Fly Me to the Moon: Companies Are Making It Happen

It’s hard to soft land on the Earth’s satellite, but there are private firms finding a way.

Jack Daleo

Friday, June 13, 2025 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

NASA’s SCALPSS cameras capture a lunar sunset, with Earth and Venus visible on the horizon. [Courtesy: Firefly Aerospace]

Key Takeaways:

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander achieved a historic milestone as the most successful private lunar mission, delivering critical science payloads and unique imagery for NASA.
This success is a significant boost for NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which partners with private companies to test technologies and scout for the Artemis program, despite the inherent difficulty and previous failures of many commercial lunar landing attempts.
NASA is committed to its strategy of leveraging commercial partners for lunar exploration, viewing these relatively inexpensive CLPS missions as valuable opportunities to gather data and test technologies, even when failures occur, by dispersing risk across multiple providers.

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When Frank Sinatra popularized “Fly Me to the Moon,” he was probably envisioning a trip up on NASA’s Apollo Lunar Module, which to date is the only lander to deposit humans on the rocky satellite. But space, once the domain of governments and militaries, is an increasingly commercial arena.

In March, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down near the moon’s Mons Latreille, a 4-mile wide mountain rising from the lava plains of the Mare Crisium basin. Over the following lunar day (about two Earth weeks), the car-sized vehicle beamed back a treasure trove of data and, by the time it powered down, accomplished more than any private lunar lander in history.