NASA's Blue Ghost lunar lander is on its way to the moon, soaring through space with a tiny lunar rover called Tenacious. "After all the testing conducted and mission simulations completed, we're now fully focused on execution as we look to complete our on-orbit operations,

A Texas-built lander named Blue Ghost marks another test of NASA’s new lunar delivery initiative

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

The payloads will be delivered to the moon via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket being launched at 1:11 a.m. Eastern time (12:11 a.m. Central time) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From there, the lander will spend 45 days in space before landing on the Moon's surface to conduct its research.

The Blue Ghost lunar lander is set to lift off Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A. Here's what to know.

AM EST, and will not only have Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lander on board, but also the Resilience lander from the Japanese robotic spacecraft firm iSpace. It will take 45 days for the craft to journey to the Moon before it spends another 14 days carrying out surface operations.

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

The two robotic lunar landers —one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months.