Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 Lunar Landing | Hacker News Reader

Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 Lunar Landing

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Link to the livestream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChEuA1AUJAY

I'd like to understand if there is a way to contribute to space missions like these, or space research in general, as a "civilian" software developer. Is there perhaps a community of space enthusiasts working on domain-specific open source tools? What are some unsolved problems in this field?

Great question, and I suggest you take a look at SatNOGS! It's a community driven satellite ground station project, where you can offer your own antenna and make use of the antennas of others. At my work we host 4 groundstations and regularly make use of those offered. A large open-source project like this can always use more contributors.

https://gitlab.com/librespacefoundation/satnogs

There's over 600 open issues with everything from hardware to website UX, so depending on your field there may be a lot you can contribute.

Thank you very much for sending me down that rabbit hole :-)

> as a "civilian" software developer.

Well, there's plenty of civilian space companies these days! It's largely embedded-oriented (code that controls launch vehicles and satellites) from what I've seen, but the opportunities are there.

There's always some small nonprofit, research, university, ham radio and similar themed 'cubesat' projects that need embedded software engineering. I'd suggest to start familiarizing yourself with common cubesat platforms, then see what the embedded hardware looks like and what you think you could do with it.

Lowest bar to OS participation would probably be mission planning tooling. NASA's GMAT is Apache licensed and widely used https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmat/files/GMAT/GMAT-R2016a...

But as others pointed out, there are a lot of civil space companies needing embedded systems programmers to work on space subsystems and (generally student lead) open source CubeSat tech. You'd likely need an actual job to work on solving novel hardware-specific problems like autonomous navigation, docking, landing, robotics, advanced Space Domain Awareness etc

Seconding GMAT. It's a distant third in the space in terms of adoption (behind FreeFlyer which is itself (anecdotally) far behind STK) but as a GN&C contractor I've used GMAT over FF and STK for a few jobs.

Particularly when it comes to code generation it has, IMO, a big advantage over FF and especially over STK. It's relatively lightweight, at least in my experience it's much faster to spawn and destroy instances than FreeFlyer, and it's pretty simple to write code to leverage GMAT to do interesting things.

Two things I've used GMAT for that would have taken longer in FF or STK are generating thousands of randomized ephemerides with keplerian parameters distributed in a set range, and automating a Monte Carlo-esque analysis focusing on error magnitude permutations by generating GMAT code from templates and collating into a single script file.

Not to mention it's free; STK and FF are very much not.

I'm on a first name basis with a chunk of the GMAT development team, though it's been a minute and I don't know how they're faring given recent political changes - they were out of Goddard which was having issues even before this January.

I don't know how often they accept code from the public, but I know they appreciate bug reports.

Anyways I guess I just wanted to go on about GMAT a little. It's a really cool tool and it's awesome that it's free. I wish it had more industry adoption.

I was involved in this industry about decade, when relations with Russia was warmed after end of cold war, so could share some experience.

In any case, you must understand, even on warmest times, space technologies considered as semi-weapons, so if you cannot achieve military clearance, you will have access only to some niches.

If niches are not scary for you, excellent, there are plenty opportunities.

First, in many countries exist large niche of high altitude air research, for which constantly need small cheap rockets and balloons, and all of these need reliable organizations, who will do regular starts and than find all things returned from near space.

So, what I mean - great deal of space work is just find and gather all parts fallen from missions.

Sure, all that things mean, better to make reliable control system, and reliable return system, than to literally looking for needle at haystack sized about hundred kilometers. But unfortunately, even best real rockets have failure rate ~0.4..0.7% (amateurs usually considered good to achieve 10..20% fr), so for every 100 starts, could have 1 failure for professional approach, or 10..20 for amateur, and will work on field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Sky

Problems near infinite, because even amateur rockets are not cheap, and in many cases civilian equipment are not working (yes, civilian GPS are just turning off or hanging if achieve military bounds for altitude or speed, so need to make your own navigation) and all additional weight subtract from profit, and any failure also could be fatal for economy, so there constantly appear new brave people and on other side, appear disappointed, who leave to more calm industries.

Hello! I work at a space start up called Loft Orbital, we've open sourced all our core astrodynamics and satellite simulation tooling. Here's a link to the GitHub repo, https://github.com/open-space-collective.

It's used by a few start ups and I'm hoping to spread the word a bit more once I get some time to clean some things up. Astrodynamics sorely lacks a great open source ecosystem. Poliastro was great but is now unmaintained.

There's Orekit (which is fantastic) but it's in Java which makes it difficult to scale across languages or stacks.

Nyx Space is excellent, and it's focused on deep space applications.

Contributing to any of these tools would be a great way to improve the open source community in astrodynamics!

I contributed to one company(intuitive machines) by buying their stock a few weeks back, they are public - ticker is LUNR. They have a moon mission going on as this is written and plan to touch down on the moon 3/6/25 and drill for water(look for IM-2 mission). Last year they were the first private company to send a lander to moon and made headlines due to the missions success. So for me its profitable and I get to contribute to interesting science.

Hey there! Nyx Space was literally used on Blue Ghost, more here: https://nyxspace.com/blog/2025/02/21/nyx-space-and-rust-powe...

All of the Nyx tools are I have Rust with a Python interface. We used the Python interface throughout the flight dynamics on the mission.

Hope this one goes differently to my landings in Kerbal Space Program.

