moon

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A Japanese lander crashed on the Moon after losing track of its location

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“It’s not impossible, so how do we overcome our hurdles?”

Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, attends a press conference in Tokyo on June 6, 2025, to announce the outcome of his company’s second lunar landing attempt. Credit: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP via Getty Images

A robotic lander developed by a Japanese company named ispace plummeted to the Moon’s surface Thursday, destroying a small rover and several experiments intended to demonstrate how future missions could mine and harvest lunar resources.

Ground teams at ispace’s mission control center in Tokyo lost contact with the Resilience lunar lander moments before it was supposed to touch down in a region called Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, a basaltic plain in the Moon’s northern hemisphere.

A few hours later, ispace officials confirmed what many observers suspected. The mission was lost. It’s the second time ispace has failed to land on the Moon in as many tries.

“We wanted to make Mission 2 a success, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to land,” said Takeshi Hakamada, the company’s founder and CEO.

Ryo Ujiie, ispace’s chief technology officer, said the final data received from the Resilience lander—assuming it was correct—showed it at an altitude of approximately 630 feet (192 meters) and descending too fast for a safe landing. “The deceleration was not enough. That was a fact,” Ujiie told reporters in a press conference. “We failed to land, and we have to analyze the reasons.”

The company said in a press release that a laser rangefinder used to measure the lander’s altitude “experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values.” The downward-facing laser fires light pulses toward the Moon during descent, and clocks the time it takes to receive a reflection. This time delay at light speed tells the lander’s guidance system how far it is above the lunar surface. But something went wrong in the altitude measurement system on Thursday.

“As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing,” ispace said. “Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface.”

Controllers sent a command to reboot the lander in hopes of reestablishing communication, but the Resilience spacecraft remained silent.

“Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to swiftly analyze the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause,” Hakamada said in a statement. “We will strive to restore trust by providing a report of the findings to our shareholders, payload customers, Hakuto-R partners, government officials, and all supporters of ispace.”

Overcoming obstacles

The Hakuto name harkens back to ispace’s origin in 2010 as a contender for the Google Lunar X-Prize, a sweepstakes that offered a $20 million grand prize to the first privately funded team to put a lander on the Moon. Hakamada’s group was called Hakuto, which means “white rabbit” in Japanese. The prize shut down in 2018 without a winner, leading some of the teams to dissolve or find new purpose. Hakamada stayed the course, raised more funding, and rebooted the program under the name Hakuto-R.

It’s a story of resilience, hence the name of ispace’s second lunar lander. The mission made it closer to the Moon than the ispace’s first landing attempt in 2023, but Thursday’s failure is a blow to Hakamada’s project.

“As a fact, we tried twice and we haven’t been able to land on the Moon,” Hakamada said through an interpreter. “So we have to say it’s hard to land on the Moon, technically. We know it’s not easy. It’s not something that everyone can do. We know it’s hard, but the important point is it’s not impossible. The US private companies have succeeded in landing, and also JAXA in Japan has succeeded in landing, so it’s not impossible. So how do we overcome our hurdles?”

The Resilience lander and Tenacious rover, seen mounted near the top of the spacecraft, inside a test facility at the Tsukuba Space Center in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. Credit: Toru Hanai/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In April 2023, ispace’s first lander crashed on the Moon due to a similar altitude measurement problem. The spacecraft thought it was on the surface of the Moon, but was actually firing its engine to hover at an altitude of 3 miles (5 kilometers). The spacecraft ran out of fuel and went into a free fall before impacting the Moon.

Engineers blamed software as the most likely reason for the altitude-measurement problem. During descent, ispace’s lander passed over a 10,000-foot-tall (3,000-meter) cliff, and the spacecraft’s computer interpreted the sudden altitude change as erroneous.

Ujiie, who leads ispace’s technical teams, said the failure mode Thursday was “similar” to that of the first mission two years ago. But at least in ispace’s preliminary data reviews, engineers saw different behavior from the Resilience lander, which flew with a new type of laser rangefinder after ispace’s previous supplier stopped producing the device.

