait").

The contract light was to indicate it was down and ok to cut decent engine.

[Hobbes-22]

On Apollo 11, Armstrong kept the engine running until touchdown. Some of the other missions switched the descent engine off at the contact light.
In the last phase of landing the thrust:weight ratio was 1:1: the LM hovered, or moved up/down slowly.

[litton4]

You have to have enough thrust to slow down

Apollo missions stopped in mid air and landed in freefall, as for plans (that's what the "contact light" was for: "once one of the booms on the legs touches the ground, cut off engine and wait").

The contract light was to indicate it was down and ok to cut decent engine.

...and were the first words spoken from the moon.....

[StraumliBlight]

Three months ago today, our team of Fireflies made history as the 1st commercial company to successfully land on the Moon! Watch Blue Ghost descend from four different camera angles and relive that incredible moment when we softly touched down on the lunar surface.

[spacexplorer]

You have to have enough thrust to slow down

Apollo missions stopped in mid air and landed in freefall, as for plans (that's what the "contact light" was for: "once one of the booms on the legs touches the ground, cut off engine and wait").

The contract light was to indicate it was down and ok to cut decent engine.

No, this is an urban legend: when contact light was triggered, lander was still 1.5 meters above ground.

[Hobbes-22]

Several of the missions did switch off the descent engine when the contact light came on. The LM was built for this.
On Apollo 11, Armstrong kept the engine running until they were on the ground. As a result, the landing legs only compressed minimally and the ladder ended pretty far above the surface.

[catdlr]

How to LAND on the Moon in 2025 (ft. Firefly)

Jul 9, 2025
Before only NATIONS successfully landed on the moon... In 2025 that changed. On the day, we captured the nerves, risk, and story of how (in just 3 years) Firefly Space did it.

This video is sponsored by Flow Engineering — the modern AGILE engineering platform used by a plethora of other companies I've featured in the channel!

[catdlr]

Firefly Aerospace@Firefly_Space
·
Blue Ghost Mission 1 lives on! Following our historic Moon landing and operations, the team earned a $10M
@NASA contract addendum for additional data collected beyond our initial contractional requirements.

Article:  Firefly Aerospace Receives $10 Million NASA Contract Addendum for Blue Ghost Mission 1 Lunar Data

https://twitter.com/Firefly_Space/status/1970111963297681612

[Phil Stooke]

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ae0465

Results starting to appear in journals. This one is open access and on the LISTER drill. The data will be out in PDS soon.

[Phil Stooke]

The Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) meeting in November was pushed into January by the shutdown. Its abstracts are here:

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/leag2025/technical_program/

and this one is about the LMS on the Firefly BGM1 mission from last year: 

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/leag2025/pdf/5063.pdf

It contains the image I have cropped here which shows how the tethered sensor hit the surface and bounced or rolled out to its final position.

Still waiting for that data. Should be soon.