New moon Race: Private sector takes the lead

This year will be a landmark year for lunar exploration, with three moon landings scheduled in quick succession that demonstrate humanity's renewed enchantment with our closest celestial neighbour.

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This week marks the first of these touchdowns, with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost successfully landing on the lunar surface in Mare Crisium. This milestone is followed by plans for Japan’s M2/Resilience mission and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission before June. These landings signal a new era of lunar exploration driven by private-sector innovation, international collaboration, and an ambitious space programme.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has achieved a soft landing on Mare Crisium, a vast basaltic plain on the moon’s near side. An upright and stable landing makes Firefly the first private company to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over — a feat where only five countries have been successful: Russia, the US, China, India, and Japan.