“From Mission 1 to Mission 2, we improved the software,” Ujiie said. “Also, we improved how to approach the landing site… We see different phenomena from Mission 1, so we have to do more analysis to give you any concrete answers.”

If ispace landed smoothly on Thursday, the Resilience spacecraft would have deployed a small rover developed by ispace’s European subsidiary. The rover was partially funded by the Luxembourg Space Agency with support from the European Space Agency. It carried a shovel to scoop up a small amount of lunar soil and a camera to take a photo of the sample. NASA had a contract with ispace to purchase the lunar soil in a symbolic proof of concept to show how the government might acquire material from commercial mining companies in the future.

The lander also carried a water electrolyzer experiment to demonstrate technologies that could split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, critical resources for a future Moon base. Other payloads aboard the Resilience spacecraft included cameras, a food production experiment, a radiation monitor, and a Swedish art project called “MoonHouse.”

The spacecraft chassis used for ispace’s first two landing attempts was about the size of a compact car, with a mass of about 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) when fully fueled. The company’s third landing attempt is scheduled for 2027 with a larger lander. Next time, ispace will fly to the Moon in partnership between the company’s US subsidiary and Draper Laboratory, which has a contract with NASA to deliver experiments to the lunar surface.

Track record

The Resilience lander launched in January on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, riding to space in tandem with a commercial Moon lander named Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace. Firefly’s lander took a more direct journey to the Moon and achieved a soft landing on March 2. Blue Ghost operated on the lunar surface for two weeks and completed all of its objectives.

The trajectory of ispace’s lander was slower, following a lower-energy, more fuel-efficient path to the Moon before entering lunar orbit last month. Once in orbit, the lander made a few more course corrections to line up with its landing site, then commenced its final descent on Thursday.

Thursday’s landing attempt was the seventh time a privately developed Moon lander tried to conduct a controlled touchdown on the lunar surface.

Two Texas-based companies have had the most success. One of them, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, landed its Odysseus spacecraft on the Moon in February 2024, marking the first time a commercial lander reached the lunar surface intact. But the lander tipped over after touchdown, cutting its mission short after achieving some limited objectives. A second Intuitive Machines lander reached the Moon in one piece in March of this year, but it also fell over and didn’t last as long as the company’s first mission.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost operated for two weeks after reaching the lunar surface, accomplishing all of its objectives and becoming the first fully successful privately owned spacecraft to land and operate on the Moon.

Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and a third company—Astrobotic Technology—have launched their lunar missions under contract with a NASA program aimed at fostering a commercial marketplace for transportation to the Moon. Astrobotic’s first lander failed soon after its departure from Earth. The first two missions launched by ispace were almost fully private ventures, with limited participation from the Japanese space agency, Luxembourg, and NASA.

The Earth looms over the Moon’s horizon in this image from lunar orbit captured on May 27, 2025, by ispace’s Resilience lander. Credit: ispace

Commercial travel to the Moon only began in 2019, so there’s not much of a track record to judge the industry’s prospects. When NASA started signing contracts for commercial lunar missions, the then-chief of the agency’s science vision, Thomas Zurbuchen, estimated the initial landing attempts would have a 50-50 chance of success. On the whole, NASA’s experience with Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and Astrobotic isn’t too far off from Zurbuchen’s estimate, with one full success and a couple of partial successes.

The commercial track record worsens if you include private missions from ispace and Israel’s Beresheet lander.

But ispace and Hakamada haven’t given up on the dream. The company’s third mission will launch under the umbrella of the same NASA program that contracted with Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and Astrobotic. Hakamada cited the achievements of Firefly and Intuitive Machines as evidence that the commercial model for lunar missions is a valid one.

“The ones that have the landers, there are two companies I mentioned. Also, Blue Origin maybe coming up. Also, ispace is a possibility,” Hakamada said. “So, very few companies. We would like to catch up as soon as possible.”

It’s too early to know how the failure on Thursday might impact ispace’s next mission with Draper and NASA.

“I have to admit that we are behind,” said Jumpei Nozaki, director and chief financial officer at ispace. “But we do not really think we are behind from the leading group yet. It’s too early to decide that. The players in the world that can send landers to the Moon are very few, so we still have some competitive edge.”

