{"id":1235379,"date":"2025-02-27T07:00:23","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T12:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1235379"},"modified":"2025-02-27T07:00:23","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T12:00:23","slug":"the-moons-next-robotic-visitor-is-lining-up-for-landing-this-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1235379","title":{"rendered":"The Moon\u2019s next robotic visitor is lining up for landing this weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>CEDAR PARK, Texas\u2014Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away.<\/p>\n<p>These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace hope that their robotic spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, will become the second commercial mission to complete a soft landing on the Moon, following the <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/space\/2024\/02\/it-turns-out-that-odysseus-landed-on-the-moon-without-any-altimetry-data\/\">landing of a spacecraft by Intuitive Machines<\/a> last year. This is the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace, a company established in 2014 to develop a small satellite launcher.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, Firefly has undergone changes in ownership, a bankruptcy, and a renaming. Recognizing that the company had to diversify to survive, Firefly executives began pursuing other business opportunities\u2014spacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/space\/2024\/07\/firefly-is-building-fast-and-breaking-things-on-path-to-a-reusable-rocket\/\">medium-class rocket<\/a>\u2014to go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2025\/02\/the-moons-next-robotic-visitor-is-lining-up-for-landing-this-weekend\/\">Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2025\/02\/the-moons-next-robotic-visitor-is-lining-up-for-landing-this-weekend\/#comments\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CEDAR PARK, Texas\u2014Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away. These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1235379\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,44,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1235379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ars-technica","category-technology","category-unfiltered-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1235379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1235379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1235379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1235379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}