TRANSCRIPT:
After five decades, a private spacecraft has taken a giant leap towards humans returning the moon.
The Blue Ghost robotic spacecraft from United States space firm Firefly Aerospace has landed upright on the moon after a three-week journey from Earth.
"Y'all stuck the landing. We're on the moon."
"Firefly Aerospace just became the first commercial company in history to complete a fully successful moon landing."
The mission stands in contrast to the last attempt, from Texas-based company Intuitive Machines, whose spacecraft landed on the moon in February 2024 only to topple over on arrival.
But both of these missions are still historic.
Chris Culbert from NASA says they mark the first U-S moon touchdowns since the crewed Apollo 17 mission of 1972.
"This was designed to help us learn how to go to the Moon. We haven't done it in 60 years. And we're doing it in a different way - utilising commercial companies to get us there. We're using multiple commercial companies because we want to be able to fly a lot of missions relatively quickly. So we're going to get lower-cost missions at a faster pace. And we just have proof it works. We landed on the moon, almost perfectly."
The spacecraft is now beaming back striking images of the moon's cratered surface on its 14-day research mission to study lunar dust, radiation and surface materials of the moon.
NASA Chief Technologist, A.C. Charania, says the Blue Ghost mission is part of a new multibillion dollar partnership between the U-S space agency and the private sector.
"There are instruments and payloads to help NASA get better data. So that's understanding the atmosphere of the moon, it's capabilities and characteristics, understanding how future human explorers could more efficiently operate on lunar surface, and then also demonstrating technologies."
Other than the U-S, four other nations have made successful soft lunar landings in the past — the then-Soviet Union, China, India; and last year, Japan.
It comes amid a new emerging global space race, with Dr Ryan Watkins from NASA saying a future manned mission to Mars is the ultimate target of the world's foremost space programs.
"We're really trying to enable like this sustainable lunar economy. Really build these companies up to be able to do these types of missions with NASA is just one of many customers. A lot of the technologies that we're sending to the lunar surface, we're learning how to use these, and then we ultimately we want to use them as we go forward to Mars. So that is the ultimate goal: humans on the moon and then Mars.”
Intuitive Machines are trying again soon, with plans to send their Athena spacecraft to the moon's south pole.
Dr Watkins says this next mission will be exploring the terrain that's been identified as the landing location for a coming human-manned mission known as Artemis.
"Because this is where we're going to be sending humans as part of Artemis. And we want to understand the resources that are available to us down there as we work towards longer duration human exploration.”
