Jan. 14 (UPI) — SpaceX officials plan to launch the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost and ispace Resilience landers during the overnight hours Wednesday with a backup launch scheduled early Thursday morning.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 booster rocket is scheduled to launch at 1:11 a.m. EST Wednesday with a backup launch available at 1:09 a.m. Thursday.
The launch will be streamed live online by SpaceX starting 90 minutes prior to the scheduled launch time.
If the launch succeeds, it will be the first mission for the Blue Ghost lander and the second attempt for the Resilience lander.
Tokyo-based ispace [sic] also is sending its Tenacious micro rover to the moon inside the Resilience lunar lander.
The Blue Ghost mission is dubbed “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and will carry 10 technology and science payloads to the moon’s surface for NASA after launching from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A in Merritt Island, Fla.
The Blue Ghost would land on the moon in early March with the 350-mile-wide Mare Crisium crater as its intended landing area after completing its 45-day journey through space.
The Resilience lander will spend between four and five months traveling to the moon before making a soft landing at an undisclosed location to deploy the Tenacious micro rover.
The Resilience lander also will carry commercial payloads that include water electrolyzer equipment, a food-production experiment, a deep space radiation probe and a commemorative ally plate developed by the Bandai Namco Research Institute.
The Tenacious micro rover will carry a “Moonhouse” model home created by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg and mounted on the rover.
The micro rover will collect rock and dust samples from the moon’s surface.
The moon mission is the second for ispace after its first attempt to send a lander to the moon failed in 2022.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster has completed four prior launches and is scheduled to land on SpaceX’s Just Read the Instructions autonomous droneship in the Atlantic Ocean after completing its fifth launch mission.
