Moon objective. Although man has not set foot there since 1972, the Earth’s natural satellite is once again the subject of much attention from space programs. The devices of two private companies, one American and the other Japanese, flew to the Moon on Wednesday from a Falcon 9 rocket from the American company of billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX. A new illustration of the growing importance taken by the private sector in space exploration.
The rocket successfully took off on Wednesday at 1:11 a.m. local time (6:11 a.m. GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center on the US east coast. On board, the Blue Ghost space robot, developed by the company Firefly Aerospace on behalf of the American Space Agency, NASA, and the Resilience robot from the Japanese company ispace.
The return of humans to the Moon postponed until 2027
Both hope to reproduce the feat achieved by the American company Intuitive Machines, which succeeded in landing a spacecraft on the lunar surface in early 2024, a world first for a private company. Until then, this perilous maneuver had only been successful by a handful of countries, starting with the Soviet Union in 1966.
Resilience will take between four and five months to reach the star. It will carry, among other things, a Rover, scientific instruments developed by other companies, and a model of a house created by a Swedish artist. The stated objective of ispace is to carry out technological demonstrations of several of these instruments. The company failed in a previous attempt in 2023 when its lander crashed on the surface of the star.
Our file on the conquest of space
The American space robot Blue Ghost will spend around 45 days in transit to the Moon and will be loaded with ten NASA scientific instruments. The space agency plans to drill the lunar soil and test technologies aimed at improving navigation, with the aim of deepening its knowledge of the Moon and helping to prepare for “future human missions”. The United States aims to send astronauts back there soon. After multiple postponements, NASA is now counting on a return by “mid-2027”.