From the wiki I read that this is a part of the Artemis program, but the connection seems unclear to me. Could anybody explain, will this be used to deliver just cargo or will it have people aboard sometime in the future?

Same budget line item?

Iirc it had to do with the deployment of some navegation relay, may be wrong, but the new intuitive machines lander will also deploy one.

(Edit: riffraff on th thread has the correct lede!)

Me in Space Shuttle Simulator during liftoff: "I wonder what this red switch does?"

Space Shuttle: bang

You know, everyone’s obsessed with training and knowledge and practice, but it’s so much more satisfying to do something amazing by just flipping switches and pushing buttons at random.

Me in Space Shuttle Simulator during liftoff: "Can you open the bay doors and operate the robot arm during takeoff?" *clickety click*

Space Shuttle: No. *bang*

I’m something of an expert in lunar landings myself, having years of experience in Space Engineers.

In my opinion, the most effective strategy is to fly full speed at the moon, crashing headlong into it before it realizes you’re there and can run away.

After figuring out how to do most things successfully in Kerbal space program, a fun challenge is to install the "real solar system" mod which scales the delta v require for low orbit, and size of the solar system , up to approximately the same as reality. Delta v to orbit in stock KSP is like 2300-2500 if I remember right, in RSS it's 7800-8200. Everything else is also correspondingly more difficult like delta v require to get from a 35 degree inclined low earth orbit into a mars transfer orbit (even assuming 100% aero braking at mars and little or no fuel used at arrival)

Main goal is to deliver some NASA science gear to the Moon, I think some of it is supposed to test things directly related to issues Artemis may have as far as lunar operations go. There’s a limited amount of info available about the science on their website- https://fireflyspace.com/missions/blue-ghost-mission-1/

An interesting part of the payload is LuGRE, an experiment designed to test reception of GNSS (GPS, Galileo) signals on the moon, which would be double the maximum distance tested until now.

I never imagined that geolocation systems could work outside of the earth.

The pedant in me is curious if we would have to call it something different than geolocation. :)

but the pedant in you has no issue that navigation is used outside of the sea?

I've always been annoyed when I see words like moonquake or marsquake, like earthquake is used for the planet and not for the dearth under your feet.

IMHO, creating neologism for the sake of neologism creates the burden to parse them instead of adding additional clarity.

I’d like to point out a difference.

Earthquake to marsquake is going from an inclusive term to a specific term of dubious utility.

Geolocation on other worlds is a misnomer and could be replaced by a more inclusive term.

I leave as an exercise to the reader the burden and value of any such change.

The industry term is PNT (Position, Navigation, Timing)

The approximately 1600MHz signals emitted from a gps satellite are generally aimed directly down at the earth at any given time, but with a good enough receiver and directional gain antenna on the moon you certainly could pick them up.

I also have a theory this might work because at any given point in time, some of the gps satellites while moving at their orbital altitudes might be emitting signals aimed somewhat more directly towards the moon, at least for short periods of time.

See https://www.gpsworld.com/gps-iir-iir-m-satellite-antenna-pat...

"The use of GPS signals for spacecraft navigation has increased in general over the last few decades. Navigation employing GPS observations for spacecraft in low-Earth orbit is now considered routine.

"However, the situation is quite different for spacecraft that fly in the Space Service Volume above the GPS constellation, including medium-Earth orbit (MEO), geostationary orbit (GEO) and high-Earth orbit (HEO) satellites, as well as missions to the Moon and beyond.

"For these spacecraft, reception of GPS transmit antenna side lobe signals is essential to improve availability and performance of on-board navigation and timing. In this context, the knowledge of the full antenna pattern (main lobe and side lobes) from the transmitting antennas of each of the GPS satellites is essential."

So the signal is strongest between GPS satellite and the Earth, but the beam doesn't have sharp edges and enough of it misses the earth to be useful in higher orbits, even above the GPS constellation..

A good part of that would be because GPS satellites orbit considerably higher than all LEO stuff, at approx 20,000 km, so everything in low earth orbit is almost equally as blanketed in valid GPS signal as things at 0 meters MSL on the ground on a beach.

Something orbiting at 550 km is approx 0.027 of the total orbital altitude of a 20,200 km orbit NAVSTAR series GPS satellite.

Sidelobes aren't really 'soft edges' to a main beam, they're unintended peaks at angles outside the main beam which sap gain. You can see peaks here around 29, 55 and 68 degrees:

https://www.gpsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Improved...

As such, successive GPS satellite antenna designs have been refined to reduce sidelobes, just as deep-space operators have realised they could be useful.

TLDR: sidelobes aren't like gentle feathering at the edges of a beam, they're more like petals of a daisy.

If it works, we should probably rename it to UNSS

Or at least SSNSS

Successful touchdown! Congrats to Firefly

Watch the touchdown by rewinding here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29GfQbq1lPE

First photo arrived:

https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896125390386606333

Apologies for the X link. Can someone convert?

Here is the image from that Tweet, saved on the Internet Archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20250302091628/https://pbs.twimg...

Also available in this Flickr album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031...

They also post to Threads

https://www.threads.net/@fireflyaerospace

Salute to the original founder that was forced to give up his partnership

They made it!

Congrats to the team. Disappointed there was no stream of actual touchdown or maneuvers.

We didn't have the bandwidth for live steaming on the radio. But we're currently down linking tons of footage and expect to publish the video of the landing and the hazard avoidance redirect soon. Stay tuned!

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