An American company became the first to perform a perfect moon landing early Sunday when Firefly Aerospace sent its Blue Ghost lander down to the surface.

“You all stuck the landing. We’re on the moon,” came the callout from Firefly chief engineer Will Coogan followed by whoops and claps among the company’s mission control at its Cedar Park, Texas headquarters during a live stream of the mission.

The lander touched down at 3:34 a.m. after running through a powered descent 12 minutes out bringing the lander into a vertical position and slowing down from 3,800 mph to about 90 mph. The main engine then shut down and the vehicle’s reaction control thrusters slow it for its final controlled descent.

The mission control callouts immediately reported sensors were reading “lunar gravity and it is stable” followed by the declaration of success.

“They’re just fired up right now in the mission control room,” said Firefly CEO Jason Kim minutes after landing. “They were just pent up, holding it all in, because they were calm and collected and cool the whole time. Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed, and then after we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up. We got some moon dust on our boots.”

The landing follows the first successful landing of a commercial company performed by Intuitive Machines last year with its Odysseus lander, but that lander came in fast, had one of its legs damaged and ended up tipping partially on its side. So while it was able to perform some of the science it brought to the moon under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, it was not 100% successful.

Firefly has now improved on that effort, making a stable landing in Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille in northeast corner of moon facing Earth as seen from northern hemisphere.

“I think I’ll just forever hear our chief engineer Will’s voice. We successfully landed on the moon, and then just everybody kind of lost their minds,” said Firefly Program Director Ray Allensworth. “They’re all business again. So I had to leave because I couldn’t keep it together.”

The teams were focusing on making sure Blue Ghost was healthy and safe before working to operate its payloads designed to operate in the two weeks of sunlight at the landing site.

“We landed at the beginning of the lunar day, and that we want to maximize as much of that time as possible for all the payloads. So they will immediately dive into that. And really, these first three days after landing are going to be just jam packed, just try to get every single payload off going that we possibly can,” she said.

It was the first of three lunar landers that had been in space at the same time to attempt a landing.

Intuitive Machines just launched its second lander named Athena from Kennedy Space Center last week, and it’s slated for a quick trip to the moon entering orbit later on Sunday with a landing on March 6.

Both Blue Ghost and Athena are flying NASA CLPS missions. The majority of each landers’ payloads are for NASA, although both companies have lined up some level of commercial partners as well.

“I really think we need to keep pushing forward,” said acting NASA Administrator Janet Petro before the landing attempt. “This program, which marries NASA — a little bit of seed money — with the commercial, private industry, bringing them forward, building that lunar economy. Building that economy is what’s going to make us dominate in and around the moon. So we’ve got to do it.”

A third commercial company not associated with NASA, ispace Japan, also has a lander on its way to the moon, but one that won’t arrive for months from now.

The ispace lander and Firefly’s Blue Ghost actually launched together back in mid-January, but unlike the Intuitive Machines missions, they both had longer flight paths before each of their planned moon rendezvous.

That feeling you get when you look out the window and realize you’re almost home! T-4 days until we land in the Moon. Blue Ghost will reach her final destination no earlier than 2:34 am CST on March 2. We’ll start the joint livestream with @NASA at 1:20 am CST, approximately 75… pic.twitter.com/t5TN85zpmM

— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) February 26, 2025

The Firefly mission is dubbed ” Ghost Riders in the Sky,” and it had a 45-day transit that involved multiple orbits of Earth to ensure systems were working before making the trip to the moon where it also has spent several days in orbit.

It captured stunning images of the lunar surface during its orbits, which the company posted on X on Feb. 26.

It’s carrying 10 NASA science and technology payloads, for which NASA paid Firefly $101.5 million. NASA uses the CLPS program so it can simply be a customer for U.S.-based commercial companies, who line up their own launch providers, build the lander and are responsible for all the mission communication.

This is the third launch of four CLPS missions so far. The first was Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lander in January 2024, which suffered propulsion issues after launch and never made it to the moon. The Intuitive Machines partially successful landing was the second followed by Firefly’s launch, and then the second Intuitive Machines launch.

Among the NASA experiments on Blue Ghost are a couple of devices focused on the complexities of moon dust. Versions of both flew up on the first Intuitive Machines mission, but didn’t get to complete their job. One called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) looks to see what sort of dust plume is kicked up by landers while another, the Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS), looks to test out a way to stop dust surface accumulation.

As far as EDS, a team at Kennedy Space Center has been working on this concept for years that uses electromagnetic fields to clean off dust particles.

“I’ve referred to it a couple times as the poster child for dust mitigation technology,” said NASA’s Kristen John with the Space Technology Mission Directorate. “Just seeing that technology fly. … It’s a brilliant concept. When you see it in action, when you see videos of it, it’s just fantastic seeing the the dust repel. So the technology itself is really impressive. And so being able to finally see it demoed on the surface, I think will be really exciting and really validating for the team.”

Among the other NASA payloads are a tool to measure heat from the moon’s interior, a lunar regolith sample collector called PlanetVac, an inert laser reflector that will be able to be seen from Earth, a device to measure how lunar regolith sticks to various surfaces, a radiation-tolerant computer, an X-ray imager to measure solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field, a tool to measure the moon’s electric and magnetic fields, and an experiment that will communicate during flight, in lunar orbit and on the surface with the U.S. GPS and European Galileo systems.

The two commercial payloads are a memorial plaque, but with no human remains, for the company Beyond Burial, and a little pyramid with a seed bank and digital time capsule for the company LifeShip.

After landing, the plan is to spend about two weeks in daylight before lunar night puts the lander into darkness and the debilitating cold, although Firefly is looking to remain active for about five hours into the night before shutting down.

“We’ve done a tremendous amount of work in preparing for the landing and training for it, and doing the simulated landings, and doing the digital work and an analysis that goes into that,” said Kevin Scholtes, a future systems architect for Firefly has been working on Blue Ghost since 2021. “But we can’t test like you fly, because you can’t replicate the moon in a lab for a lander right now.”

The lander itself resembles those of the Apollo missions, and Scholtes said the company looked at the troubles seen both by other commercial landing attempts as well as government missions.

“We did a pretty extensive deep dive,” he said. “For the most part, the lessons learned that we gathered from them, we’ve been able to incorporate into our program. … We’ve been leaning forward very much on trying to make sure that we are not ignoring the opportunity to learn from those events.”

For one thing, the lander is much more broad at its base with a low center of gravity, which Scholtes said is to counteract the challenge of low gravity that can lead to tipping.

“It’s a completely different kind of kind of force there, and you see that in the videos of astronauts walking around and tipping over,” he said. “There’s a lot of counterintuitiveness in that. That makes it easy to design structures that are lighter for the moon, but strangely enough, makes it harder to make them tall.”