After Lunar Disappointments, NASA Hits the Jackpot With Blue Ghost Moon Lander

NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.Last year, that was a bad bet.The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely.

The second landed but fell over.But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic.There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s spacecraft die.A quarter-million miles away, the sun had already set on Mare Crisium, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.For the solar-powered spacecraft, the hours remaining were numbered and few....