After its successful lunar touchdown, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost mission could soon be joined on the moon by two more commercial spacecraft

Blue Ghost, a NASA-funded lunar lander built and operated by the private U.S. company Firefly Aerospace, has successfully touched down on the moon.

After 45 days in space—and a pulse-pounding semi-autonomous hour-long descent to its landing site—at 3:34 A.M. EST the boxy, car-sized spacecraft’s four footpad-tipped legs crunched into the surface of Mare Crisium, a vast and ancient impact basin filled with frozen lava on the moon’s northeastern near side. This marks the second time the U.S. has soft-landed on the moon since the crewed Apollo 17 mission of 1972

  • MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    Asteroid capture doesn’t seem out of the realm of near future possibility. Then we could directly mine and refine materials in space with robots, sparing the earth more climate altering pollution and saving humans from slave work in unregulated mines.