The Current - The first private spacecraft has landed on the moon

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

The private spacecraft Blue Ghost has landed successfully on the moon, the first private expedition to touch down without crashing or toppling over. We look at what this means for renewed lunar exploration — and the commercial space race. 

What does a mummified Egyptian child, the Parthenon marbles of Greece and an Irish giant all have in common? They are all stuff the British stole. Maybe. Join me, Mark Fennell, as I travel around the globe uncovering the shocking stories of how some, let's call them ill-gotten, artifacts made it to faraway institutions. Spoiler, it was probably the British. Don't miss a brand new season of Stuff the British Style. Watch it free on CBC Gem. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast.

Y'all suck at landing. We're on the moon. Whoo! Celebrations erupted at the Mission Control outside Austin, Texas on Sunday morning after Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost stuck its lunar landing. Firefly Aerospace just became the first commercial company in history to complete a fully successful moon landing. It's a big deal. Blue Ghost made it to the moon without crashing or falling over, not an easy feat,

something that several organizations and even countries have tried and failed to do. Gordon Osinski is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Western University in London, Ontario, also director of the Canadian Lunar Research Network and principal investigator for the Canadian Lunar Rover Mission.

Gordon, good morning. Good morning, Matt. Thanks for having me. Sure. Thanks for being here. You heard the cheers from folks at Mission Control. Were you cheering when you, when you learned

that the lander, as I said, stuck it and didn't topple over? Absolutely. This was, you know, third time lucky for this NASA's CLPS program of a successful landing on the moon. What is that CLPS program? Yeah.

So CLPS stands for Commercial Lunar Payload Services. Bit of a mouthful, which is why we tend to use the acronym, but it's a really new way of doing things. In the past, NASA would do the research, the research and development, they'd do the building the spacecraft, the rockets, and launch everything to the moon. That's still how they go about doing Mars rover missions, for example. But with clips, NASA basically hires companies to send robotic landers and rovers to the moon.

And so NASA buys the service, the contracts are fixed cost, and so it transfers a lot of the risk, the financial risk to those companies. Why does it mean it's the moon? It's not like you're traveling. We're just talking about diving in a lake, a frozen lake, which is difficult enough. Landing something on the moon and sticking the landing without it toppling over seems incredibly difficult.

Why is it that this one worked and other ones perhaps have not been able to pull this off? You know, it's a great question. I think we have figured out, we as in the companies mainly, you know, this is the third landing in NASA's Eclipse program. The two, the first two launched early last year.

The first one didn't even make it to the moon. It had a propellant leak out in space. And so it didn't even get to attempt a landing. The second mission by intuitive machines, let's say it had a hard landing. You may have seen pictures of this. It essentially landed so hard, we think that it broke one of the legs on

the lander and caused it to more or less tip over, which basically meant the mission couldn't really continue. For that one, they have figured out that they had a laser scanner that was scanning the surface during landing, and that wasn't working properly. And so it wasn't able to avoid hazards, and it actually came in a lot faster than it should have done. And I guess Firefly with Blue Ghost have made sure that everything was working perfectly, and they stuck the landing, as you said.

And so like every good tourist, you arrive and you take a photo to send to the folks back home. There are images that have already come back from this successful landing. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen two, well, there's been two that have really caught my eye. The first one that I saw was essentially the shadow of the lander. And so because the sun is at quite a low inclination,

you could think of it like as a maybe late in the day in winter where the shadows get really long. You're not seeing the lander, but the lander took a picture of its own shadow. And I think it's quite spectacular. It's beautiful. The surface of the moon in the background. And then they took a picture of the sunrise too, which again, just, you know, absolutely amazing. So it's carrying the lander is carrying a drill, a vacuum and some other experiments. What will we learn from what this thing has hauled to the moon? Yeah, so these missions are also quite unlike, you know, again, if we take NASA's Mars rover

missions as an example, it was designed from scratch to be, you know, every instrument has a function and it works together and, you know, that's part of the mission goals. Whereas here, they're really just carrying whoever wanted to pay to have something go to the Moon. And so all of this actually 12, you know, instruments on this, they all have separate goals. Like you say, one is a drill. A lot of these early missions are what we call kind of

really technology demonstrations. You know, they're going to do science. They're going to collect science data, but a lot of this we're doing for the first time again. And again, I think it's worth emphasizing at a much lower cost. You know, you might say we've been, we have been to the moon in the past and things, but not with private spacecraft. And these companies are doing it for a fraction of the cost that, you know,

we did during the Apollo era, for example. What do you make of the fact that private companies are, I mean, we talk about the space race and this seems to be a commercial space race to get to the moon. It absolutely is. Um, I think most of it is positive. Um, most of it, primarily because it really is driving down the costs.

