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The past few years have marked the advent of a new lunar space race, with a fleet of robotic spacecraft from various countries trying — and mostly failing — to reach the moon and carry out their intended missions.
But 2025 may offer a second chance for the companies and countries behind those missions that crashed and burned, as well as introduce some new players to the field.
January will kick off with the launch of two lunar landers in one fell swoop: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will carry spacecraft developed by Cedar Park, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based Ispace.
Firefly is making its first attempt to put a vehicle on the moon, but this mission marks a second try for Ispace, after its first lander crashed and blasted a divot in the lunar surface in 2023.
And those two landers are only a couple of the uncrewed missions looking to reach the lunar surface — or seek redemption — in the coming months.
This year promises to be among the most tantalizing yet in humanity’s renewed push to explore the moon, with the United States and its allies as well as China scrambling to send robots to the lunar surface. Many of these machine-driven missions are designed to pave the way for astronauts to return to the lunar surface, as NASA plans to do as soon as 2027.
Here’s a glance at some of the moon shots on the horizon.
This week: Firefly and Ispace are on double duty
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slated to launch landers for both Firefly and Ispace is set to lift off as soon as 1:11 a.m. ET Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
If all goes according to plan, Firefly’s lander, called Blue Ghost, will spend about 45 days making a careful approach to its lunar destination around Mons Latreille, an ancient volcanic feature in a more than 300-mile-wide (483-kilometer) basin called Mare Crisium, or the “Sea of Crises,” on the moon’s near side.
“Mare Crisium was created by early volcanic eruptions and flooded with basaltic lava more than 3 billion years ago,” according to Firefly. “This unique landing site will allow our payload partners to gather critical data about the Moon’s regolith (rock and dust rubble), geophysical characteristics, and the interaction of solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field.”
On board Blue Ghost will be a group of science experiments and technology demonstrations, including ones that will test a “Lunar PlanetVac” to collect and sort soil samples on the moon, satellite navigation, radiation-adapated computers, and self-cleaning glass that can wipe away lunar dust, according to Firefly.
For its inaugural mission, Blue Ghost is expected to operate on the moon for about 14 days before its landing zone is plunged into the frigid temperatures of lunar nighttime.
Firefly is among the participants in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program in which the space agency partners with private companies to deliver payloads to the moon. Others contractors include Houston-based Intuitive Machines and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology.
The goal of the CLPS program is to give NASA a pool of commercial robotic landers that can ferry cargo to the lunar surface as the space agency works on separate plans to get its astronauts to the moon later this decade.
“It’s a good time for the lunar economy,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim told CNN in December, adding that he’s “100% confident in our team’s ability” to land the company’s Blue Ghost vehicle successfully.
Success, of course, is not guaranteed.
Ispace, the Japan-based company, understands that all too well: The company’s first attempt to put one of its Hakuto-R landers on the moon ended in a dramatic failure in April 2023 because of navigation issues.
Now, an upgraded Hakuto-R spacecraft, named Resilience, will offer Ispace a second chance.
The spacecraft will take a much slower path to the moon than Blue Ghost after the landers are deployed from their Falcon 9 rocket.
Resilience is aiming to land on the moon roughly four to five months after liftoff, according to Jumpei Nozaki, Ispace’s chief financial officer. On this mission, the Resillience lander will carry a tiny rover as well as tech instruments with various goals, including testing algae-based food production and monitoring deep-space radiation.
Ispace is targeting an area of the moon called Mare Frigoris — or the “Sea of Cold,” which lies in the far northern reaches of the moon’s near side — for its landing location.
Houston-based Intuitive Machines made history in February 2024 by putting a US-made lunar lander on the moon for the first time in more than five decades.
The triumphant touchdown of the company’s Nova-C lunar lander, called Odysseus, spurred jubilant cheers during the company’s webcast. But the landing wasn’t perfect: Odysseus tipped over on its side because of a navigation issue, leaving the vehicle to run with limited power and capabilities.
But Intuitive Machines will soon get another shot at perfection with a new Nova-C lander, called Athena, set to make its way moonward this year.
The mission, slated to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, could kick off as soon as late February, the company confirmed Monday. It will aim to land near the moon’s south pole — a region considered crucial to the current moon race because it’s believed to be home to stores of water ice.
Water found there could be used to provide astronauts with drinking water or even converted to rocket fuel.
