• Intuitive Machines, Firefly Aerospace, and ispace are all on their way to attempt a moon landing.
• Three private missions at once is notable, and it's just the beginning of the moon opening for business.
• Here's why three companies are flying to the moon right now.

Three companies are flying missions to land on the moon right now, in the early stages of a mad dash for lunar wealth.

The moon may not be Mars-obsessed Elon Musk's favorite space destination, but many other entrepreneurs see it as an untapped economic opportunity.

That's why two Texas-based companies and one Japanese firm are flocking to the moon this month.

All three missions were launched aboard SpaceX rockets.

None of them are carrying human crews, but they all lay the groundwork for more complex operations in the future as the moon opens for business.

Intuitive Machines wants to mine the moon

The Texas-based company Intuitive Machines launched its second moon-landing mission, called IM-2, on Wednesday.

The company became the first commercial enterprise to land on the moon a year ago, but the new mission is taking its ambitions further. The mission includes a rover and a hopper, which carry experimental technology for GPS on the moon and a small drill to test the technology needed to one day mine minerals and ice beneath the lunar surface.

Water ice on the moon could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, while minerals like titanium or rare earth elements used in smartphones and computers could be sold back on Earth.

"The whole package of this mission is about prospecting," Steve Altemus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines, told Business Insider in December.

He added that eventually, he hopes to mine rare materials on the moon and bring them back to Earth.

Firefly Aerospace is testing lunar dust for NASA

For now, Intuitive Machines is the only company to ever successfully land softly (that is, without crashing) on the moon. Another Texas company, Firefly Aerospace, is gunning for second place this weekend.

Firefly's Blue Ghost mission is set to attempt its first moon landing on Sunday.

"I think a lot of us will be holding our breath, you know, lighting a candle," Ray Allensworth, the director of Firefly's spacecraft program, told BI.

If Blue Ghost succeeds, it will run experiments on the lunar surface for about two weeks, which is a full lunar day.

All in all, the spacecraft is carrying 10 payloads for NASA, mainly focusing on "what the surface of the moon looks like or feels like, trying to figure out the impacts of the regolith, how the dust interacts with materials, the temperatures under the surface, stuff like that," Allensworth said.

Japan's ispace wants people to live on the moon

Both Texas companies' moon landers are funded in part through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.

The third mission en route to the moon, though, is from the Japanese company ispace.

The company's Hakuto-R spacecraft previously tried to land on the moon in 2023, but ispace reported that the lander had miscalculated its altitude when it detected an unexpected crater rim on the lunar surface, causing it to plummet and crash.

Ispace is trying again with a new mission carrying a lander and a micro-rover. The mission, called M2, launched aboard the same Falcon 9 rocket as the Firefly Blue Ghost spacecraft on January 15. M2 is taking a more leisurely route to the moon, though, with its landing set for May or June. The new lander is named RESILIENCE.

Ispace touts a future where the moon and its water resources support "construction, energy, steel procurement, communications, transportation, agriculture, medicine, and tourism."

The ispace website also advocates for permanent human residence on the moon, saying that "by 2040 the moon will support a population of 1,000, with 10,000 people visiting every year."

It's going to take a lot more moon missions to bring that vision to life. For now, for all three missions, just sticking the landing would be a huge achievement.

• The Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace is flying its first moon mission, called Blue Ghost.
• New photos show how far the spacecraft is traveling for its moon landing attempt on March 2.
• Photos like these are rare since NASA ended the Apollo program 52 years ago, but a new era is beginning.

A new mission to land on the moon is beaming back stunning photos that put our world into perspective.

Look closely at the above image. There are two worlds in the photo. The moon is a tiny dot in the distance, visible below Earth.

The photo comes from the uncrewed Blue Ghost spacecraft, built by the Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace. The mission is en route to descend to the lunar surface on March 2.

Success would make Firefly the second private company to ever land on the moon, just one year after a historic touchdown by Intuitive Machines.

The mission is a harbinger of a new era in space, where companies race to the moon to build the infrastructure for a future economy of lunar tourism, mining, and exploration.

Photos from the Blue Ghost spacecraft

The below image, which Firefly released on February 12, shows Earth reflecting off the spacecraft's solar panel. Believe it or not, the moon is in this photo, too. See it?

On its way to the moon, the spacecraft has crossed over 715,000 miles in space.

As it crept closer to the moon, the spacecraft conducted a critical engine burn to insert itself into lunar orbit, where it's set to hang out until it's time for landing.

A few hours after the burn, the spacecraft sent its first up-close images of the moon.

