January Rideshare Mission to the Moon

This mission is more like a Transporter rideshare mission without the Transporter hardware than competitors having to work with each other. Today we learned that this January both the next Firefly Aerospace and iSpace lunar landers will start their journeys to the moon aboard the same Falcon 9. A launch date hasn't been named.

In an online presentation late Dec. 17 to discuss preparations for its Resilience lander, Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace, said that his company’s mission would launch during a six-day window in mid-January on the same rocket launching Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 mission.

“The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will not only be carrying the ispace Resilience lander. Another private company’s lander aiming to reach the moon will also be riding on the same rocket as us,” he said. On-screen graphics stated that lander was Firefly’s Blue Ghost.

Apparently both SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace seem a little reluctant to talk about it.  About a week ago, Bloomberg first reported on this, noting that they had been expected to fly on separate boosters as they did on their first flights. Both Firefly and ispace didn't answer questions about this, deferring reporters to SpaceX, who didn't answer either.  Yesterday, at a NASA teleconference about the upcoming mission, Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, declined to discuss if his company was sharing a launch with ispace. “I would defer the answer to that to our launch provider, SpaceX,” he said. 

In the ispace presentation hours after the NASA briefing, Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace, said that Firefly’s lander will separate first from the Falcon 9, after which the upper stage will perform another burn. After that, ispace’s Resilience lander will be deployed. 

In overview this really is simply a ride sharing mission to Low Earth Orbit. The two landers take completely different paths from LEO to the moon. Firefly's Blue Ghost lander will remain in Earth orbit for about 25 days before performing a translunar injection maneuver.  It's not wasted time, during the 25 days, ground controllers will commission the lander and begin collecting data from some of its payloads.

The lander will reach the moon four days after performing the translunar injection. It will spend 16 days in lunar orbit, calibrating its vision navigation system and moving into a low lunar orbit, before attempting a landing.

ispace's Resilience, will take a much longer route, much like their first lander.

It will first operate in an elliptical transfer orbit, then use a lunar flyby to move into a low-energy transfer trajectory, taking it about one million kilometers away before returning to enter lunar orbit. On ispace’s first mission, it took about four and half months from liftoff to its attempted landing. The spacecraft crashed during the landing because of a software flaw.

Clearly, they're simply completely different landers on completely different missions. The companies don't see each other as enemies or competitors, rather mutual explorers of that "strange new world" in orbit around us. 

Kim said he saw no potential conflicts between Firefly’s lunar mission and others, including both ispace’s Resilience and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission that is currently scheduled for launch in February. IM-2 is taking a direct route to the moon that with a landing planned about a week after launch, so its operations could overlap with Blue Ghost’s.

“We call each other. We talk to each other. We root for each other,” he said. “I don’t foresee any conflicts in 2025.”

The completed Blue Ghost 1 lander, at Firefly's Texas headquarters, will launch in January on a Falcon 9.