Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 (Ghost Riders in the Sky)
Firefly's Blue Ghost lander launched 2025-01-15, landed in Mare Crisium on 2025-03-02 and operated for more than 14 days; among its NASA payloads, Honeybee Robotics' Lunar PlanetVac collected, transferred and sorted lunar soil with pressurized gas. This was a sample-collection technology demonstration, not resource extraction or processing.
Objective. Demonstrate pneumatic collection, transfer and sieving of lunar regolith (Lunar PlanetVac), a technology NASA says could benefit the search for water, helium and other resources.
Facts
- Kind
- Spacecraft
- Mission type
- Technology demonstration
- Target
- MoonMare Crisium (near Mons Latreille)
- Launch
- 2025-01-15
- Launch vehicle
- SpaceX Falcon 9
- Phase
- EndedFirefly's live-updates page (2025-03-17 entry) and NASA Flight Opportunities page on Lunar PlanetVac results.
- Outcome
- SuccessBasis: operator statement
- Why it is included
- Stated resource objective
Outcome statement (operator statement)
Firefly met 100% of our mission objectives for Blue Ghost Mission 1 after performing the first fully successful commercial Moon landing on March 2, completing more than 14 days of surface operations (346 hours of daylight)
Participants
Operators, payload owners, carriers and customers are recorded separately.
| Organization | Role |
|---|---|
| Firefly Aerospace | Operator |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Customer |
| Honeybee Robotics | Payload builder |
| SpaceX | Launch provider |
Resources and evidence
| Resource | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Regolith | Sampled |
Dated events
- 2019-07-01
NASA selects Honeybee's PlanetVac for a CLPS flight
NASA selected PlanetVac (principal investigator Kris Zacny, Honeybee Robotics), a technology to acquire and transfer lunar regolith, among 12 lunar science and technology investigations for CLPS flights; it later flew as Lunar PlanetVac on Blue Ghost Mission 1.
Sources (2)
PlanetVac is a technology for acquiring and transferring lunar regolith from the surface to other instruments that would analyze the material, or put it in a container that another spacecraft could return to Earth. The principal investigator is Kris Zacny of Honeybee Robotics
Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) was deployed on Blue Ghost’s surface access arm and successfully collected, transferred, and sorted lunar soil
Open evidence gaps
- Peer-reviewed LPV results paper (Zacny et al., 2026, doi 10.1007/s44461-026-00012-z; Springer page bot-walled) not fetched.
Sources
7 sourcesFirefly met 100% of our mission objectives for Blue Ghost Mission 1 after performing the first fully successful commercial Moon landing on March 2, completing more than 14 days of surface operations (346 hours of daylight)
Lunar PlanetVac for example successfully collected, transferred, and sorted lunar soil from the Moon using pressurized nitrogen gas.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center launch complex 39A at 1:11 am EST, and Blue Ghost is on its way to orbit!
The technology on this CLPS payload could benefit the search for water, helium, and other resources and provide a clearer picture of in situ materials available to NASA and its partners for fabricating lunar habitats and launch pads
It's designed to efficiently collect and transfer lunar soil from the surface to other science instruments or sample return containers without reliance on gravity.
Lunar PlanetVac successfully collected, transferred, and sorted lunar soil from the Moon
The Lunar PlanetVac will demonstrate pneumatic sample collection of lunar regolith by collecting and sorting regolith within its sample collection chamber.