A space twofer is scheduled to take place early Wednesday morning — two lunar missions for the price of one rocket launch.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 will lift off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan.

When is the launch and how can I watch it?

The launch is scheduled for 1:11 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. Forecasts predict a 90 percent chance of favorable weather.

SpaceX will provide coverage of the launch on the social media platform X beginning about one hour before liftoff, or around 12:10 a.m. NASA will start a live video stream at 12:30 a.m. of Blue Ghost and the payloads it is carrying for the agency, which you can watch in the video player above. Ispace will provide coverage of its Resilience lander in English and Japanese starting at 12:20 a.m.

If needed, a backup launch time is available on Thursday at 1:09 a.m., although the weather is less favorable.

Why are two moon landers sharing one rocket?

That is the result of fortuitous scheduling by SpaceX and not something that was planned by Firefly or Ispace.

Firefly had purchased a Falcon 9 launch to send its Blue Ghost lander to the moon. At the same time, Ispace, to save on the costs for the mission, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload on a rocket launch that was going roughly in the right direction to get its Resilience lander to the moon. That turned out to be Blue Ghost’s trip.

“It was a no-brainer to put them together,” Julianna Scheiman, the director for NASA science missions at SpaceX, said during a news conference on Tuesday.

After the Falcon 9 rocket reaches orbit, the second stage will fire again for a minute so that it can deploy Blue Ghost in an elliptical orbit around Earth about one hour after launch. Then the rocket stage will fire once more, for just one second, to adjust the orbit for the deployment of Resilience about 1.5 hours after launch.

What are Firefly and Blue Ghost?

Firefly Aerospace is one of the new space companies that have popped up over the past few years. It has developed and launched a small rocket called Alpha several times. In 2023 Firefly demonstrated that it could prepare and launch a payload for the United States Space Force within days — a capability that the Department of Defense is looking to develop so that it could quickly replace satellites that come under attack.

Blue Ghost — named after a species of fireflies — is a robotic lander that Firefly has developed to take scientific instruments and other payloads to the surface of the moon.

This mission is headed to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

NASA will pay Firefly $101.5 million if it takes 10 payloads to the lunar surface, and a bit less if it does not fully succeed. The NASA payloads include a drill to measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean off glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.

The lander will operate for about 14 days — the length of a lunar day — until darkness descends at the landing site.

What are Ispace and Resilience?

This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a commercial lander on the surface of the moon. Its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander tried to set down near the Atlas crater on the near side of the moon. But the landing software was confused when it passed over the crater rim, which is two miles higher than the surrounding terrain. The spacecraft ended up hovering far above the ground after thinking it had landed and then crashed when it ran out of propellant.

Resilience — also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander — is essentially the same design as the Mission 1 spacecraft, but with different payloads. Ispace officials said they were confident that the mistakes that led to the crash in 2023 had been fixed.

The payloads on Resilience include a water electrolyzer experiment, which splits the hydrogen and oxygen molecules, from the Takasago Thermal Engineering Company in Japan, and a small rover named Tenacious that was developed and built by Ispace’s European subsidiary.

Although this is not a NASA mission, it will collect two soil samples — one scooped up by the rover, the other just soil that settles on the landing pads — and sell them to the agency for $5,000 each.

The transactions have no scientific value, because the samples will remain on the moon. Instead, they are meant to help strengthen the view of the United States government that while no nation on Earth can claim sovereignty of the moon or other parts of the solar system under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, nations and companies can own and profit from what they extract from the moon.

Resilience and Tenacious are also designed to operate for one lunar day, or 14 Earth days.

Which mission will arrive at the moon first?

Blue Ghost should get to the moon first on March 2. For the first 25 days, it is to circle around Earth as the company turns on and checks out the spacecraft’s systems, before heading on a four-day journey to the moon. Then it will orbit the moon for 16 days before trying to land, 45 days after launch.

Resilience will take a longer, winding path that consumes less energy and propellant, gradually stretching out its elliptical orbit until the farthest point of the orbit reaches beyond the moon. As a secondary payload on the Falcon 9, it will need to perform a flyby of the moon to get into the correct position to be captured into lunar orbit.

The vehicle is to land on a plain named Mare Frigoris about four to five months after launch.

Both Blue Ghost and Resilience might be beaten by a spacecraft from Intuitive Machines of Houston that is not scheduled to launch until late February. Despite its later start, it will take a direct, quicker path to the moon.

Intuitive Machines placed Odysseus, its first lander, on the moon in a trip sponsored by NASA last year. It was still successfully able to contact Earth despite tipping over.

Why are private companies landing on the moon?

By hiring private companies, NASA hopes to send more devices to the moon at a lower cost to perform experiments and test new technologies. A second aim of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or C.L.P.S., is to jump-start a commercial industry there that would not otherwise develop.

NASA officials expect failures along the way, and that is what has happened. The first C.L.P.S. mission by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh suffered a catastrophic propulsion failure soon after launch and never made it close to the moon. The tipping of the second Intuitive Machine lander during the second C.L.P.S. mission prevented the scientific instruments aboard from collecting the data they were sent to measure.

The American subsidiary of Ispace is collaborating with Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., for a C.L.P.S. mission that is scheduled to launch next year.

Among both men and women, drinking just one alcoholic beverage a day increases the risk of liver cirrhosis, esophageal cancer, oral cancer and various types of injuries, according to a federal analysis of alcohol’s health effects issued on Tuesday.

Women face a higher risk of developing liver cancer at this level of drinking, but a lower risk of diabetes. And while one alcoholic drink daily also reduces the likelihood of strokes caused by blood clots among both men and women, the report found, even occasional heavy drinking negates the benefits.

The report, prepared by an outside scientific review panel under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services, is one of two competing assessments that will be used to shape the influential U.S. Dietary Guidelines, which are to be updated this year.

The government has for several decades recommended a limit of two standard alcoholic drinks per day for men and one for women.

In December, a review of the data by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine supported this advice, finding that moderate drinking was linked to fewer heart attack and stroke deaths, and fewer deaths overall, compared with no drinking.

But some experts fear that the harms of moderate drinking have been understated, particularly the risk of cancer, which is the leading cause of death among people under 85, according to the American Cancer Society.

In 2020, the last time the dietary guidelines came up for review, scientific advisers suggested lowering the recommendation to one drink daily for both men and women. That advice did not appear in the final guidelines.

The analysis from the National Academies tied moderate drinking in women to a small but significant increase in breast cancer, but said there was insufficient evidence to tie alcohol to other cancers.

This month, however, the U.S. Surgeon General, citing mounting scientific evidence, called for labeling alcohol with cancer warnings similar to those that appear on cigarettes. The report issued on Tuesday found that the increased cancer risk comes with any amount of alcohol consumption and rises with higher levels of drinking.

Drinking is linked to a higher risk of death for seven types of cancer, including breast cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer as well as cancers of the oral cavity, pharynx and larynx and esophagus.

Men and women are both vulnerable to these health harms, but women are much more likely to develop a cancer linked to drinking, the report said.

“Among the U.S. population, the risk of dying from alcohol use begins at low levels of average use,” the report said. “Higher levels of alcohol consumption are linked with progressively higher mortality risk.”

Those who consume more than seven drinks per week have a one in 1,000 risk of dying from a condition related to alcohol. The risk increases to one in 100 if consumption is more than nine drinks a week.

This article will be updated.