‘We learned so much that we didn’t know’: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost moon lander mission was full of surprises
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado — Lessons learned and on-the-spot surprises from the first fully successful commercial lunar lander mission bolsters the chances of long-term robotic and human operations on the moon.
The Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission 1 safely touched down on March 2 within the targeted Mare Crisium landing zone. Plopping down on its four landing legs, the spacecraft delivered ten science instruments and technology demonstration gear through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
Blue Ghost completed more than 14 days of surface operations during 346 hours of daylight, stretching its lifetime for a little over 5 hours into the super-chilly lunar night.
Center of gravity
On moon landing day, “I should have had a heart monitor. My heart was racing. But I had full confidence in the team,” recalled Jason Kim, Firefly’s Chief Executive Officer during the 40th Space Symposium held here April 7-10 by the Space Foundation at The Broadmoor.
The trek to the moon involved seven major engine burns, doing so with the company’s in-house engine technology that performed with precision, Kim said. “So we’re going to use that engine over and over.”
A key to Blue Ghost’s spot-on landing was plotting out the spacecraft’s changing mass properties, to ascertain the craft’s constantly changing center of gravity, said Kim. The team was smart enough to design the vehicle with four propellant tanks, side by side.
“So having that balanced design really helped land on the moon and stick that landing,” Kim told the audience. “It’s just what commercial companies do. They come up with creative solutions and innovation to attack the problem.” Firefly also conducted robust testing that included 500 hours of rehearsals using multiple simulations to design the system, he said.
Doubling-down on autonomy
Another checklist success was the Blue Ghost’s autonomous landing.
“There were no communication outages that we had to worry about. No latencies we had to worry about or false alarms from human error. It was just doing everything autonomously in the last hour. That’s what made it successful … but also that’s why it was so challenging,” Kim said.
As a big believer of autonomy, Kim said the company is doubling-down on that capability. “All of our spacecraft going forward are going to have some level of autonomy,” he said as “that’s where the future is going.”
Surprise finding
After landing, Blue Ghost immediately got to work.
Kim spotlighted two payloads, the LISTER drill to probe the moon’s subsurface and the Lunar PlanetVac that successfully collected, transferred, and sorted lunar regolith from the moon using pressurized nitrogen gas. It proved to be a low cost, low mass solution for future robotic sample collection.
LISTER was developed jointly by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company that also provided the Lunar PlanetVac.
The LISTER drill, plowing down an unprecedented three feet instead of a projected 10 feet, “did hit some really hard rock formations,” related Kim, “and that’s the whole discovery. We learned so much that we didn’t know.”
A surprising finding from Blue Ghost was the lunar temperature.
“Nobody has ever done noon operations on the lunar surface. We found out that it’s hotter than expected and modeled.” It actually starts sooner and it lasts longer, Kim said, observing that the temperature swings on the moon “were really, really crazy.”
Read more: Watch sparks fly as Blue Ghost lander drills into the moon (video)
Crater-generated heat
Adding to the temperature revelation was another Blue Ghost surprise finding.
“We didn’t know we were going to land next to a huge crater. The sun does hit us from one side and heats us up. But the sun reflected off one side of that crater and hit us from the back. So we actually got hotter because of that reason,” said Kim. “So there’s so much new discovery that we found and we can pass that forward to other CLPS missions.”
All the lunar landing components operated through the thermal swings, Kim said, even though they exceeded their thermal limits.
“So in the future, we know we need to model the geographic features of the moon a lot better with higher fidelity,” Kim added.
Made in the shade solution
Blue Ghost mission controllers came up with a clever “beat the heat” idea during lunar operations.
When the lander was going through lunar noon and was over-heating, Earth operators wanted to assure radio operations were maintained.
Blue Ghost’s rectangular antenna on the lander’s top deck was gimbaled in such a way as to shade the area in which the radio was contained.
“We’re from Texas so we know about shade,” Kim said. Indeed, that “made in the shade” approach got the radio back into operational configuration.
Blue Ghost’s five-hour sojourn into the lunar night also provided some takeaway messages.
“NASA wanted us to turn on the payloads, so we did, and we actually got some payload data,” Kim said. “The LISTER was the last payload standing. That was pretty spectacular.”
Survive the night
Information gleaned from the short foray into lunar night, said Kim, shows that there are ways to design lunar lander systems in a modular way to survive and thrive in the night.
The Blue Ghost batteries used on the lander exceeded expectations. Taking a modular approach, Kim said more batteries could be added in the future to sustain specific components, enabling them to live on through the cold lunar night. “We could add radiators as well,” he said.
Looking ahead, Firefly is ramping up for annual missions to the moon.
The team has begun qualifying and assembling flight hardware for Blue Ghost Mission-2, which will utilize Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander stacked on the group’s Elytra Dark orbital vehicle for operations in lunar orbit and on the far side of the moon.
Read more: Watch the sun set over the moon in epic video from private Blue Ghost lunar lander
Incremental design
That far side lander, also designed to operate for 14 days on the moon, is based on a slightly incremental design of the Blue Ghost-1 mission, Kim said. “It will require us to have a tandem orbiter, to provide communications to and from the Earth,” he said, “so we’re going to be operating two spacecraft simultaneously.”
That moon orbiter is expected to last quite a few years,” Kim noted, “so we’re already looking at putting things like high-resolution cameras on it.”
In appraising the Blue Ghost Mission-1, Kim saluted the company’s 750 employees that include the 60-person lander team’s commitment and bold approaches taken.
“For some of them, this was their first spacecraft … never having built and operated a spacecraft, but they nailed it,” said Kim. The $101 million mission called upon the team to do whatever it took to out-think the problems, he said, and keep the program on cost and schedule.
“They are unstoppable,” he concluded.
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