A busy year of lunar missions will begin this week with the launch of two private lunar landers on the same rocket.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the missions has a six-day window starting early Wednesday morning (Jan. 15). Liftoff from Launch Complex-39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida is set for 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 GMT).
Both landers will be transported by Falcon 9 to Earth orbit, where they will start separate journeys to the moon. The goal of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar lander, Ghost Riders in the Sky, is to transport scientific payloads to the moon's surface as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
Resilience, the second lander, is the second mission that the Japanese corporation ispace has undertaken in an attempt to land on the moon. Blue Ghost will be followed by iSpace's Mission 2, which will take almost four times as long to finish.
In order to set its course toward the moon, Blue Ghost will orbit the Earth for 25 days before an engine fire.
If all goes according to plan, the lander will autonomously land in Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises") after another 20 days, which includes 16 days in lunar orbit and four days in transit, to start two weeks of lunar science.
About five hours after nightfall on the lander's site, Blue Ghost's 60-day journey from Earth to the moon would come to an end. Before shutting down, the spacecraft will use its remaining battery power to take a picture of the lunar sunset.