Science|Two Private Moon Landers Have Launched at Once: What to Know
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-spacex-launch-lunar-landers.html
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Two Private Moon Landers Have Launched at Once: What to Know
Robotic vehicles from Firefly Aerospace of Texas and Ispace of Japan parted ways early Wednesday after being launched on the same SpaceX rocket. Both are aiming for the lunar surface.
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two lunar landers lifted off on Wednesday.
3, 2, 1. Ignition and liftoff. Stage separation confirmed.
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 NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. Eastern time, carrying the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan.
Why did two moon landers share one rocket?
That was 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.
After the Falcon 9 rocket reached orbit, the second stage fired again for a minute so it could deploy Blue Ghost in an elliptical orbit around Earth, about an hour after launch. The rocket stage fired once more, for just a second, to adjust the orbit for the deployment of Resilience, about 1.5 hours after launch.
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