Brief Review of the Rocket and Space Industry in the First Half of 2024, part 2: The Great Leap to the Moon

During the first half of 2024, several significant lunar missions took place. The United States, China, and Japan each showcased exciting launches that, from a global perspective, mark the beginning of humanity’s desire to firmly establish a presence on the Moon in the coming decades.  

Today, we will review the most notable lunar missions in the first half of 2024.

CLPS launches: the Peregrine lander and Nova-C voyage

The first mission of the year took place on January 8 when the Peregrine lander, manufactured by the American company Astrobotic Technology, headed to the Moon aboard ULA’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket. According to the mission plan, the Peregrine spacecraft was supposed to attempt a soft landing on the Moon. However, the spacecraft was unable to leave its initial elliptical lunar orbit due to a fuel leak that began immediately after it separated from the rocket. The lack of power for the final jump to the Moon led to the decision to destroy Peregrine by a controlled deorbit into Earth’s atmosphere.

The Peregrine mission was the first in NASA’s much-anticipated Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Investigations by Astrobotic Technology revealed that the most likely cause of the engine’s power shortage and the fuel leak was high-pressure helium entering the fuel supply valve. The loss of Peregrine was not the only setback for NASA in January of this year. The Martian helicopter Ingenuity’s 72nd flight over the surface of Mars turned out to be its last, after having operated on the Red Planet since April 3, 2021.

The second planned CLPS mission was the Nova-C lander by Intuitive Machines, headquartered in Houston, Texas. The Odysseus spacecraft, which carried the Nova-C, was launched into orbit on February 15 from the Kennedy Space Center launch pad at Cape Canaveral using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The mission’s goal was to reach the Moon’s surface within a week, making Intuitive Machines the first private company to conduct a lunar landing. Over the course of two weeks, Nova-C was supposed to conduct a series of experiments, including drilling into the lunar surface and collecting soil samples in a special container. Unfortunately, the landing did not end up being as “soft” as planned.

Just six days later, on February 21, the spacecraft entered lunar orbit at an altitude of 92 km, and began its landing maneuvers the next day. It touched down 300 km from the Moon’s south pole, in the vicinity of the Schomberger crater. However, it encountered a setback: one of its legs broke during the landing, causing the module to bounce off the Moon’s surface and collapse onto its side. The vehicle’s solar panel, which was supposed to serve as its primary source of energy, tilted towards the Schomberger crater, making it impossible to recharge its batteries.

Ultimately, the lander, which was supposed to operate for two weeks, managed to send only 350 MB of data back to Earth. On February 29, after only six Earth days of activity, the lunar night overshadowed Nova-C, preventing it from generating energy with its solar panels. By March 23, nearly a month after the landing, Intuitive Machines announced the conclusion of the mission.

Despite these unfortunate setbacks, further Nova-C lunar missions could take place at the end of 2024 and in 2025. Moreover, Intuitive Machines had reason to celebrate other successes. First and foremost, Odysseus became the first spacecraft to use methalox fuel, a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.

Furthermore, it became the first commercial company to (relatively softly) land a platform on the Moon and receive telemetry data from it. In light of the even less successful start of the Peregrine project, Nova-C’s achievements can be viewed as a significant step forward.

Three more CLPS missions are expected to launch in 2024:

• The Blue Ghost M1 lunar landing platform, developed and launched by Firefly Aerospace, is expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2024. The spacecraft will deliver a lander equipped with small commercial payloads to the Moon.
• Griffin Mission 1, led by Astrobotic Technology, is expected to launch in November 2024. This mission will deliver a lander to the Moon aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket. Initially, NASA’s VIPER rover was planned to be the primary payload of the Griffin lander, but in July of this year, the space agency canceled the rover due to rising project costs, leaving room for other types of commercial payloads.
• IM-2 Athena is expected to launch in December 2024. This is the second lunar mission by Intuitive Machines under NASA’s CLPS program, which will deliver another Nova-C Athena lander to the Moon’s surface. The main objective of this second Nova-C mission is to measure the content of lunar water ice using the PRIME-1 detector. The Athena lander will also carry an unmanned drone, the Micro Nova Hopper (or μNova), which will use its neutron spectrometer to measure hydrogen content on the surface in PSR (permanently shadowed regions). A special drilling rig, TRIDENT, will perform lunar soil drilling to allow deeper exploration by the search instruments.
• NASA’s CLPS program is also becoming a key platform for demonstrating the latest space logistics technologies, which will later be used during the Artemis program’s lunar missions. These missions also include plans for building the first inhabited bases on the Moon’s surface.

Asia’s response: the success of China’s Chang’e 6 and Japan’s SLIM

NASA’s achievements on the global stage this year can be compared only to the success of China’s Chang’e 6 mission. This spacecraft launched on May 3 aboard the flagship of China’s space industry, the Long March 5 rocket. By May 8, the Chang’e 6 orbiter had reached lunar orbit, where it remained for about three weeks. On May 30, the Chang’e 6 lander separated from the orbiter to collect samples and successfully made a soft landing on the far side of the Moon, in the area of the large South Pole-Aitken Basin near the Moon’s south pole.

