by Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lander successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket on Monday (December 8), setting the stage for a new era of private space exploration.
The Falcon was originally scheduled to reach the moon on February 23 and become the first private company to make a soft landing on the moon, but the lander experienced a propulsion anomaly just moments into its mission involving a “critical loss of propellant.” Astrobotic is now looking at alternative scenarios to salvage what science it can from the mission.
But the Falcon is only the first of many planned private lunar missions. Although the mission did not go as planned, several other private lunar missions are set to follow hot on its heels. Thanks to NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program (CLPS) and other private initiatives, multiple missions to the lunar surface are scheduled through 2026. And that’s just in the United States.
Related: 10 exciting spaceflight missions to watch in 2024
NASA’s Future Commercial Lunar Payload Services launch missions
Many other CLPS initiative commercial missions are scheduled to launch during 2024, many of which will also go to the lunar South Pole.
The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) is the second scheduled CLPS Astrobotic mission set for this year. This golf cart-sized robot will search for water and other compounds in lunar soils over a period of 100 days on Earth.
The robot will be equipped with a drill to dig soil clips as deep as 3.28 feet (1 meter) below the lunar surface. These drill samples will be analyzed inside the robot, allowing operators to determine the composition and concentration of potential resources, including water and other ice.
Another space exploration company making the most of CLPS this year is Intuitive Machines, based in Houston, Texas.
The company will place its Nova-C lander near a crater at the moon’s south pole as part of a mission named Intuitive Machines 1 (TO2-IM) no earlier than February 2024.
The mission will be carried into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and will aim to investigate what happens when high-energy particles from the sun hit the lunar surface and the effect of space weather on the moon.
Another Intelligent Machines mission to the moon in 2024 is the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1).
This robot also aims to search for water at the moon’s south pole, which PRIME-1 will do with two elements: the Regolith and Ice Drill to Explore New Terrain (TRIDENT) and the Mass Spectrometer to Watch Lunar Operations (MSolo) . TRIDENT will collect samples and forward them to MSolo for analysis.
As part of the third CLPS mission for Intelligent Machines in 2024, payloads will be delivered to the far side of the moon. The mission, tentatively called IM-3, will investigate a strange feature of the moon officially known as Reiner Gamma, which can be seen as a bright pulse in the dark expanse of the Oceanus Procellarum center.
The hope is to find out if this vortex is the result of crustal magnetism. There will also be secondary payloads, including a rover and a data relay satellite.
Another company set to benefit from the CLPS program at some point in 2024 is Firefly Aerospace, also based in Texas, which will send the Blue Ghost lander to Mare Crisium, a large basaltic plain on the moon that was formed by early volcanic eruptions.
The Blue Ghost 1 Mission (TO 19D) will carry ten payloads to the moon on the box-shaped two-deck lander. Blue Ghost will measure heat flow from the lunar interior to the lunar surface. In addition, he will use his observations of the moon to focus his attention on the Earth’s magnetosphere.
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This flurry of commercial space activity will continue into 2025 when another company, Draper, is set to send its SERIES-2 lander to a region on the far side of the moon called the Schrödinger Basin.
In 2026, Firefly will send its second payload to the moon as part of the CLPS program. During this launch, the company will also be shooting for a landing on the far side of the moon.
The operators of these two missions have no doubt that in August 2023, India has successfully landed the craft, the Chandrayaan-3 lander, in this hard-to-reach area of the moon. get it.
Russia made a similar attempt the same month, but that mission failed when the lander crashed into the lunar surface due to a detected anomaly. Far from the lunar south pole region, a private Japanese mission met a similar fate in April 2023 when the ispace lander Hakuto-R hit the moon.
