Firefly’s Blue Ghost — named after a species of U.S. Southeastern fireflies — should reach the moon first. The 6-foot-6-inches-tall (2-meter-tall) lander will attempt a touchdown in early March at Mare Crisium, a volcanic plain in the northern latitudes.

A new year of lunar exploration kicked off early Wednesday, when two robotic landers and a small rover began their journeys to the moon.

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.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a pair of lunar landers into space early Wednesday, sending Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience on their lengthy journeys to the moon.

SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying two lunar landers from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday. The rocket carried Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience to the moon.

The mission featured two robotic lunar landers: one from Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and another from the Japanese space company ispace. Both landers, each roughly the size

Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its massive New Glenn rocket for the first time early Thursday, a livestream of the blastoff showed.Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets -- used for suborbital tourism -- but they are five times smaller and land on terra firma rather than a ship at sea.