Robotic vehicles from Firefly Aerospace of Texas and Ispace of Japan parted ways early Wednesday after being launched on the same SpaceX rocket. Both are aiming for the lunar surface.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander flying under NASA’s CLPS program as well as Japanese company ispace’s Resilience lander are set to launch together on a SpaceX Falcon

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched lunar landers to the moon for two commercial missions on Wednesday, January 15.

Two moon landers, one from Japan's ispace and another from U.S. space firm Firefly, began their journeys into space on Wednesday with SpaceX's unusual double moonshot launch, underscoring the global rush to examine the lunar surface.

The two landers that departed from Kennedy Space Center are the latest in a stream of private spacecraft headed to the moon.

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.

A SpaceX rocket carrying two commercial lunar landers took off toward space early Wednesday morning in another step toward an era of private moon exploration. This carpool to the moon carried Blue Ghost,