Jason Kim Leads Blue Ghost Lunar Lander Mission
By wchung | 16 Jan, 2025

On March 2 Firefly’s first Blue Ghost mission is scheduled to deliver 10 science and technology instruments to the lunar surface under contract with NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS).

Blue Ghost is aiming to achieve only the second soft-landing on the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.  The landing will come at the end of a 45-day transit that began with the January 15 launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from its Cape Canaveral launch facility.

The mission plan for the first of Firefly's three scheduled lunar landings calls for Blue Ghost to touch down in Mare Crisium where it will activate its NASA payloads for a full lunar day or about 14 Earth days. Once the contracted NASA missions are completed Blue Ghost will capture views of the lunar sunset and data on how lunar surface soil reacts to solar energy during lunar dusk.  The lander will continue operations for several hours into the lunar night.

The Blue Ghost lunar landing comes four months after Jason Kim was named CEO of Firefly in August 2024.  Prior to joining the 700-employee company based in Cedar Park, Texas, Kim was CEO of Millennium Space Systems.  Prior to that he held various key executive roles at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, and the U.S. Air Force where he acquired expertise in aerospace and defense systems, small to large satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles, rocket launch, vertical integration, manufacturing, assembly, and on-orbit mission operations.

As a prominent graduate of the Air Force Academy Kim is a member of the Board of Directors for the Air Force Academy Foundation and serves on the Executive Committee for Space Workforce 2030.  He graduated with a BS in electrical engineering from the Academy, then earned a masters in EE from the Air Force Institute of Technology and an MBA from UCLA's Anderson School of Management.