Firefly Scales Composite Lunar Lander Production With $144M NASA Moon Mission Contract
Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract will deliver next Blue Ghost mission in ≈2 years, helping to support NASA’s Moon Base and multiple Moon landings/year.
Source | Firefly Aerospace
Firefly Aerospace (Cedar Park, Texas, U.S.) announced a $144 million NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract to deliver a rapid mission to the Moon with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, which uses composites in the structural panels, support struts and lander legs. This marks the company’s sixth contracted lunar mission to date with the goal of demonstrating repeatable access to the lunar surface on an accelerated timeline.
Targeted to launch in 2028, Firefly will design, build, test and deliver the mission in approximately 2 years, half the time of the historic Blue Ghost Mission 1, by using its proven Blue Ghost lander design and operations. For this mission, Blue Ghost will return to the Moon’s near side, similar to where Mission 1 landed, and deliver three NASA science instruments, including the laser retroreflector array (LRA) to enable precision laser ranging, the linear energy transfer spectrometer (LETS) to measure the radiation environment and the stereo cameras for lunar plume surface studies (SCALPSS) to further study plume-surface interactions during touchdown.
“This latest mission award will help prove that commercial lunar delivery can be rapid, repeatable and reliable — exactly what’s needed to enable a permanent lunar presence and support NASA’s Moon Base initiative and Artemis program,” says Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. “With amplified demand signal from NASA and commercial customers, Firefly extended its growth strategy from one annual Moon landing to multiple a year. We’re now using our proven lander, operational maturity, and expanded production capacity to meet this demand.”
Firefly is leveraging valuable flight data from its first successful lunar mission to enhance its Blue Ghost landers with optimized thermal systems and advanced operational procedures based on real mission experience. These incremental improvements are being integrated into a build-to-print lander, enabling faster production cycles without the need for extensive redesign between missions.
“We’re not reinventing the wheel with each mission,” adds Ray Allensworth, vice president of spacecraft at Firefly Aerospace. “We’ve templated our Blue Ghost design to cut our lunar delivery time in half, and we’re not stopping there. We’ll continue to improve that timeline as we scale up spacecraft production, execute on multiple missions and apply lessons learned from each mission.”
Following the company’s first successful Moon landing, Firefly’s other upcoming lunar missions include deliveries to the Moon’s far side, Gruithuisen Domes and south pole with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander and Elytra orbiter as well as a recent subcontract to deliver NASA’s MoonFall drones above the lunar south pole with Elytra. Each vehicle will be built and assembled at Firefly new expansive spacecraft facility and cleanroom near Austin, Texas, enabling a more robust production line of lunar landers and orbital vehicles.
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