Notably, on board Athena will be PRIME-1, or the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1, a NASA-developed tech demo designed to search and drill for water ice.
Also sharing a ride with Athena will be NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, a satellite designed to orbit the moon and use remote sensing to detect water.
If both of those NASA payloads succeed, it will be a welcome win for the space agency, which lost at least four research satellites during its November 2022 Artemis I mission.
The primary goal of that flight — to send an unoccupied crew capsule on a test flight around the moon — went smoothly.
But a group of small NASA satellites deployed alongside the spacecraft, including two meant to hunt for lunar water, failed to hit their marks.
Blue Origin, the space company Jeff Bezos founded in 2000, may also debut a prototype of its lunar lander.
The spacecraft, called Blue Moon, is one of two vehicles NASA has picked to potentially ferry astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface of the moon. Blue Origin’s contract for that task is worth $3.4 billion. (The other vehicle NASA selected is SpaceX’s Starship, which will aim to carry out the first landing in 2027.)
A Blue Moon vehicle capable of carrying humans is likely at least a few years away from its debut, but Blue Origin plans to launch a “pathfinder” lander for cargo missions to the moon as soon as this year. It’s not clear exactly when, however, or if that timeline will stick.
The mission will send a robotic lander to test Blue Moon’s design and engine capabilities, aiming to ensure a smooth ride for future missions with valuable science payloads or crew on board. NASA will also put one science instrument on board called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies, or SCALPSS, which is a set of cameras designed to monitor how moon dust reacts to the engines of landers as they head in for touchdown.
Blue Origin’s pathfinder spacecraft is slated to launch atop one of the company’s New Glenn rockets, which was set to make its debut flight Monday morning. But Blue Origin aborted the inaugural launch attempt as engineers worked to troubleshoot an undisclosed issue with the rocket.
Later this year and beyond
More moon missions are on the docket for later this year, though the complexity of such endeavors routinely leads to delays.
That said, Intuitive Machines could launch its third robotic lunar mission, called IM-3, as soon as October.
Astrobotic Technology may also get a chance to bounce back from a disappointing first go at a moon landing in 2024. Its Peregrine lander began leaking fuel after reaching space last January, forcing the vehicle to swing back toward Earth and abandon its lunar ambitions.
The company has a new, larger vehicle — called Griffin — in the works for a launch as soon as this year. However, Astrobotic has already hit several complications with Griffin, including NASA’s cancellation of a rover meant to fly on board the lunar lander. That rover, called the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, remains in limbo.
But Astrobotic has said it may outfit Griffin with some of the company’s own technology, such as infrastructure for its planned lunar power business called LunaGrid.
Finally, according to a timeline laid out in early 2024, SpaceX may attempt to send an uncrewed Starship spacecraft — the most powerful launch vehicle ever made — to the moon.
It’s not clear whether that mission will actually happen in 2025. When reached for comment, a NASA spokesperson confirmed in an emailed statement that conducting an uncrewed test mission to the moon is part of the space agency’s development requirements for SpaceX’s Starship — but the statement did not say whether the rocket may be ready for such a demo this year.
“NASA continues to work closely with SpaceX on progress toward milestones, including a design review, individual subsystem development and testing, and SpaceX’s integrated flight test campaign,” the space agency said. “Please refer to SpaceX for more information on their development progress.”
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment nor does the company typically respond to routine inquiries from reporters.
Officials at NASA, however, have more recently indicated that SpaceX at least plans to ramp up Starship development this year, completing missions that will show how the spacecraft can be refueled once in orbit. (Starship is expected to need its propellant topped off multiple times as it sits in Earth orbit before it can complete a moon mission.)
Whether all these missions squeeze onto the 2025 calendar remains to be seen. What’s certain, however, is that NASA, the commercial space sector, and nations around the globe are fomenting their desires to renew lunar exploration.
NASA, for example, wants more than just to return American astronauts to the lunar surface: The federal agency is seeking to establish a permanent settlement there, angling to compete with the ambitions of China, which is aiming to put boots on the moon by 2030.
The pursuits by the US and China are in part nationalistic and political. But the objectives are also scientific.
“From a scientific perspective, if we think about it, the moon is a repository of information of what’s been happening to both the moon and Earth over time,” said Dr. Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology and the principal investigator for NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter. “So a big question is, where did this water on the moon come from? Is it ancient? And then, what does that tell us about how the Earth got water?”