The spacecraft built and operated by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace launched in the early Monday hours from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket.

Blue Ghost's main mission will be research. It will hang out in Earth's orbit for 25 days taking measurements and waiting for the right time to fling itself to the moon. After four days in transit, Blue Ghost will spend 16 days in lunar orbit collecting more data before descending to Mare Crisium, one of the largest basins on the moon.

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander launched at 1:11 a.m. Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the SpaceX rocket before separating an hour later. The lunar lander — part of a mission known as Blue Ghost Mission 1 or Ghost Riders in the Sky — will spend 45 days in orbit and 14 days on the surface of the moon.

In a groundbreaking effort to enhance lunar exploration, NASA has launched the Blue Ghost Mission 1, featuring a suite of scientific investigations and technology demonstrations aboard a Firefly Aerospace spacecraft.

As part of its Artemis campaign, NASA is developing a series of increasingly complex lunar deliveries and missions to ultimately build a sustained human presence at the moon for decades to come. Through the agency's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative,

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost moon lander is set to launch on January 15, carrying NASA's innovative LEXI instrument to study Earth's magnetosphere and its interaction with space weather.

A SpaceX rocket carrying two commercial lunar landers took off toward space early Wednesday morning in another step toward an era of private moon exploration. This carpool to the moon carried Blue Ghost,

In a monumental step forward for private lunar exploration, SpaceX has successfully launched two groundbreaking moon landers—Blue Ghost and Resilience—aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on January 15, 2025. Developed by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based ispace,

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched two lunar landers from Florida on Wednesday for Firefly Aerospace and ispace. This video shows the launch and the separation of the Blue Ghost lander in space.