As soon as late February, a lunar lander will depart from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on its way to the moon carrying instruments that could investigate what’s just beneath the surface. Barely two months into the year, it’ll be the third mission to have set out on a journey toward the moon so far in 2025. If 2024 was all about establishing a commercial presence on the moon, 2025 is the year of doubling down. Well, unless Trump decides to deprioritize moon missions and shift the focus to Mars under Elon Musk’s direction, throwing off the whole timeline. But as it stands, it should be a busy year for the moon.
Last year kicked off with the launch of Astrobotics’ Peregrine lander, marking the first of several missions led by companies working under multimillion-dollar contracts as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Peregrine ultimately didn’t make it to its destination after suffering a propellant leak post-launch, but only a few weeks later, Intuitive Machines launched and successfully landed its Odysseus spacecraft on the moon — a first for a private spacecraft. (Odysseus tipped over when it hit the ground, but its payloads were still able to collect and transmit some data).
Now, fast-forward to this year, and NASA has half a dozen CLPS missions on its schedule. The first of these, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, launched on January 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. That same rocket also carried a lunar lander made by the Japanese company ispace, which is making a second attempt for its own commercial exploration endeavor, Hakuto-R.
Firefly’s lander, Blue Ghost, is expected to arrive at the moon first, with a target landing date of March 2 in an area called Mare Crisium. The 6.6-foot-tall solar-powered spacecraft is carrying 10 science payloads for NASA and other partners. That includes a new dust shield system to demonstrate how future missions might prevent particulates from accumulating on spacecraft, instruments for testing sample collection and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based navigation and a radiation tolerant computer. “The objectives of the mission are to investigate heat flow from the lunar interior, plume-surface interactions, [and] crustal electric and magnetic fields,” according to NASA. “It will also take X-ray images of the Earth’s magnetosphere.”
Resilience, the ispace lander, is taking a different, low-energy path to the moon and won’t reach its site, Mare Frigoris, until late May or June. That craft has a micro rover called Tenacious on board that is designed to explore, collect surface material and relay data. In addition to a camera and shovel, Tenacious has a tiny model house mounted on it — specifically the “Moonhouse,” by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg. The lander is carrying water electrolyzer equipment, a deep space radiation probe and a food production experiment module. (And how could we forget, it also contains a commemorative alloy plate from Bandai Namco Research Institute made in the style of the Gundam franchise’s “Charter of the Universal Century”).
ispace
Intuitive Machines, the company that pulled off the first-ever commercial moon landing with its Odysseus craft last year, is slated to launch its second CLPS mission in the next month or so, around the end of February. The IM-2 Nova-C lander dubbed Athena is headed to the lunar south pole with a meter-long drill and a mass spectrometer for NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1). Its goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of drilling for samples and analyzing those samples on-site for things like water. IM-2 will also serve as a rideshare for NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, a small orbiter that will “study the form, abundance and distribution of lunar water and its relation to geology.”
Besides the PRIME-1 instruments, Athena will transport a laser retroreflector array, an Intuitive Machines Micro-Nova Hopper — described as “a propulsive drone that deploys off of a Nova-C lander and hops across the lunar surface” — and a Lunar Surface Communication System “network in a box” made by Nokia. The two companies plan to set up the moon’s first cellular network, which is “engineered to handle surface connectivity between the lander and vehicles, carrying high-definition video streaming, command-and-control communications and telemetry data.”
Intuitive Machines
There’s a chance Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander will take its first trip to the moon as soon as this spring or summer. John Couluris, a senior VP at Blue Origin, said in an interview with 60 Minutes last March that “we’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today.” At the time, the company hadn’t yet launched its New Glenn rocket — which would be the vehicle for this mission — even once, so that claim didn’t hold much weight. But after many, many delays, New Glenn finally took its maiden flight in mid-January.
NASA revealed, in an FCC filing spotted by SpaceNews back in August, that it had selected Blue Origin’s lander to bring a camera system, the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS), to the moon’s south pole this year under the CLPS program. In the filing, NASA notes that this needs to be done before 2025 is over, as the data collected by the instrument at landing will help inform plans for the first crewed Artemis moon landing. SCALPSS payloads have flown on other CLPS missions, but the thrust level of Blue Origin’s Mark 1 lander is closer to the scale of the Human Landing System NASA will use for astronauts.
Blue Origin said in another FCC filing the same month that its demonstration lunar mission, Pathfinder, could launch as early as March 2025, SpaceNews reported. Don’t be surprised if it actually happens much later.
The next CLPS mission after that isn’t expected to take off until the fall, when Astrobotic will get another shot at landing on the moon. This time, it’ll be sending its larger Griffin lander to a region near the south pole. Griffin Mission 1 was initially supposed to carry NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), but the space agency canceled development of that project late last year due to delays and rising costs. Astrobotic’s lander won’t show up to the moon empty-handed, though. It’ll have a tiny solar-powered CubeRover in tow, as well as a laser retroreflector array to pinpoint the lander’s location.
Astrobotic
We may see a third Intuitive Machines mission before the end of this year. The company and NASA are eyeing late 2025 or early 2026 for the launch of IM-3, which will deliver a suite of instruments focused on studying the magnetic and plasma properties of the Reiner Gamma lunar swirl, an area with its own “mini-magnetosphere.” A rover called the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) will also be on board, plus a trio of small rovers from the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project that will demonstrate mostly autonomous robots working together. The European Space Agency’s MoonLIGHT laser retroreflector will fly with IM-3 too, along with and the Lunar Space Environment Monitor, from South Korea’s Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).
While this year is certain to bring a lot of activity on and around the moon, there’s one thing we won’t see there just yet — humans. NASA has adjusted the timeline of the Artemis missions a few times since the program’s announcement, and most recently said in December that it’s pushing the first crewed flight, Artemis II, to April 2026. The agency previously said it was shooting for September 2025. Artemis III, the mission in which two astronauts will go to the lunar surface, now isn’t expected to launch until mid-2027.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/2025-is-going-to-be-another-big-year-for-commercial-moon-missions-160038622.html?src=rss
