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.
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Blue Ghost carried with it NASA’s Stereo Cameras for Lunar-Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS), which took stunning photos of the “diamond ring” effect observed when the Earth partially blocks the sun during a total solar eclipse—the first time a commercial lander captured such an event from the lunar surface. SCALPSS also produced spectacular,
never-before-seen images of a lunar sunset.
But Blue Ghost wasn’t just there to snap pretty pictures. The lander carried 10 NASA science payloads, including instruments that drilled into the lunar surface to study heat flow, analyzed the moon’s exosphere, and tested technologies for future human missions. The Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), for example, tracked GPS signals on the surface for the first time—a capability that could improve navigation on future visits.
Blue Ghost’s success marks a potential turning point for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which so far has struggled to deliver results. Launched in 2018, CLPS aims to establish a competitive marketplace for private companies to fly small landers and rovers, carrying NASA technology, to the lunar surface.
But these commercial missions are also instrumental to the space agency’s Artemis program, which aims to land Americans on the moon for the first time in half a century—including the first woman and first person of color.
A human landing system (HLS) variant of SpaceX’s Starship rocket is expected to deliver four NASA astronauts to the lunar south pole as soon as mid-2027. The CLPS landers, though, will test critical Artemis technologies, scout potential landing sites, and help scientists better understand them before astronauts arrive.
“The moon is a very difficult environment, though also an important one for science and arguably national security,” said Matthew Weinzierl, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Frontier. “It’s also an imperfect but valuable venue for practicing a mission to Mars.”
Soft Landings Are Hard
Fourteen companies are eligible to receive CLPS task orders, and NASA so far has awarded 11 lunar deliveries to five companies under contracts worth up to $2.6 billion through 2028. The fixed-price agreements are end-to-end—meaning the contractor covers build and launch costs—and typically valued around $100 million. Compared to what NASA spent on the Apollo lander, about $23 billion in 2020 dollars, that’s a drop in the bucket.
“I see lots of opportunities for complementarities across the private and public sectors in space,” said Weinzierl. “Each can play to its strengths and leverage the other to achieve its own goals more effectively and efficiently. One way to think about this is that space is just a place, and like all places on Earth, its development will mean there are big roles to play for governments, businesses, and everyone.”
As the past few decades have shown, however, landing on the moon is not easy. Only five nations have done it, and for the 37 years between the former Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission and China’s Chang’e 3 mission in 2013, no spacecraft achieved a soft landing. Humans have not visited since Apollo 17 in 1972.
China has since launched three more successful Chang’e missions, while India and Japan became the fourth and fifth countries to land on the moon, respectively, in 2023. But there have also been plenty of failures, particularly on the commercial side. Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL’s Beresheet, Japanese firm ispace’s Hakuto-R, and Russian company NPO Lavochkin’s Luna 25, for example, all careened into the moon’s surface.
“Flying in space is fundamentally hard. Landing adds even more challenges,” said Bruce Betts, chief scientist for The Planetary Society. “Traditionally, there are more failures for countries or companies trying their first attempts and also more challenges and failures for missions that are operating on smaller budgets.”
That’s been the case for CLPS early on. In 2024, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander suffered a propellant leak that forced it to abort a landing, while Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus made a soft landing but tipped over shortly after. A second Intuitive Machines lander, Athena, landed on its side in March.
“The CLPS missions all contain technologies and/or science goals and/or landing sites that are part of the Artemis
exploration plans,” Betts said. “So as failures occur, NASA will have to ponder what needs to be reflown and what they can get from other sources or go without.”
Failures have not swayed NASA’s commitment to CLPS. In fact, the program is ramping up. After two launches in 2024 and two more in early 2025, five more missions are planned for this year and next. Firefly and Intuitive Machines recently earned task orders for missions as far out as 2028. And with the breakthrough success of Blue Ghost, NASA could see more firms vie for those contracts.
Weinzierl said other players will “almost certainly” come to the table.
“…Though I expect much of the demand for commercial providers to the moon will come from NASA and the national security sector, and their international counterparts,” he said.
Shifting the Strategy
Blue Ghost, CLPS, and Artemis encapsulate NASA’s revamped strategy, in contrast to the Apollo era, to lean on commercial partners as much as possible.
BryceTech, which provides official space launch data to the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation among other government customers, analyzed 259 orbital launches in 2024. Of those, commercial providers handled close to 70 percent, with SpaceX alone accounting for more than half. Per BryceTech, SpaceX also launched an astounding 83 percent of all spacecraft—mostly small satellites—that flew last year. The company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has a success rate above 99 percent across more than 450 missions.
“To grow the commercial space economy, we need to lower the costs of accessing and operating in space—what economists would think of as boosting supply—and we need to uncover ways to generate value in space—what economists would think of as boosting demand,” Weinzierl said. “The sector has been making big strides on the supply side, in launch but also in satellites and other technologies, and we’re seeing lots of attempts to deliver on the demand side as well.”
Private companies have not yet proven they can reliably deliver payloads to the moon. But for NASA’s purposes, in the short term, that may not be necessary.
“The success or failure of any one CLPS mission would have a real but limited impact on efforts to explore the moon through Artemis, since the goals were spread out among multiple missions from multiple companies,” Betts said.
In other words, NASA is not relying on any one provider to prepare for Artemis. And because CLPS contracts are relatively cheap, failures can be tolerated and even produce valuable data for future missions.
Ultimately, all of this work will pave the way for NASA to return Americans to the moon. But it remains to be seen if the space agency’s larger contractors—such as SpaceX, whose multibillion-dollar development of Starship HLS officials have cited as a reason for delays to the mission—will hold up their end of the bargain.
This column first appeared in the May Issue 958 of the FLYING print edition.
