Blue Origin’s Vehicle To Explore Gruithuisen Domes In 2028

Firefly Aerospace announced it has selected Blue Origin’s Honeybee Robotics as its partner to provide the rover vehicle for its third Lunar mission in 2028 to explore and study the geological history and potential resources at the Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon’s near side.

The agreement with Honeybee reinforces an emerging trend of leveraging established space technologies even among competitors to advance human understanding and exploration of the Moon’s surface.

Firefly’s first Lunar mission went off without a hitch earlier this month when its Blue Ghost lander delivered 10 NASA instruments and operated for two weeks when it concluded on March 16. The company’s first commercial Lunar landing mission operated for the full 14 days of daytime surface with 346 hours of daylight followed by operating for 5 additional hours into the lunar night, representing the longest commercial operations on the Moon thus far.

The company’s mission with Honeybee’s rover will be the third under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative and will also include Firefly’s Elytra Dark orbital vehicle. Elytra will serve as the transfer vehicle and deploy the Blue Ghost lander with the rover, then remain on orbit to provide communications with Earth.

As the Honeybee rover explores the Domes, Blue Ghost will operate six NASA-sponsored payloads on the surface for 14 days.

The NASA instruments include a Lunar imaging and spectroscopy explorer; a sample acquisition, morphology and regolith probe; radio wave observations; neutron measurements; and photovoltaic investigations. A sixth payload is for the Planetary Science Institute.

In 2026, Firefly will conduct the second commercial mission for NASA to the Moon as well as the deployment of the Lunar Pathfinder satellite into orbit around the Moon for the European Space Agency.

The Blue Ghost will land  on the Lunar far side and carry out government and commercial payload operations for more than ten days.

FMI:  fireflyspace.com/