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

  • @stickly
    16•18 hours ago

    Fuck that, keep all private enterprise out of space. Polluting our orbit with useless satellites was bad enough.

    Do we need to push our unsustainable growth onto lifeless celestial bodies? Why burn our limited resources on astronaut-cosplay rollercoasters for billionaires? Can’t they just go die in a submarine like normal people?

    • @SloppyPuppy
      4•15 hours ago

      That submarine also polluted. The ocean nonetheless. Your post is inherently contradictory.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•14 hours ago

        Not inherently.

        There’s just too much going on in it and it’s not very coherent.

        I think what they wanted to say was:

        1. Fuck excessive human greed.
        2. We should focus on fixing problems here on earth, first, before we truly go to space.
        3. Celebrating private enterprises going and claiming space and progressing their investments will most likely exacerbate the existing sociopolitical and economic issues.
        4. Eat the rich