Austin-area space company Firefly Aerospace, with help from SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, to launch Blue Ghost mission to the moon on Wednesday, January 15.

A SpaceX mission set to lift off overnight marks a first for Firefly Aerospace under NASA’s plans to build up American companies to support its lunar goals. A Falcon 9 targeting a 1:11 a.m, liftoff Wednesday from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A is carrying the Cedar Park,

CEDAR PARK, Texas — A Central Texas aerospace company is making final preparations before blasting off to the stars. Early Wednesday morning, the lunar lander built by Firefly Aerospace is set to launch from Florida and head to the moon.

In 2011, the 30-year space shuttle program ended as Atlantis touched down at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. With five shuttles ad 355 space flyers, the program completed 135 missions. Today, Atlantis is on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors’ Center.

Blue Ghost's main mission will be research. It will hang out in Earth's orbit for 25 days taking measurements and waiting for the right time to fling itself to the moon. After four days in transit, Blue Ghost will spend 16 days in lunar orbit collecting more data before descending to Mare Crisium, one of the largest basins on the moon.

Firefly Aerospace, the leader in end-to-end responsive space services, today announced Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, successfully acquired signal, and completed on-orbit commissioning.

Tucked inside the rocket’s bullet-shaped nose cone were the two lunar landers — hailing from two different countries. The first is Blue Ghost, a 6.6-foot-tall (2-meter-tall) lunar lander developed by Firefly Aerospace, a Cedar Park, Texas-based company.

The spacecraft built and operated by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace launched in the early Monday hours from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket.

In the spirit of those words in Tech's "Matador Song," one of Texas Tech's professors is bearing the institution's banners into space through a NASA project aimed at understanding how heat flows on the Moon, with an eye on potential habitation.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blared toward space Wednesday carrying a pair of lunar landers on a journey to our closest celestial neighbor.

SpaceX is set to launch another batch of its Starlink V2 Mini satellites into low Earth orbit during a four-hour launch window that opens at 12:13 a.m. ET.