NASA’s latest Commercial Lunar Payload Program (CLPS) mission, “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” developed by Firefly Aerospace (Cedar Park, TX), was successfully launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Centers’s Launch Complex 39A in the early morning hours of January 15, 2025. This spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, is the first of three planned Ghost Riders spacecraft destined for lunar landings.
Music buffs will recall that “Ghost Riders in the Sky” is a 1948 Stan Jones composition, hailed by some as the greatest Western song of all time. The song, first popularized by a 1949 Vaughn Monroe recording, tells a folk tale of a cowboy who in a vivid dream is haunted by red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the cowboy spirits.
So why does it seem appropriate to name a mission to the Moon after Ghost Riders? Well, there are a myriad of challenges associated with lunar exploration and habitat, kind of like the danger of those thundering cattle in the cowboy dream. Each of those challenges needs to be better understood and addressed if “taming” the lunar surface for human activity is to be achieved.
That’s the goal of CLPS contractors and missions, one of which is Firefly’s Ghost Riders, by sending small robotic landers and rovers to the Moon. But the role of CLPS goes beyond simply supporting NASA’s Artemis Program to settle the Moon, and might include other eventual commercial activity such as mining, energy extraction, and low-gravity investigations and experiments.
NASA and a variety of commercial companies have long been interested in potential lunar resources. NASA had initiated the Resource Prospector and the Viper Programs in the last decade and would have eventually put exploration robotic rovers on the lunar surface, but both were cancelled due to insufficient funding. On the other hand, under the CLPS Program, it is believed that lunar recourses can economically be explored. Firefly joins Astrobotic Technology and Intuitive Machines that will have sent CLPS payloads to the Moon. The competitive nature of the CLPS program is expected to reduce the cost of lunar exploration, accelerate a robotic return to the Moon, sample return, resource prospecting in the south polar region, and promote innovation and growth of related commercial industries.
This first Ghost Riders’ spacecraft, Blue Ghost, does not derive its name from the Ghost Riders song as one might speculate. Rather it is named after a species of firefly found in the eastern and central United States.
Blue Ghost is loaded with ten payloads that together total 207 lbs. Five of these involve regolith, the term coined to describe the dusty “topsoil” of the lunar surface.
Scientists and engineers know from the Apollo missions that the regolith is annoying if not rather nasty. It stuck to the Apollo astronauts clothing, is easily kicked up, and is microscopically sharp … capable of sandblasting hard surfaces. So how are camera lenses kept clean? One the Blue Ghost’s experiments is the Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS), an active dust mitigation technology that uses electric fields to move dust from surfaces and to prevent dust accumulation on surfaces. The EDS, which can lift, transport, and remove particles from surfaces with no moving parts, will be demonstrated for the first time on the lunar surface. This technology will show the feasibility of self-cleaning glass and thermal radiator surfaces.
Other payloads related to regolith are: 1) The Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) will determine how lunar regolith sticks to a range of materials exposed to the Moon’s environment during landing and lander operations; 2) The Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) is designed to characterize the structure and composition of the Moon’s mantle by studying electric and magnetic fields; 3) The Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) is designed to acquire lunar regolith from the surface and transfer it to other instruments that would analyze the material or put it in a container that another spacecraft could return to Earth; 4) Stereo CAmeras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS 1.1) will capture video and still images of the area under the lander from when the engine plume first disturbs the lunar surface through engine shutdown. Long-focal-length cameras will determine the pre-landing surface topography. Photogrammetry will be used to reconstruct the changing surface during landing. Understanding the physics of rocket exhaust on the regolith, and the displacement of dust, gravel, and rocks is critical to understanding how to best avoid kicking up surface materials during the terminal phase of flight/landing on the Moon and other celestial bodies.
Just as Global Positioning System (GPS) is now pretty much essential to most Americans, so too will GPS be important to locating positions on the Moon. Blue Ghost’s Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) is based on GPS. LuGRE will continue to extend the reach of GPS signals and, if successful, be the first to discern GPS signals at lunar distances.
Just as the Resource Prospector and Viper Programs had been intended to drill down into lunar surface, Blue Ghost will attempt to bore 7-10 feet into the lunar regolith using a compressed gas to investigate the Moon’s thermal properties at different depths. It will measure heat flow from the interior of the Moon.
Solar winds and radiation are expected to be major impediments to human beings on the Moon. The Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) will capture images of the interaction of Earth’s magnetosphere with the flow of charged particle solar winds from the Sun. The Reconfigurable, Radiation Tolerant Computer System (RadPC) aims to demonstrate a radiation-tolerant computing technology. Due to the Moon’s lack of atmosphere and magnetic field, radiation from the Sun will be a challenge for electronics. This investigation also will characterize the radiation effects on the lunar surface.
Though the journey from the launch pad to the Moon is only a 3-4 day trip, don’t expect Blue Ghost to settle into a landing site within the next few days. Before heading toward the Moon, Blue Ghost will orbit the Earth for 25 days, and when it arrives at the Moon it will orbit for another 16 days before lowering to the lunar surface in the northeast sector of the visible surface of the Moon. The lunar landing is expected to occur about 45 days after blast-off from Launch Complex 39A.
How long will Blue Ghost operate after landing? That landing will be timed so that it will arrive at the beginning of the area’s roughly two week daytime, permitting Blue Ghost’s solar panels to power those ten payloads aboard. Once that area endures its roughly two-week period in darkness, there is some doubt that the spacecraft will be brought back to life again.