It is worth noting that the Chang’e 6 program was not entirely concealed from the world. In late 2018, the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA), which oversaw the program’s development, offered several European countries the opportunity to place additional payloads of up to 10 kg on the lander. This allowed the Chinese suite of instruments to be supplemented by an Italian retroreflector, the Instrument for Landing-Roving Laser Retroreflector Investigations (INRRI) orbital laser rangefinder, and the French Detection of Outgassing Radon (DORN) instrument, used for studying the movement of lunar dust and water particles between the regolith layer and the exosphere. Sweden also participated in the Chinese initiative with its Negative Ions on Lunar Surface (NILS) module, which conducted an experiment that studied the emission of negative ions around the Moon. Chang’e 6 also served as the mothership for the Pakistani ICUBE-Q CubeSat, which observed the Moon’s magnetic field using a pair of optical sensors.

Two days after landing, the Chang’e 6 deployed a small unmanned rover called Jinchan, equipped with an infrared spectrometer to search for ice deposits, as well as an optical camera that Jinchan used to capture images of the landing platform on the far side of the Moon.

After several days of collecting rock samples and other activities, the lander launched on June 6 from the South Pole-Aitken Basin, where the orbiter was already waiting for docking. During this maneuver, the lander transferred a container with over 2 kg of lunar soil to the spacecraft. Afterward, Chang’e 6 began preparations for its return flight to Earth. Its re-entry occurred on June 25, when the reentry capsule completed a controlled descent over Siziwang Banner, Inner Mongolia.

In 2024 there has been a marked growth of interest, particularly from the commercial space sector, in establishing a lunar presence. The first American CLPS missions, although not entirely successful, paved the way for further implementation of NASA’s Artemis program. CLPS remains the primary logistical mission for Artemis, so its setbacks and delays will have immediate negative impacts on the program’s timeline. This was evident when, following the failure of Peregrine, NASA announced a delay in future Artemis missions by at least a year.

Against this backdrop, China’s lunar program remains impressively stable, with the success of Chang’e 6’s return journey serving as a vivid confirmation. We are already witnessing mounting efforts by the major space powers to strengthen their presence on the Moon.

Speaking of the results achieved by other countries in the Asian region, it is important to highlight the partially successful soft landing of the Japanese spacecraft SLIM. On January 19, 2024, SLIM made Japan’s first-ever soft landing on the Moon with a precision range of 100 meters (for comparison, Apollo 11 had a precision range of 5-12 kilometers). Although the landing maneuver was initially successful, SLIM’s braking engines were affected by uneven thrust during the final stages of its descent, causing the spacecraft to topple over onto its side.

Some of SLIM’s solar panels ended up facing the Moon as a result of the fall, but the probe retained the ability to send data back to Earth, albeit in an energy-saving mode. The engineering team at JAXA put the probe into controlled hibernation three times to conserve its resources during the long lunar nights. To their great surprise, the probe “woke up” each time and continued transmitting data to Earth.

The last telemetry data from SLIM was sent on April 29, after its third “awakening.” However, shortly after that, contact with the spacecraft was lost due to a sudden power loss, indicating that the batteries were fully discharged. JAXA has not yet officially declared the end of the SLIM mission, so they will likely attempt to restart the probe during the next lunar day when there is a chance that sunlight could reach its solar panels.

Currently, we see growing competition between the two main spacefaring nations in the Asia-Pacific region. Although China continues to lead in the number of successful lunar landings, Japan has been persistently closing the gap, clearly demonstrating that it does not intend to lag behind its closest neighbor.

The moon in the orbit of global interest

Currently, the main trio of new American rockets have either already passed or are planning tests, as in the case of New Glenn, for interplanetary space missions. United Launch Alliance (ULA) is preparing for its second launch.

Currently, only the Starship Superheavy remains, having conducted its third and fourth demonstration flights on March 14 and June 6, 2024, respectively. While a Starship spacecraft was lost during re-entry during the spring IFT-3 mission, the summer demonstration ended more successfully for SpaceX. At this stage, both the spacecraft and booster successfully performed a virtual landing maneuver. After reaching the peak of heating during re-entry, booster B11 fell into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and spacecraft S29 ended its flight in the waters of the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX has scheduled two more test launches for the new spacecraft this year: missions IFT-5 and IFT-6. The company aims to demonstrate the full launch/reentry cycle of its super-heavy rocket. Initially, SpaceX planned to expand the number of Starship Super Heavy launches in 2024 to nine but, as of late August, these plans are looking increasingly unrealistic. 

The Starship spacecraft can carry up to 200 tons of cargo to low Earth orbit and beyond, after orbital refueling. SpaceX plans to increase the number of annual Starship Superheavy launches to 44 per year from the LC-39A launch site. Whether there will be enough demand to justify delivering nearly 8.8 million tons of cargo to space, however, remains to be seen.

Regardless of whether or not Musk’s company achieves this milestone, it is clear that SpaceX’s priorities are shifting toward Earth orbit and strengthening its own telecommunications satellite constellation rather than future lunar missions under the Artemis program. In any case, the Moon is becoming an increasingly important platform for demonstrating new types of rocket technologies, especially those using mixtures of liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquefied natural gas (LNG). Technologies for delivering cargo to the lunar surface, which could be used in the future for building surface bases on various celestial bodies in the Solar System, are also undergoing separate development.

The introduction of the new generation of launch vehicles and the surge in interest from major private players in lunar cargo delivery further support this thesis.