Firefly Aerospace has acquired Space-ng Inc., a Littleton, Colorado-based provider of AI vision navigation and autonomous guidance systems — and the timing is no accident. This is the software that already proved itself in the most unforgiving test environment possible: an autonomous lunar descent with no room for error.
The deal carries tangible operational history. Space-ng’s vision navigation software flew on Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, where it determined position and attitude, detected hazardous lunar terrain, and autonomously executed two hazard-avoidance manoeuvres in real time before the lander’s March 2025 touchdown in Mare Crisium. The software also brings GPS/GNSS-free optical navigation, rendezvous and proximity operations, and docking capability — functions that matter across a growing mission manifest.
That success deserves context. Recent lunar landing attempts by commercial operators have ended in failure — a reminder that soft landing on the Moon remains a hard problem. Firefly succeeded on its first attempt, and Space-ng’s autonomous hazard detection was a material part of that outcome.
Space-ng’s origin is worth noting. Founded in 2024 as a spinoff of Farm-ng — a company building AI vision and robotics for precision agriculture since 2020 — it demonstrates how domain-agnostic autonomy can be. The core engineering problem is structurally identical: determine position, map surroundings, avoid obstacles, act in real time. The operating environment simply changed from a field to the lunar surface. Co-founder and CEO Ethan Rublee joins Firefly as Chief Engineer of Software, overseeing the company’s full spacecraft software suite.
With Space-ng’s technology now deployed across Blue Ghost Missions 2, 3, and 4 under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme, the NASA MoonFall mission delivering four drones to the lunar south pole via an Elytra Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV), the capability is no longer experimental. It is Firefly’s operational baseline.
This story was covered in Issue #6 of Bits & Orbits, the weekly read on where AI meets space.
Bits & Orbits #6
https://read.bitsandorbits.com/p/bits-orbits-weekly-issue-6
Firefly Aerospace Acquires Space-ng to Advance Future of Autonomous Space Operations