Touchdown For The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Last week, a robotic lander touched down on the surface of the moon, the blue. Ghost. It’s carrying a bunch of NASA science experiments. But the lander itself wasn’t built by NASA or any other space agency. It was built by Firefly Aerospace, a company based in Texas. It’s the first commercially built spacecraft to successfully land on the moon.

Joining me now to talk about the mission, how it got there, and what it’ll be doing on the moon are my guests. Kevin Scholtes is the future systems architect for Firefly Aerospace, in Texas, and Dr. Nicky Fox is the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, which is wrangling 10 experiments onboard this lander. Welcome to Science Friday.

NICKY FOX: Thank you.

KEVIN SCHOLTES: Thank you for having us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Kevin, let’s start with you. How did this project begin? Did it feel audacious to say, oh yeah, we can go to the moon?

KEVIN SCHOLTES: Yeah, absolutely. It was definitely an audacious kind of undertaking. When we started this project off, we hadn’t yet launched our first alpha launch vehicle. And taking this on seemed like its own– forgive the strain metaphor, but moonshot for our company.

And then once we got into it, we suddenly realized, holy cow, this is actually something we can pull off. This might actually be something that we can keep building on and taking further. And it’s been just a surprise every step of the way.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What was the biggest challenge? What was the thing that kept people up at night?

KEVIN SCHOLTES: Oh, that changed. I think that changes daily. Early on, we started this project close to the beginning of COVID. So think of the kind of office environment that you have to be in order to work on a lunar lander with other people. And all of a sudden, everyone’s having to work remote. And that’s a huge challenge early on.

And then, honestly, war in Ukraine limited some of our supply chain choices. And we had to pivot on that as well. And then I think just you look at the history of landing on the moon or landing on any planetary body, and it should stop you in your tracks to think about what it is you’re about to attempt, considering how few attempts are successful.

So every day, every test campaign, it was a constant focus. How is our propulsion going to perform? How is our vision navigation going to perform? What are the things we haven’t thought of? A couple of months before we launched, our chief engineer went around the office and gave everyone a hypothetical, “it’s two months after our mission. We were a terrible failure. Tell me why,” just to get the juices going and saying, what’s the last thing that we didn’t think of yet?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Nicky, there’s a bunch of NASA science on this lander. Tell me about some of the experiments.

NICKY FOX: Oh yeah, we’re really excited. We actually have 10 instruments on the lander, all working beautifully. I could talk about all of them, obviously, but maybe if I group them. This one’s really looking at the characteristics of the regolith, so of the surface of the moon.

On the way down, we had an instrument called scalps, that is actually looking at how the rocket plume as the lander was descending, how it interrupts and interferes with the regolith, and how the regolith respond. So we’re looking at how the dust is kicked up as the Lander comes down, so that we can sort of see how, if you had sensitive equipment, and you were bringing another lander down, what is that keep-out zone that we would need to do? And that helps us model as we start to think about larger and larger landers.

We also have an instrument that is looking at how sticky the regolith is. So once it’s kicked up and it lands, how hard is it to actually move it? How much does it adhere to surfaces? And then we have an electrodynamic dust shield instrument, which is kind of– it’s going to be putting an electric current through some of the materials to see if you can actually shake off that regolith. So that’s a nice grouping of three of them that are really characterizing the lunar surface for us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So a lot of interest in the dust is what I’m hearing.

NICKY FOX: Yes. I mean, we learned from the Apollo mission just how tacky that regolith was. It stuck to everything. It stuck to the spacesuits, to the boots, to everything. And it does get into your lungs and can cause some health issues. So we really want to make sure that we are protecting our future astronauts as they return to the moon with the Artemis program.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How do you make the call, Nicky, for which instruments you’re going to send on which lander?

NICKY FOX: That is a really great question. So most of the time, we make it by the actual destination of the lander, so this particular one going to Mare Crisium, which was an area that was formed by an asteroid impact. And so it flooded the basin with balsatic lava, which is a very dark lava and which is actually commonly found here on Earth. And so because we were going there, we planned the instruments that make sense to go to that location.

We do have some instruments that are destination agnostic. They’ll do great science wherever they go. So they can take advantage of any of them. But a lot of them are just selected because it is the best place for them to go.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Nicky, talk me through the advantages, disadvantages, of using commercial flight versus something in-house.

NICKY FOX: Well, actually, there’s a couple of reasons. So one is, the main goal of the eclipse program is to actually create a sustainable lunar economy. And we want to do that by really incentivizing and supporting American companies to be able to do these daring, amazing things. So we have companies often that haven’t done any real space work before. So it’s really exciting for us.

I mean, we want to be able to focus on the science. We want to be able to put more instruments on the surface of the moon, more instruments into space for less money. And so, honestly, we want to end up just paying for this as a delivery service, just as you would ship a package. We want to ship packages up to the moon on a very regular basis.

FLORA LICHTMAN: MoonPS.

NICKY FOX: Yes, absolutely. So it’s incentivizing and stimulating the American companies to be able to do this for us and also, to just do it in a more efficient and economical way.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Kevin, are you designing the spacecraft around the science?

