"Honestly daunting": how the engineers of Firefly's Blue Ghost are getting ready for a lunar landing.

      Landing a spacecraft on the moon is akin to throwing a dart and hitting a moving target located in another city: it's an immense challenge. With an unwelcoming terrain filled with steep craters and troublesome boulders, there are no designated landing zones, no GPS, no air traffic control, and no assistance if something goes awry.

      This weekend, Firefly Aerospace will strive to overcome these challenges and successfully land its Blue Ghost spacecraft in the Mare Crisium region on the moon's near side. Only one other private entity has ever achieved a successful moon landing, and that was fraught with difficulty: the Intuitive Machines Odysseus lander ended up landing on its side after one of its legs snagged on the rough lunar surface, which limited its operational lifespan.

      The pressure is on for the Firefly team, who are aiming for a flawless soft landing on Sunday. We spoke with a team member to discuss their plans for this endeavor. Kevin Scholtes, Firefly’s Future Systems Architect, is tasked with envisioning potential future challenges. “I like to say that my role is to always be dissatisfied with our current status and encourage us to push boundaries,” he shared with Digital Trends.

      Scholtes and his team are eagerly awaiting this weekend's landing attempt, hoping that their years of diligent work have prepared their cherished lander for the numerous obstacles associated with landing on the moon. “Everyone is certainly on edge, anxious to see what unfolds,” he noted.

      Relying on engineering

      One of the most daunting aspects of attempting to land on an object more than 200,000 miles away is the inability to manually control a lunar spacecraft. Once the descent begins, the spacecraft must autonomously navigate — a phase the Japanese space agency dubbed the "20 minutes of terror."

      “Once we initiate the descent, it becomes entirely autonomous,” Scholtes detailed. Due to the moon's distance and the limitations imposed by the speed of light, there is an unavoidable communication lag of several seconds between Earth and the spacecraft.

      “It’s not feasible to operate the lander in real-time from Earth. So we must place our trust in the engineering, the analysis, and the onboard guidance and navigation. We are acutely aware of our commitment to see this through to completion,” he emphasized.

      Understanding the environment

      Though humanity accomplished a moon landing over 50 years ago, one should not underestimate the complexities of such an endeavor. “Ironically, one of the major hurdles is simply knowing your precise location,” Scholtes pointed out.

      With no GPS for accurate positioning or astronauts present to visually assess their surroundings, a spacecraft must decelerate from speeds of one mile per second to a landing speed of merely one meter per second while determining its location with meter-level precision.

      “This can be frightening since all this information must be generated internally,” Scholtes explained. “It requires us to replicate the intuition a pilot would have by visually identifying features and estimating speed based on those observations.”

      Identifying those features presents challenges as well, since the lunar surface is pockmarked with craters of varying sizes. From different altitudes, craters can appear quite similar, complicating the task of discerning whether one is approaching a large crater up close or a smaller one from a distance.

      “At heights of 100 kilometers, 1 kilometer, or even just 10 meters, you only see craters,” Scholtes stated. “So even with optimal navigational data, gauging distance to the surface as you descend remains difficult.”

      “Make no mistake,” he asserted, “landing on the moon is an extraordinarily tough challenge.”

      Selecting the ideal location

      Thanks to modern technology and images captured by spacecraft like NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we have exceptional visuals of the moon's surface from orbit. Although this imagery is crucial for selecting a landing site, its resolution of a few meters per pixel may not reveal all the hazards that a lander needs to avoid.

      “That resolution is quite low for spotting a large rock you might land on,” Scholtes remarked.

      Nonetheless, the lunar environment has its advantages; its lack of atmosphere means there are no winds or moving objects like clouds to obscure the view. With a clear understanding of the sun’s position, the length of a shadow provides a reliable indication of an obstacle's size.

      To assist with navigation, Blue Ghost is equipped with terrain relative navigation technology. This involves a camera mounted beneath the spacecraft that captures images of the ground below, which are then compared to an onboard map of the surface. This form of navigation became feasible only recently due to advancements in computer processing, enabling quick comparisons between incoming images and the internal map.

      “We synthesize the expected appearance of the moon,” Scholtes described, “and perform a comparison with what the cameras capture.”

      Discrepancies between the onboard map and actual images provide vital data on the lander's speed and orientation, facilitating precise position determination. Additionally, a second system, called hazard avoidance, utilizes the same