"I almost started crying because we're finally at the moon," Ray Allensworth, the director of Firefly's spacecraft program, told Business Insider.

Looking at the photos is "really surreal," she said.

Blue Ghost has 10 experiments and plans to capture a lunar sunset

Blue Ghost is carrying 10 experiments and instruments for NASA, including a system to collect samples of moon dust and a radiation-tolerant computer that will test whether the technology can survive the extreme radiation on the moon.

If the mission successfully lands on the moon, its payloads are set to operate for about 14 days, which is a complete lunar day.

If all goes to plan, one of its final acts will be to capture the lunar sunset, studying how the sun causes moon dust to levitate, a mysterious phenomenon observed by Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.

Until then, Blue Ghost is orbiting the moon while its human operators prepare for landing.

Photos from fresh new spacecraft headed to the moon have been scarce since NASA ended the Apollo program, with no US moon landings since 1972 until last year's Intuitive Machines mission. These images could become common again, though, if Firefly has its way.

"Ultimately, our goal is that we're going to the moon at least yearly and hopefully increase that cadence over time," Allensworth said.

• A stunning new photo shows the International Space Station passing in front of the moon.
• The ISS appears tiny against the moon's vastness — and it's almost 239,000 miles closer.
• Can you see the ISS? The photo has another Easter egg too — a site for future human moon landings.

The moon isn't Earth's only iconic satellite. The International Space Station is up there too, circling the planet 16 times each day. You just don't see it.

A stunning new photo shows just how small the football-field-sized orbiting laboratory is compared to the moon.

Take a look:

Can you see the space station? Here's a hint: It's near the boundary between light and dark.

Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured this image of the ISS as its orbit carried it across the face of the moon, from his perspective in Arizona. The ISS is about 250 miles away, and the moon is about 239,000 miles away.

Let's zoom in a little closer.

Do you see the ISS now? It's right here, near the top:

"I think there's a very nice juxtaposition," McCarthy told Business Insider of the photo, adding that the ISS has "a haphazard-looking design with the way the radiators jut out and the solar panels jut out," next to the moon's rugged, natural craters.

It was daytime, which lends the image a "soft, pastel-y look," he said.

The telescope almost missed it

Taking a photo like this is no easy feat.

To capture the few seconds when the ISS zoomed across the moon's face, McCarthy said he had to drive three hours to set up his telescope and computer equipment in the right area and point it to exactly the right spot of the sky at exactly the right time.

Once he'd pulled over to the side of a dirt road and set up all his equipment, McCarthy said he was racing to solve technical problems and get the shot. The sun was bright, which made it difficult to see the computer screen where he was recording what his telescope saw.

"I had no idea if it was really in focus," he said.

Then, one of his laptops died. No matter, McCarthy thought, because he had two different telescope-laptop-camera stations in case this happened. He sells prints of these photos, after all.

However, the second station's camera wasn't recording enough frames per second. By the time he'd swapped cameras, there were only two minutes left until the space station zoomed past — and his telescope was looking at the wrong part of the moon.

McCarthy recalled the final moments of his telescope drama: "I try to keep my cool, to slowly pan across the moon until I get to the area where I know the station is going to transit. The moment I get there, I see the station zip through the screen."

McCarthy wasn't sure if he'd gotten a crisp image until he reloaded the video, scanned through the 6,000 images in it to find the moment of the space station's transit, and looked at each frame. He was relieved to see the result.

"It was amazing — like the best one I've ever done," he said.

McCarthy stayed at the spot for another hour to slowly pan his telescope across the rest of the moon, capturing each portion of it in the same crisp, zoomed-in field of vision. He stacked and stitched together about 108,000 images to get a complete, high-resolution mosaic of the entire moon with the ISS.

NASA's future moon-landing site

There's another Easter egg in this photo, too. Near the top you can see Shackleton Crater on the lunar south pole.

NASA is eyeing the area around that 13-mile-wide depression for its next human moon landing — the first mission to put astronauts on the lunar surface since 1972.

Scientists believe that permanently shadowed craters on the lunar south pole are rich in frozen water, which will be a crucial resource for expanding further into deep space. Water can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to fuel rocket launches — perhaps enough fuel to launch from the moon to Mars.

The ISS, meanwhile, is aging and due for retirement in the 2030s. McCarthy's new image shows two eras of space exploration — the space-station era coming to a close and the moon-base era that NASA and its business partners are forging anew.

"In this photo, you're looking at the pinnacle of human ingenuity and engineering," McCarthy said. "The space station has taught us so much about the human body, and it's given us a lot of information that we're going to use as we continue to pursue those seemingly impossible frontiers."