Blue Ghost Mission 2 prepares for its return to the moon

CEDAR PARK, Texas - A Cedar Park company is working on a return trip to the moon for later this year.

What they're saying:

Inside the "clean room" at Firefly Aerospace in Cedar Park, technicians spent Wednesday morning inspecting components that are going to the moon. They're part of the Blue Ghost 2 Lunar Lander. It is a flight that’s coming together as the Artemis II flyby of the moon is coming to an end.

"It's sort of the moment before the big plunge for everyone. We're excited about watching the Artemis program, but it's really raising the stakes for everyone about what's going to come next," said Kevin Scholtes, a Future Systems Architect at Firefly.

Scholtes designed several of the systems for the Blue Ghost 2 mission. It’s set to launch later this year, but an official date has not yet been announced.

"Mission 2 is a science mission. It's focused on doing discovery work for the cosmic dark ages. So, we are helping deliver a payload to the surface of the moon that's going to be doing radio astronomy, looking at the very origins of the universe, down to the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. So really what we're doing is showing the world what it means to do science on the moon, robotically, which should really raise the bar on expectations of what we can do on the Moon with humans," said Scholtes.

Firefly, which is part of NASA’s effort to build a lunar base, is the first private company to successfully land on the moon. Amanda Woodard was on that team last year, but there's been little time to sit back and appreciate the win.

"It's just been buzzing, like we call this building the Hive for a reason, because we are constantly go, go, go, let's not just rest on our claim to fame for mission one. We are ready to do it again, to prove that it wasn't a fluke. And it is real, it is really buzzing," said Woodard.

Blue Ghost 2, in a way, will not be locked down to one spot on the far side of the moon. A small rover is going along and once deployed from the lander, it will travel the lunar surface.

"We're funding it through NASA, on what's called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, which means that we're expected to take commercial providers to the moon. So this rover from MBRSC out of the United Arab Emirates is a proof case of that for a commercial rover capability. They'll help us out by taking photos of the lander and giving some perspective on the locale. But overall, what's really important here is proving that there is an industry and an economy for taking payloads to the moon," said Scholtes.

What's next:

The Firefly team is also looking beyond the upcoming mission by expanding the clean room at the Cedar Park Hive. That project is in response to a request from NASA to ramp up for monthly moon missions.

The last human to walk on the moon is buried here in Austin at the Texas State Cemetery. Gene Cernan, flew on Apollo 17 in 1972, and in an interview before his death, Cernan said he made a commitment to Neil Armstrong that they would not stop, until that One Small Step becomes One Giant Leap. 

Firefly and other aerospace companies are trying to fulfill that promise. Apollo 7 Astronaut Walt Cunningham is buried next to Cernan.