Fire Fly Aerospace became the first commercial company to make the picture perfect landing on the moon in early Sunday, and touched it A The ancient basaltic plain to contract $ 101 million with Nisa, named Marie Crymium.
Lunar Lander, called the Blue Gast, settled on the moon level on CST (3:34 am est; 08:34 UTC) at 2:34 pm. A few dozen engineers in the mission control room of the firefly monitored real -time data a quarter million miles away.
“You got stuck in the subcontinent, we’re on the moon!” Lander’s chief engineer Will Cogan announced for a firefly team gathered in the Lenner in Texas, north of Austin. In an event in the middle of the night for under the road, firefly employees, their families, and VIPs, the crowded clapped the champagne.
“They have just been fired in the mission control room,” said Jason Kim, CEO of the firefly. “They were all just declining, holding it all because it was calm, accumulated and cool all the time. Everything was a clockwork, even when we landed. When we saw that everything was stable and straight, they were fired.”
The Blue Past of the firefly, named a type of firefly, became a second trading company that put the spacecraft on the moon, and the first person to make a troubled landing. Intuitive machinesWorking under NAS NASA contractB (b (b (In February 2024, his Odisis spacecraft landed on the moon, but the Lander threw a leg of him and pointed it. Odis returned photos and some scientific figures from the lunar level for a week, but off -killer landing reduced the mission.
Like a firefly, intuitive machines are headquarters in Texas. As a result, the first two commercial moon’s landlors from the United States come from the Lone Star State.
Kim told a crowd of supporters at the company’s watch party, “We got some moon dust on our shoes.”
The Blue Gust Lander of the Flight was seen here at the company’s spacecraft manufacturing facility at Cider Park in Texas.
Credit: Stephen Clark/ARS Ticenica
It was a long, weird journey for the firefly, based in 2014 by a former Space X engineer named Tom Marksk. The company survived bankruptcy and emerged with a new name and new ownership by a Ukrainian businessman named Max Polikov. The US government forced US investors to controversial sale in 2022, citing national security concerns. Last year, The government did the back trackAnd Policov and his companies released all the restrictions imposed on them.
Now a private equity firm is owned by the AE industrial partners, the firefly has successfully flown its small satellite launcher and is producing medium -sized lift rockets in partnership with the Northop Gromman. With the Blue Goast, the firefly shot for the moon, a business area in which the company’s founders did not imagine a decade ago.
A significant moment
Landing on Sunday shows that NASA is starting to receive money with a initiative set up seven years ago to set a line of robotic advance missions for the agency’s artemic lunar program. CLPs, or commercial lunar pay load services, the program is designed to provide a cost -effective method of costing science and technology to reach the moon, while developing a lunar transportation industry to support the needs of NASA and potential commercial consumers.