Lunar Success, and the Return of Crew Nine

Lunar Success, and the return of Crew-9. I'm Tom Patton, and here are some of the stories we covered for you this week on The Journal of Space Commerce.

After landing on the Moon with NASA science and technology demonstrations March 2, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 concluded its mission March 16. But analysis of data returned to Earth from the NASA instruments continues, benefitting future lunar missions.

“We collected over 119 gigabytes of data, and that's imagery data, and payload data, and that doesn't include even the telemetry data we brought back down.” Ray Allensorth, Firefly Aerospace

As part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander delivered 10 NASA science and technology instruments to the Mare Crisium basin on the near side of the Moon.

In a news conference following the official conclusion of the mission, Firefly Aerospace Spacecraft Program Director Ray Allensworth said that the impacts of the mission will be realized in the months and years to come.

"We were able to completely maximize the lunar day, operating every day that we were on the surface, and ... also through an eclipse and into the lunar night. And it's that data that's really important to us as Firefly to provide back to the payloads. We collected over 119 gigabytes of data, and that's imagery data, and payload data, and that doesn't include even the telemetry data we brought back down. So just a significant amount of data that all the teams get to go dig into, learn from, and I think over the coming months and years we're really going to see all the information and new findings coming out of all this data.

Firefly says the data captured will benefit humanity in many ways, providing insights into how space weather and other cosmic forces may impact Earth.

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The Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station wrapped up this week, with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returning to Earth some nine months after launching aboard the Boeing Starliner crewed flight test last June.

Williams and Wilmore, along with NASA Astronaut Nick Hague and Russian Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, splashed down in the Gulf of America off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida on Tuesday.

Even given the issues that cropped up with the Starliner spacecraft that took Wilmore and Williams to the station, at a post-splashdown news conference, NASA Commercial Crew Manager Steve Stitch said the agency was not ready to give up on the Boeing system.

"We'll celebrate for a while. We're going to take some time to celebrate this one and spend a little time with the crew. And then we'll move on to Crew-11. Crew-11 will be here before you know it, we're going to launch that vehicle as early as mid-July, so we'll start preparing for that. And then, we're working hand in hand with Boeing as well on certification of Starliner, getting that vehicle back to flight. Butch and Suni's return on Dragon to me shows how important it is to have two different crew transportation systems, the importance of Starliner and the redundancy we're building in human spaceflight for our low-Earth orbit economy. "

The Crew-9 mission was the fourth flight of the Dragon spacecraft named Freedom. It also previously supported NASA’s SpaceX Crew-4, Axiom Mission 2, and Axiom Mission 3. It will be inspected and refurbished for use on a future mission.

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In other news, the third Varda orbital processing and reentry capsule, W-3, launched just 15 days after the reentry of the company's second mission, which land