A little while ago, ispace’s Hakuto-R2 Resilience and Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon landers blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. After about 1 hour and 5 minutes, Blue Ghost successfully separated from the rocket’s upper stage, and about 27 minutes later, Resilience separated as well. The two landers will travel on very different routes to attempt to land on the Moon a few months apart. This is ispace’s second mission, after the first failed on April 25, 2023.

The mission called Hakuto-R Mission 1 was ispace’s first attempt to land on the Moon, which failed due to an error in the onboard computer’s altitude assessment during the descent maneuver to the Moon’s surface. Mission 2 is supposed to have improved onboard systems to avoid the problems that led to the first lander’s crash. The name Resilience for the Hakuto-R2 lander was chosen precisely to emphasize the resilience of the ispace program.

Firefly Aerospace has a contract with NASA awarded in 2021 to deliver payloads to the Moon as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, tied to the Artemis program. This mission, called Blue Ghost M1, represents the company’s first attempt at a Moon landing.

The Blue Ghost lander is equipped with various instruments and carries the Next Generation Lunar Retroreflectors (NGLR), a new generation retroreflector that should be added to the ones already placed on the Moon surface to reflect laser beams from Earth used to precisely measure the Moon distance. In this case, the purpose is also to collect and send various data on the Moon’s interior.

The two companies planned very different routes for their landers. That’s why they separated almost half an hour apart from the Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage, which performed a brief extra engine burn to push Resilience on its course. For this reason, Blue Ghost is scheduled to attempt a Moon landing on March 2, while Resilience is scheduled to take four to five months to reach the Moon.