The year in space is off to a strong start for 2025 as two lunar landers from private companies — Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based iSpace — have officially launched from Earth and are now headed for the moon.
This moment represents the first time two landers from different nations have launched on the same rocket, having taken to the sky on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during the early hours of January 15, 2025 at 1:11 a.m. EST.
The Flight of the Blue Ghost
The Firefly lander kicks off the company’s Blue Ghost series of missions, designed to deliver payload services to the surface of the moon. This inaugural Blue Ghost mission, dubbed “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” is responsible for transporting 10 NASA payloads consisting of technologies that will inspect the moon’s environment and provide findings critical to future human moon landings.