KEVIN SCHOLTES: The way the spacecraft is designed, it’s mostly around the spacecraft itself. Because as Nicky was mentioning, we’re trying to build a service. And the eventual goal– I mean, we’re still iterations away from this. The eventual goal is to get to the point where you can have that “if it fits, it ships” kind of approach with payloads, where we’re able to incorporate them on a fairly standard kind of spacecraft.

And as a commercial entity, our big push is to make the spacecraft as repeatable in its build as possible. There’s huge cost savings in that. There’s huge engineering savings. If we can prove that the system works, why customize it more than we need to each time around? So there’s quite a bit of it that’s standardized around the idea of, “I’m building a lander. What do I need a lander to do?”

And then there is some customization that we have to provide for the individual payloads, based on their unique sensitivities. So what we’re learning about, as we take on this great experiment of commercial payload services, is there are certain kinds of interfaces that are kind of hard to standardize when it comes to things like electromagnetic interference or mounting locations. Some payloads want to be on top of the lander looking back at Earth. Some payloads want to be underneath the lander, getting dirty with the regolith as the engines are firing. And it’s kind of hard to anticipate and standardize that.

So there’s a fair amount of customization that happens. But it’s nowhere near to the extent that you might expect for a Mars lander mission, for example, where really, the science comes first, and every engineering decision has to trace back to the science investigation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to talk a little bit more about your business model. I mean, who do you imagine are your customers?

KEVIN SCHOLTES: That’s a great question. I use the term “great experiment.” And that’s kind of where we’re going into this with, is that as we look out at the market for what could happen at the moon, there’s a whole slew of possibilities. And it’s a real challenge to predict the future. I mean, the one thing that you can guarantee about predicting the future is that you’ll be wrong.

But there’s promise in terms of some materials resources on the moon. There’s promise in the world of things like helium-3 and its use in refrigerants for quantum computing and its use for profusion. There’s promise in the science activity and being an ancillary logistical support for a sustained, permanent human presence on the moon. I mean, those pesky humans, they need food. They need water. They need things to read.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We’re so needy, yeah.

KEVIN SCHOLTES: The logistics supply chain itself is kind of a huge potential market if we’re going to have a continuous presence there. But then there’s all sorts of unknowns as well. And as an analogy in this, I think back in the ’60s and ’70s, when we were first putting satellite constellations around the Earth, the idea of using a satellite to broadcast TV was considered so niche and esoteric. Like, why would you ever do that? Who except the most wealthiest of people would ever do something like that?

And then, lo and behold, the ’80s and ’90s, that is the largest business for satellites. And it was completely unexpected. So part of this is getting out there, figuring out what’s real and what isn’t, and figuring out, What kind of customers might come along that we weren’t even thinking of before? and then pivoting from there.

And along the way, from a commercial business standpoint, it’s an incredible diversification for us, in that regardless of what kind of economy emerges at the moon, we’re building out capabilities that are applicable across the solar system.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is there a target cost you’re going for, like oh, we’ll ship whatever you want to the moon for $19.95 a pound?

KEVIN SCHOLTES: I mean, the goal for commercial competition is always finding the lower cost. So a lot of our costing is competitive in nature. And we’re driving for the best value for NASA. That’s really the major goal there. I don’t know that I’d be able to give you a specific range that we’re at right now, but the goal is always lower.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Nicky, it seems like a really busy time for moon science. Thursday, another private lander called Athena made it to the moon, but was on its side. And the mission ended after its batteries ran out. Last week, another moon-oriented mission launched the lunar trailblazer, which is an orbiter. It’s had some communications problems after launch. What’s going on with that now?

NICKY FOX: Yes, we definitely have had some communication problems. We’re using as many resources as we can to image the spacecraft and figure out why it’s tumbling right now, and so hoping that it will reorient itself so that it’s in the right configuration, and we can actually establish communications with it and send some commands. The team is fantastic, believe me. If anyone can bring back the spacecraft, it’s the lunar trailblazer team, so just wishing them lots and lots of luck in trying to recover this beautiful little mission.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Nicky, when will we start seeing science roll in from Blue Ghost?

NICKY FOX: It is already rolling in. My goodness, Blue Ghost didn’t waste any time. They were taking data, as Kevin noted, some of our instruments wanting to get dirty to actually be able to image those plumes. So a lot of the instruments were on during the landing even. And then as soon as possible, we’ve been turning on instruments. Some of them have already achieved all of their science goals.

Obviously, we’re going to keep going to get bonus science, just trying to get more science for our money, as always. But yeah, we’re already seeing science rolling in and beautiful images. And if you have not yet seen the unbelievable sunrise, lunar sunrise, image from Blue Ghost, then please go look for it. Because it is stunning.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love that. Thank you to you both for joining me today.

KEVIN SCHOLTES: Absolutely. Thank you for having us.

NICKY FOX: Thanks.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Kevin Scholtes is the future systems architect for Firefly Aerospace, in Texas. And Dr. Nicky Fox is the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. And you can see that lunar sunrise picture Nicky mentioned at sciencefriday.com/lunar.

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