The head of a Quebec aerospace company says he’s thrilled by the confirmation that a private lunar lander has touched down on the moon with his company’s technology aboard.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost successfully descended from lunar orbit on autopilot early Sunday morning, carrying experiments for NASA and several Canadian-based technologies.
Jean de Lafontaine says the moment has been a decade in the making for Sherbrooke, Que.-based NGC Aerospace, which produces a GPS-like lunar navigation system that uses the moon’s craters as references.
He said the company has experience deploying its technology on satellites orbiting, and has tested the lunar system repeatedly on simulators. “But there’s nothing like making it happen in the real environment of the moon,” he said Sunday in a phone interview.
He says the technology should allow scientists to calculate lunar landings far more accurately than previously — to within as little as 100 metres — allowing them to more quickly reach interesting areas of study, and avoid dangerous spots.
“If you aim at an area which is flat and safe, then precision landing allows you to land exactly where you want it to be,” he said, adding that he expects to receive data back in the coming days that will show him how well the technology performed.
The lunar lander carried a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA, as well as NGC’s software and a Canadian-made moon dust repellent developed by Integrity Testing Laboratory Inc., a 13-person company based in Markham, Ont.
“It’s a very big deal,” said Jacob Kleiman, the company’s president and chief executive officer, in an interview Saturday. “We are the only Canadian company that got on this experiment.”
Lunar dust is a big problem for scientists and astronauts on the moon, Kleiman said. Its particles are tiny, abrasive and electromagnetically charged, and they cling to everything, from mechanical equipment to astronauts’ suits.
The samples from his company heading to the moon are made of Kapton — the shiny, gold-coloured material on satellites that looks like foil — and the white paint commonly used on space vessels, he said. Both are covered in his company’s special “diamond-like” coating, Kleiman said.
Sunday’s upright and stable landing makes Firefly the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Two other companies’ landers are following close behind Blue Ghost, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.
De Lafontaine says the success of the private lander is proof that access to the moon is increasing rapidly.
“It’s not only governments that can spend the energy and the money to get to the moon,” he said. “Private companies can do that, so it’s like a democratization of the moon, basically.”
With files from The Associated Press
