The Blue Ghost mission: the first private cislunar to touch down on the lunar surface and into the Moon, landing and unfurling

The Blue Ghost lander made history as the first private landers to land on the moon, according to its creator. The firm claimed on Sunday that it had softly touched down on the Moon in a stable configuration.

“With the hardest part behind us, Firefly looks forward to completing more than 14 days of surface operations, again raising the bar for commercial cislunar capabilities,” said Firefly Aerospace’s Chief Technology Officer Shea Ferring. “We want to thank NASA for entrusting in the Firefly team, and we look forward to delivering even more science data that supports future human missions to the Moon and Mars.”

Other companies have tried to land on the Moon before, but have been lost in space or crashed while attempting to touch down. Last year, the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines managed to land its Odysseus spacecraft, but it hit the ground so hard it broke a leg and tipped on its side.

The 2-metre-high Blue Ghost is now unfurling and commissioning its science payloads. Among them are a small drill and a ‘planetvac’ to burrow into and scoop the crumbly lunar dirt. Other experiments will study the stickiness of Moon dust, and a way of using electric fields to try to keep spacecraft surfaces free of such dust.