A double robotic mission seeking commercial exploration of the Moon has been successfully launched | Science

This Wednesday, when the clock read 7:11 in the morning (Spanish peninsular time), the Falcon 9 rocket from the private company SpaceX took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida (USA). On board it has two private robotic modules, one American and the other Japanese, whose mission will be to collect information from the surface of the Moon to prepare future missions to the Earth satellite. It is the first of those planned for 2025.

The Falcon 9 will take both landers to Earth orbit, there they will be released and each one will begin an independent trajectory until reaching the Moon. He Blue Ghost —from the Firefly Aerospace company, which is part of the — will take 45 days to arrive and will spend 14 days there, where it will have a tight scientific testing schedule. Research on this flight aims to “test and demonstrate lunar subsurface drilling technology, regolith sample collection capabilities, radiation-tolerant computing, and lunar dust mitigation methods,” according to . The module is planned to land autonomously on the Great Crisis (Sea of ​​Crises) at the beginning of March.

For its part, the module Resiliencemanufactured by , will attempt to deploy after Blue Ghost and it will take almost four times as long to complete its mission. Several tests are planned along the way. The Japanese module is equipped with after the failure of its first mission in April 2023, which was on the surface of the Moon after exceeding its orbit due to a failure in an altitude sensor. In this new attempt, the lander heads to a point known as Sea of ​​Cold (Sea of ​​Cold), in the northern hemisphere of the satellite. Once there it will display a microrrover called Tenaciouswhich travels inside the ship, to collect samples of lunar dust that will later be shared with the US space agency.

NASA has numerous contracts in force with private companies. These alliances are focused on boosting the efforts of the agency’s Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the Moon in 2027 and eventually establish a base in the lunar south polar region, where water ice—considered the “new lunar gold”—could be abundant.

The Japanese, for their part, do not want to be left out of the emerging business of space tourism. The company announced a few years ago that by 2040 the Moon will have 1,000 inhabitants and will be visited by 10,000 people each year. Ispace’s stated goal is to lead the “space economy” by extracting water on the Moon and shipping experiments, supplies and other materials as a government or corporate customer. With the imminent return to the Moon of the great space powers, supported by large private companies like SpaceX, that forecast . The consulting firm PwC already estimated in 2023 that transportation to the Moon will move around $350 billion by the end of the next decade.