The Blue Ghost and Resilience landers will take different paths toward the Moon. Firefly's Blue Ghost will spend about 25 days in Earth orbit, then four days in transit to the Moon. After Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, Firefly's ground team will verify the readiness of the lander's propulsion and navigation systems and execute several thruster burns to set up for landing. Blue Ghost's final descent to the Moon is tentatively scheduled for March 2. The target landing site is in Mare Crisium, an ancient 350-mile-wide (560-kilometer) impact basin in the northeast part of the near side of the Moon. After touchdown, Blue Ghost will operate for about 14 days (one entire lunar day). The instruments aboard Firefly's lander include a subsurface drill, an X-ray imager, and an experimental electrodynamic dust shield to test methods of repelling troublesome lunar dust from accumulating on sensitive spacecraft components. The Resilience lander from ispace will take four to five months to reach the Moon. It carries several intriguing tech demo experiments, including a water electrolyzer provided by a Japanese company named Takasago Thermal Engineering. This demonstration will test equipment that future lunar missions could use to convert the Moon's water ice resources into electricity and rocket fuel. The lander will also deploy a "micro-rover" named Tenacious, developed by an ispace subsidiary in Luxembourg. The Tenacious rover will attempt to scoop up lunar soil and capture high-definition imagery of the Moon. Ron Garan, CEO of ispace's US-based subsidiary, told Ars that this mission is "pivotal" for the company. "We were not fully successful on our first mission," Garan said in an interview. "It was an amazing accomplishment, even though we didn't have a soft landing... Although the hardware worked flawlessly, exactly as it was supposed to, we did have some lessons learned in the software department. The fixes to prevent what happened on the first mission from happening on the second mission were fairly straightforward, so that boosts our confidence." The ispace subsidiary led by Garan, a former NASA astronaut, is based in Colorado. While the Resilience lander launched Wednesday is not part of the CLPS program, the company will build an upgraded lander for a future CLPS mission for NASA, led by Draper Laboratory. "I think the fact that we have two lunar landers on the same rocket for the first time in history is pretty substantial," Garan said. I think we all are rooting for each other." Investors need to see more successes with commercial lunar landers to fully realize the market's potential, Garan said. "That market, right now, is very nascent. It's very, very immature. And one of the reasons for that is that it's very difficult for companies that are contemplating making investments on equipment, experiments, etc., to put on the lunar surface and lunar orbit," Garan said. "It's very difficult to make those investments, especially if they're long-term investments, because there really hasn't been a proof of concept yet." "So every time we have a success, that makes it more likely that these companies that will serve as the foundation of a commercial lunar market movement will be able to make those investments," Garan said. " Conversely, every time we have a failure, the opposite happens." Listing image: SpaceX