SpaceX plans to launch two private moon landers early Wednesday morning (Jan. 15), and you can watch the action live.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the robotic Blue Ghost and Resilience landers — built by Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based ispace, respectively — is scheduled to lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday at 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 GMT).
SpaceX and NASA will webcast the launch, and Space.com will carry the agency’s feed if it’s made available. NASA’s coverage will begin at 12:30 a.m. EST (0530 GMT).
Wednesday morning’s launch will kick off the first-ever moon mission for Firefly, which the Texas-based company calls Ghost Riders in the Sky. The flight is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program; Blue Ghost is carrying 10 science payloads to the lunar surface for the space agency.
The mission plan calls for Blue Ghost to circle Earth for 25 days, then head for the moon. The lander will spend 16 days in transit and four days in lunar orbit before making a landing attempt in Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”). Blue Ghost will then operate on the surface for two weeks, before darkness falls at its touchdown site and brings the solar-powered mission to a close.
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Resilience will be the second lander that ispace has sent to the moon. The first reached lunar orbit successfully in March 2023 but failed during its touchdown attempt a month later, after its altitude sensor got confused by the rim of a crater.
Resilience will take a more leisurely route to the moon than Blue Ghost does; the Japanese lander is expected to make its touchdown try in the Mare Frigoris (“Sea of Cold”) region, four to five months after launch. Among its payloads is a microrover named Tenacious, which will collect a sample of lunar dirt and rock as part of a contract with NASA.
The double moon launch isn’t the only SpaceX action on tap for Wednesday: The company also plans to launch the seventh-ever test flight of its Starship vehicle, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.
That liftoff is scheduled for Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 GMT). You can watch it live here at Space.com, or directly via SpaceX.