Two private missions heading for the moon have blasted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The lunar landers launched in the middle of the night from NASA‘s Kennedy Space Centre and are the latest to try to land on Earth’s nearest neighbour.
America’s Firefly Aerospace and Japan’s ispace shared the ride to save cash but parted company an hour later and will take different routes.
Elon Musk‘s SpaceX posted images of the landers – named Resilience and Blue Ghost – drifting off into the darkness of space.
The powerful Falcon 9 rocket landed back on a droneship in the Atlantic less than nine minutes later.
SpaceX said Blue Ghost would take about 45 days to get to the moon’s Mare Crisium, where it will conduct experiments for NASA.
They include testing a device that could help future moonwalkers keep abrasive particles off their suits and equipment as the space agency bids to put humans back on the moon.
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NASA is paying Firefly $101m (£82.7m) for the mission and another $44m dollars (£36m) for the experiments.
Meanwhile, the Japanese probe, Resilience, will take a less fuel-intensive four to five months to get to an area called Mare Frigoris, meaning ‘Sea of Cold’.
It will hopefully be second time lucky for ispace after its first lander crashed into the moon two years ago.
The company’s boss, Takeshi Hakamada, pinned an Irish shamrock to his jacket during the launch for good luck.
“We don’t think this is a race. Some people say ‘race to the moon’, but it’s not about the speed,” Mr Hakamada said earlier this week.
If it makes it, iSpace’s micro-rover will stay near its lander, moving at a leisurely speed of less than one inch per second.
It will also leave a special memento behind – a toy-size red house designed by a Swedish artist.
Both landers are designed to work for one lunar day – equivalent to 14 Earth days
Only five countries have put spacecraft on the moon successfully since the 1960s, the former Soviet Union, America, Japan, India and China.
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The US remains the only nation to have put humans on the moon – the last in 1972 – but NASA is trying to repeat that feat by the end of the decade.
Speaking on the eve of the launch, its science mission boss, Nicky Fox, said it was “sending a lot of science and a lot of technology ahead of time to prepare for that”.
Another moon mission by Houston-based Intuitive Machines is set to launch for NASA – again on a SpaceX rocket – at the end of February.
The company last year managed to successfully put a US lander on the moon – near the south pole – for the first time in more than 50 years.
SpaceX’s latest launch came as the debut of a rocket from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos‘s company was postponed earlier this week.
The company is set to try again this Thursday (16 January).
