Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Lander at JPL
Figure A
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Figure B
A full-scale model of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 lunar lander awaits transport into a clean room for environmental testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in September 2025. This structural qualification model of the spacecraft is used to prove the design is ready for space.
Figure A shows technicians and engineers readying a fixture used to attach the lander, visible in the background, to a “shaker table” that tests a spacecraft’s readiness to survive the stresses of launch.
Figure B shows the structural qualification model of the lander in a clean room at JPL before testing.
The testing was done in JPL’s Environmental Test Laboratory (ETL). The ETL team also led environmental testing for Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander in 2024 ahead of its successful soft Moon landing in March 2025.
Set to head to the Moon’s far side in 2026, Blue Ghost Mission 2 is part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. The Blue Ghost lander will touch down on the Moon’s far side, delivering its payloads that include LuSEE-Night, a radio telescope that is a joint effort by NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. A payload developed at JPL called User Terminal will test a compact, low-cost S-band radio communications system that could enable future far-side missions to talk to one another and to relay orbiters.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech