Blue Ghost's main mission will be research. It will hang out in Earth's orbit for 25 days taking measurements and waiting for the right time to fling itself to the moon. After four days in transit, Blue Ghost will spend 16 days in lunar orbit collecting more data before descending to Mare Crisium, one of the largest basins on the moon.

An illustration of a private U.S. lander on the surface of the moon built by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace. The company’s Blue Ghost lander is carrying a suite of scientific instruments to the moon, including an experiment to detect and use GPS satellite signals on the lunar surface.

Blue Ghost's final descent to the Moon is tentatively scheduled for March 2. The target landing site is in Mare Crisium, an ancient 350-mile-wide (560-kilometer) impact basin in the northeast part of the near side of the Moon.

The two landers rocketed away in the middle of the night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the latest in a stream of private spacecraft aiming for the moon.

In a monumental step forward for private lunar exploration, SpaceX has successfully launched two groundbreaking moon landers—Blue Ghost and Resilience—aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on January 15, 2025. Developed by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based ispace,