A Brownsville native and Lopez Early College High School graduate is a part of a team that will put a lunar lander loaded with scientific equipment on the moon in early 2025.
Jesus Charles graduated from Lopez in 2009, earned a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas-Austin and then worked for the Johnson Space Center in Houston for six years. Now he’s senior mission operations engineer for Firefly Aerospace’s uncrewed Blue Ghost Mission 1 spacecraft.
Charles will also serve as flight director for the mission, dubbed “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” that’s scheduled for mid-January. Firefly, headquartered in Cedar Park, Texas was founded in 2017.
Blue Ghost, named after a very rare firefly species, will be launched into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Charles, who joined Firefly nearly five years ago, said in a recent phone interview that Blue Ghost will deliver 10 science and technology instruments to the moon’s surface as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. CLPS is once aspect of the space agency’s Artemis program, which aims to return U.S. astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 and establish a permanent base there.
The 10 payloads, provided by universities, private companies and government laboratories, include the PlanetVac, basically a vacuum that will collect regolith (dust, dirt, rocket fragments) from the moon’s surface, Charles said.
The collected samples will be deposited into a different unit designed to analyze the composition of the regolith at the landing site, he said.
Another piece of equipment, this one attached to Blue Ghost’s underside, is the LISTER probe, a type of pneumatic drill that will attempt to penetrate the lunar surface several feet to measure the temperature at different depths in order to gauge heat flow from the interior of the moon, Charles said.
LISTER stands for “Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity.”
“There’s another neat one called EDS (Electrodynamic Dust Shield), which is going to test a new technology that can be used to dissipate lunar dust, the regolith, from surfaces like cameras or solar panels,” Charles said.
“There’s a lot of other science that’s going to be done on this mission,” he said.
Blue Ghost will spend about 45 days getting to the moon, where it will set down in Mare Crisium, a dark plain on the face of the moon about 66,000 square miles in area, or roughly the size of Florida.
The spacecraft will operate its payloads/instruments for one complete lunar day, about 14 Earth days, take pictures of the lunar sunset and “provide critical data on how lunar regolith reacts to solar influences during lunar dusk conditions,” according to Firefly. The lander will then operate for several hours after lunar nightfall, the company said.
Charles said his team has been busy testing Firefly’s ground stations to make sure they’ll be able to communicate with Blue Ghost once it’s in space. Come launch day, they’ll be camped out at the mission control room at Cedar Park ready to start working with the lander after it separates from the rocket, he said.
Charles noted that Firefly will soon have its own Medium Launch Vehicle (in addition to its Alpha rocket) capable of carrying spacecraft such as Blue Ghost into space.
While one team of engineers is charged with ensuring Blue Ghost is designed according to NASA specifications, and another team is responsible for assembling the lander, Charles’ job is to “oversee everything that needs to be done once the spacecraft is in orbit,” he said.
With a number of thorough mission simulations having been conducted, the teams feel good about the real thing, coming up in just a matter of weeks, Charles said.
“The testing team has completed everything. The assembly team has completed all the assembly. I think all around the company we’re very confident and ready,” he said.
Firefly received the Mission 1 award from NASA in 2021, and has also received awards for Blue Ghost Missions 2 and 3, with launches scheduled for 2026 and 2028, respectively.
“We’re very excited to have all these opportunities to provide NASA some value and get the U.S. back to the moon,” Charles said.
He said he’s greatly honored to be part of such a history-making endeavor, which feels like a “dream come true,” and offered this advice: “Aspire and always keep working.”
“Hard work and dedication are going to get you there,” Charles said. “Never give up on your dreams.”