Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 Lunar Landing

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.

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 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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/

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

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)

Same budget line item?

If it works, we should probably rename it to UNSS

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

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.

Watch the touchdown by rewinding here:

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

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

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

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

They also post to Threads

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

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!