Private lunar lander Blue Ghost aces moon touchdown with a special delivery for NASA.

 Private lunar lander Blue Ghost aces moon touchdown with a                                        special delivery for NASA.

Private lunar lander Blue Ghost's shadow is seen on the moon's surface after touching down on the moon with a special delivery for NASA, Sunday, March 2, 2025. (NASA/Firefly Aerospace via AP)

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 Private lunar lander Blue Ghost's shadow is seen on the moon's surface after touching down on the moon with a special delivery for NASA, Sunday, March 2, 2025.

Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP)— A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum, and other experiments for NASA landed on the moon Sunday. This is the latest in the string of companies that hope to kickstart business on Earth's celestial neighbor ahead of a mission by astronauts. The Blue Ghost lander of Firefly Aerospace was thus seen descending from lunar orbit and was automatically guided through the landing on the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the northeastern edge of the Moon's near side.

Confirmation was reported back to the company's Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, approximately 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) away:

"On the first one that you tried, you guys stuck the landing. We are on the moon," reported Firefly's chief engineer of the lander, Will Coogan.

A smooth and vertical landing puts Firefly, which was set up about ten years ago, as the first-ever private entity to insert a spacecraft into a lunar trajectory without crashing or tipping over. The crash landings of the other five remain in the history of mankind: Russia, the USA, China, India, and Japan.

Half an hour after the landing, Blue Ghost sent images from the surface. Its first snap was a sun-blinded selfie, and the second picture captured a blue dot somewhere in the cosmos: Earth.