Cedar Park's Firefly Aerospace successfully gets lunar lander into space
Blue Ghost Lunar Lander headed to space
A company out of Cedar Park launched a spacecraft on the SpaceX Falcon 9 on Wednesday.
CEDAR PARK, Texas - Among the starry nights of Central Texas this week is a little bit of home.
A company out of Cedar Park launched a spacecraft on the SpaceX Falcon 9 on Wednesday.
The launch from Cape Canaveral was a success.
"The work is just getting started, and we've got an exciting mission in front of us, about sixty days in front of us, and we're digging in hard in all that work," said Scholtes.
What is the Blue Ghost Lunar Lander?
Blue Ghost Lunar Lander prepares for trip to moon
The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander was built in Cedar Park by Firefly Aerospace. It’s now in Cape Canaveral, Florida, being prepared for a mid-January blast off to the moon.
The backstory:
The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander soared out of the Florida coastline and into space, shining as bright as a Central Texas firefly in the summertime.
"It's an incredible privilege, and it's hard to fully understand the extent of that impact," said Kevin Scholtes, the future systems architect at Firefly Aerospace.
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While the spacecraft launched from Florida, the control room was at Firefly Aerospace’s Cedar Park headquarters. Firefly Aerospace also built the lunar lander.
"It's kind of an unusual feeling to be able to look around and say here's this thing we read about in history books with the Apollo program that sounded like a massive national undertaking, and what do you know, there's a small start-up company that's capable of doing that in my own backyard," said Scholtes.

What's next:
The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander will spend the next 45 days orbiting the Earth before touching down on the moon for two weeks.
It will collect data for more rocket science, too.
"A lot of investigations into the material properties of the moon, lots of investigations into electromagnetic properties of the moon and of the earth as well," said Scholtes.
NASA will use this data for projects that are simply out of this world.
Take the Artemis Mission: NASA's quest to establish a long-term presence on the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars.
NASA hopes this mission will also break barriers by sending the first woman and person of color to the moon.
But before all of that, it starts at home in Cedar Park.
"It's a tremendous feeling of satisfaction to get a chance to prove our capability and to demonstrate that we are worthy of the responsibility that we've been entrusted with and to see this mission through to the end and see what kind of exciting data we can get back," said Scholtes.
The Source: Information from interviews conducted by FOX 7 Austin's Lauren Rangel