NASA advances commercial Moon cargo tests as a Falcon 9 stage nears impact
NASA reported thermal-vacuum and hardware tests on four commercial cargo landers for its Moon base first phase, while a Falcon 9 upper stage left from Blue Ghost 1 is expected to strike the Moon on 5 August.
Science··Midday
Thermal-vacuum and hardware steps on the cargo landers
On 4 August NASA gave a detailed status update on four commercial companies' landers in the cargo line for its base near the Moon's south pole. Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK1 completed thermal-vacuum testing at Johnson Space Center; the agency says cryogenic propellant loading comes next. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 2 will fly a lander together with the Elytra orbital spacecraft and carry three NASA payloads. Intuitive Machines' IM-3 has finished thermal-vacuum testing at Marshall Space Flight Center and is planned to carry five NASA payloads plus the Altus-1 relay satellite, which will study the local magnetic environment at Reiner Gamma. Voyager Technologies' Griffin-1 is in testing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is planned to launch late in 2026. Northrop Grumman is adapting power and avionics hardware from Gateway's HALO module for survive-the-night and shared surface power systems. These steps make concrete the cargo delivery test schedule NASA framed for the first base phase, as each company moves a vehicle or hardware piece through thermal, payload or power testing.[1]
A Falcon 9 stage left from Blue Ghost 1 is heading for the Moon
The same agency also announced that a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage left over from the 15 January 2025 launch that carried Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander is expected to strike the Moon on 5 August near the Einstein and Bell craters. NASA expects a crater about 18 metres wide and 3.7 metres deep. The trajectory is tracked by the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The scientific value the agency states is seeing how the ejecta plume behaves and refining models of lunar geology. Ground telescopes coordinated by the Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the ShadowCam instrument aboard South Korea's Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will try to capture the impact. NASA gives no impact time, and no asset is guaranteed to capture it. The observation attempt tracks an upper stage left from the commercial lunar landing line and sits in the same update window as the cargo-testing announcement.[2]
The first base phase and the commercial surface line advance together
The cargo-testing announcement ties these developments into a single program frame. NASA said it expects four commercial companies to deliver landers by 2028 for the first phase of its base near the Moon's south pole, a phase that runs to 2029 and is planned to include more than twenty robotic landings. The reported steps from Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Voyager Technologies and Northrop Grumman fill the test and integration calendar for the commercial line that is to carry cargo and surface power into that phase. The Falcon 9 upper stage expected to strike on 5 August, left from the Blue Ghost 1 launch, enters the observation agenda through residual hardware from the same commercial lunar-landing family: cargo landers move through thermal-vacuum, payload and power-hardware tests while an upper stage from an earlier commercial landing launch is tracked toward the lunar surface. Together, the two announcements show NASA's commercial lunar-surface logistics gathering both the coming landing schedule and the tracking of leftover launch hardware in the same update window.[1], [2]
