Blue Ghost spacecraft successfully lands on the Moon

A private spacecraft called Blue Ghost has successfully landed on the Moon. It is just the second commercial vehicle to reach the lunar surface. Richard Hollingham from the excellent Space Boffins podcast has the story…

Richard - Blue Ghost is by Firefly Aerospace and it's landed on the Sea of Crises, which I love. It's a two metre by three and a half metre robotic spacecraft. I've been trying to find out the origins of this actually. They seem to have a lot of talk on the website of ghost riders in the sky. Seems to be all over Firefly Aerospace website and I do encourage you actually to look at the video of it landing because it is spectacular. You can see the dust being kicked off and there's this amazing ghost-like picture, this ghost-like image of its silhouette on the lunar surface. This is the second private landing on the Moon. There was a one around about a year ago from Intuitive Machines that didn't entirely go quite to plan. It sort of landed on the edge of a crater, sort of tipped over. This one seems to be pretty much perfectly landed. On board, it's got 10 instruments and it's part of a bigger programme. So, NASA's essentially commissioning spacecraft to deliver science to the lunar surface. This is one of 11 missions with a total of 50 instruments.

Chris - What sorts of things will it do with these instruments then? What's the game plan?

Richard- It's really to set the stage for further human exploration of the Moon. It's just this whole effort to just get back and exploring the Moon again. This spacecraft actually did some experiments on the way to the Moon. It monitored the Van Allen belts - these radiation belts - in deep space. It had a radiation tolerant computer system on board, which I quite liked. The other experiment I'm quite excited about - because I saw the prototype of it at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida -  is the electromagnetic dust shield.

You know you have those kinds of electrostatic dusters at home which are really good at getting the dust off the TV. Well, this is kind of like the space age version of that because dust on the moon, it's really sharp, it's unpleasant, almost certainly will be doing damage to astronauts' lungs if they're there for any prolonged period. So, there's quite an effort to sort out the dust problem on the moon for future human exploration, for clearing dust off, for example, solar panels. And it just removes dust using electrostatics. So, the Moon is negatively charged. It's being bombarded by all these charged particles from the Sun all the time. And this is just like a little electrically charged balloon where you rub a balloon on your hair and it sort of sticks to your head. Same idea but more sophisticated.

Chris - But it's not a duster coming out on a little arm like Wallace and Gromit wiping. Or is it?

Richard - Well, this one is actually attached to the spacecraft, but that's a very good idea. The idea is this would be built into, for example, visors on faceplates for spacesuits that astronauts wear on the Moon. It could be windows if you're looking out of your lunar base to the lunar surface. What I saw when I went to NASA was this idea that you kind of walk in with your spacesuit and you stand in this sort of electrostatic shower, which basically attracts all the particles, all the dust off you, and then you can walk in. It’s a cleaning system. You come into your house, you stand in the electrostatic shower go: “bazoomp” - takes all the dust off, and then you can walk in it. If this works, this could be a bit of a game changer for human exploration and certainly the safety, the well-being, of astronauts on the Moon.

Chris - Does it make that exciting sound as well? I hope so.

Richard - Yeah, almost certainly.

Chris - But more seriously, are we at a sort of watershed moment with this sort of thing? Because we're now seeing a lot of people, countries, commercial entities as well, landing on the Moon. Does this mean technology has marked a step change? Has something changed that means this is now much more feasible than it was before? And if so, why?

Richard - I think we're picking up where we left off from the Apollo missions and the last footprint on the Moon in 1972 and it's just accelerated. It's using new technology. I think the investment of private industry in this is making a huge difference. It's driving down costs. There is, in the background, this kind of space race going on between the US and China. And we don't yet know the US plans for the Moon. It will almost certainly be led by the US. Whatever, Europe, Japan, Canada, decide whether they're going to go in with NASA or not.

NASA has yet to decide what its architecture is for returning humans to the Moon. And of course, we heard Donald Trump talking in his inauguration speech about going to Mars. The Moon might just be a stepping stone to Mars. But realistically, to get to Mars, we've got to understand all these ideas about how we live on a foreign world, if you like, or an alien world; an airless environment, we've got to be able to extract water. How do we live off the land in this dusty, airless desert? So, all these things, it's a lot easier to do on the Moon, which is only three days away from Earth, than it is to do on Mars.

So, that is the bigger picture here, is humans going hopefully in around about a year's time on this expedition out around the Moon. So not not landing on the Moon, but right out into deep space and back again to Earth, and then landing humans on the Moon. But we don't quite know how that's going to happen now, particularly with the Trump White House, what the plan is. Are they going to go with this giant rocket that NASA has built at an enormous cost? Or are they going to go with a much cheaper option like Elon Musk's Starship launcher and lander? So we don't quite know how things are going to pan out. But, there's an absolute drive to get experiments on the moon, get science on the Moon, find out more about the Moon, and ultimately get humans onto the Moon.