Firefly Aerospace’s successful moon lander has yielded a trove of data that scientists will pore over for years.
NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.
Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over.
But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.
On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s spacecraft die.
A quarter-million miles away, the sun had already set on Mare Crisium, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.
For the solar-powered spacecraft, the hours remaining were numbered and few.