Um, you know, we've seen what SpaceX have done with launches to the international space station where, you know, again, compared to the shuttle, where it would be billions of dollars a launch, we're now talking hundreds of millions or even less. And so that can only be good for everybody. The agency is the taxpayer. I say mostly because we still, the framework,

the laws of space are still catching up with how fast this commercial program is going. You know, a lot of these missions and some of the payloads, I think, on the next mission are looking to prove the concept of, you know, extracting resources from the moon. And so, you know, perhaps many of you listen as we hang on a second, you know, who, you know, who owns the moon, who would own the resources, can you sell resources and make money? And the answer right now is that, well, maybe because we don't really have the legal framework in place that is being worked on, but it's kind of not there yet.

I mean, that's a really pointed question, like who owns the moon? If these companies are going there and trying to do this work, which may benefit us all, but it might also benefit them, who is in control of that? So this is all being worked out. I think just about everybody hopes

that it will be something like, I like the model of Antarctica currently where no one owns Antarctica, but lots of countries have bases in Antarctica. The US does lots of European countries and things, and so they might think they own a little bit of territory around their base, but they in fact don't. But they can operate there, people work collaboratively and collegially together.

And so I think that would be a really good model for the Moon moving forward. Of course, yeah, it is interesting because right now you actually can't mine resources in Antarctica. And so that's something that the United Nations has a space group made up of lots of the world's space agencies and people are working on that right now in the legal framework to figure that out. But I guess, I mean, the belief is, and you've talked about the SpaceX example of it, that private companies might be more nimble or may have a greater tolerance for risk than large institutions like NASA to be able to pull something like this off.

Absolutely, yes. Yeah. You're involved in, in this Canadian rover mission. Tell me a little bit about this. Yeah. And so, you know, probably the second thing that went through my mind over the weekend when Firefly stuck his landing, um, was, you know, this is a huge milestone for us in Canada.

And that's because, um, Canada was building for the first time a rover to go to the moon and we will also be launched in a few years time on one of these CLPS missions. That's because Canada was building for the first time a rover to go to the moon and we will also be launched in a few years' time on one of these CLPS missions. I think we've been waiting with bated breath after the first couple of unsuccessful missions to make sure that these companies can do it. This is a major milestone and makes me really optimistic about our Canadian rover, which is still in development, still getting built

right now. What would our rover, when it's developed and built, what are you hoping it will be able to do and it will be able to learn? Yeah, so it's quite ambitious for Canada's first rover. It's actually been built by Canada Ansys Aerospace, which kind of has offices in the Greater Toronto area and Stratford, closer to me here in London. And we are gonna go to the South Polar region of the moon, which is where not this mission, the Blue Ghost mission, but where most of the robotic missions and Artemis missions with humans are going. It's a region of the moon we've not gone to before.

It's got some really interesting geology, but it's also got, we think, water ice deposits. And so a lot of the instruments on our rover are to look at the geology and hopefully detect water ice in this region. And unlike this particular mission and these early CLPS missions too, we want to survive the lunar night. And so quickly, the lunar night is about 14 Earth days long or can be up to that and the temperatures drop to about minus 200 degrees Celsius. And so if you can imagine designing electronics to withstand

that temperature, it's a huge challenge, but we think as a country we're up for it. It's just so interesting. I mean, there's so much focus on trying to get to Mars and other forms of space exploration. The moon, obviously in the 60s and 70s was the object of such attention and ambition. And now it feels like it's taken in some ways a back seat, but that seems like it's changing again in some ways. It is. It's absolutely coming back. I remember I came to Canada about 25 years ago as a grad student and yeah, nobody really talked about the moon. People were still looking at the Apollo samples and talking about missions from the

70s and late 60s. There was a big lull where, as you say, a major focus became on Mars. I think we've realized that if we want to go to Mars with humans, we've got to actually figure out how to do it on the moon again. And in the meantime, too, we've also learned that the moon is a really interesting object. The fact that there might be water on the moon, that was not even a crazy dream in the Apollo era. No one would have ever guessed that there was water on the moon even 20 years ago.

And so there's a lot more science questions that are driving us to go back to particular the poles of the Moon. That is some nervy thing though to stick that landing. Yeah. Absolutely. A lot of anxious moments when the rover touches down. Yeah. Gordon, good to talk to you about this. Thank you very much.

Thank you. You're very welcome. Gordon Waszynski is a professor at Western University and director of the Canadian Lunar Research Network, as well as the principal investigator for the Canadian Lunar Rover mission set to take off, as he said, in the next few years.