“Honestly, there were some times I almost cried, but I need to lead this company, and I need to have a strong will to move forward, so it’s not time for me to cry,” Hakamada said.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions

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“There’s not yet a commercial reason only to go to the Moon with humans.”

In this long exposure photograph, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket pierces a cloud deck over Florida’s Space Coast on its inaugural flight January 16. Credit: Blue Origin

Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together.

Limp had no background in the space industry before taking the helm of Jeff Bezos’ space company in December 2023. He started his career as a computer scientist at Apple, took a stint at a venture capital firm, and joined Amazon in 2010, where he managed development of consumer devices like Alexa, Kindle, and the Fire TV.

“I had no thoughts of ever running a space company,” Limp said Thursday at a space conference in Washington, DC. “I’ve done consumer electronics my whole life. Started at Apple and did a bunch of other things, and so when I decided to retire from Amazon, I was looking for something that I could give back a little bit, be a little bit more philanthropic in the sort of second half of my career. I didn’t want to stop working, just wanted to do something different. And about that same time, Jeff was looking for a CEO.”

While he’s still a relative newcomer to the space business, Limp’s views align with those of many policy wonks and industry leaders who have the ears of senior officials in the Trump administration, including Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee to become the next NASA administrator. Limp’s long tenure at Amazon and his selection as Blue Origin’s new CEO demonstrate that he also has the trust of Bezos, who was dissatisfied with his company’s slow progress in spaceflight.

“I think Jeff convinced me, and he’s very persuasive, that Blue didn’t need another rocket scientist,” Limp said. “We have thousands of the world’s best rocket scientists. What we needed was a little bit more decisiveness, a little bit more ability to think about: How do we manufacture at scale? And those are things I’ve done in the past, and so I’ve never looked back.”

David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, speaks during the 2025 Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit at George Washington University in Washington, DC, on May 29, 2025. Credit: Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images

Leave it to us

In remarks Thursday at the Humans to the Moon & Mars Summit, Limp advocated for commercial companies, like his own, taking a larger role in developing the transportation and infrastructure to meet lofty national objectives established by government leaders.

In some ways, NASA has long been moving in this direction, beginning with initiatives ceding most launch services to private industry in the 1990s. More recently, NASA has turned to commercial companies for crew and cargo deliveries to the International Space Station and cargo and human-rated Moon landers.

However, NASA, with the backing of key congressional leaders, has held an iron grip on having its own heavy-lift launcher and crew capsule to ferry astronauts between Earth and destinations beyond low-Earth orbit. Now, these vehicles—the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft—may be canceled if Congress agrees with Trump’s proposed NASA budget.

Commercial rockets close to matching or exceeding the Space Launch System’s lift capability are available for purchase or likely will be soon. These include SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher. Both are already key elements of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land US astronauts on the Moon as a stepping stone toward human expeditions to Mars.

But NASA still plans to use its government-owned Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts out to the Moon, where they will rendezvous with a Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander to fly to and from the lunar surface.

SLS and Orion are expensive vehicles, costing more than $4 billion per launch for the initial set of four Artemis missions, according to a report by NASA’s inspector general. While commercial companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build elements of SLS and Orion, NASA acts as the prime integrator. The agency signed cost-plus contracts with the companies building SLS and Orion, meaning the government is on the hook for cost overruns. And there have been many.

Artist’s concept of Blue Ring, a propulsive spacecraft platform Blue Origin says it is developing to carry payloads to different orbits, and possibly all the way to Mars, at lower costs than feasible today. Credit: Blue Origin

NASA’s robotic science probes are also getting more expensive, even when accounting for inflation. Given the way NASA procures science probes, it would cost NASA more today to send an orbiter to Mars than it did for a similarly sized spacecraft a quarter-century ago.

This has to change in order for NASA and private companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX to make their ambitions a reality, Limp said Thursday.

“I think commercial folks can worry about the infrastructure,” he said. “We can do the launch. We can build the satellite buses that can get you to Mars much more frequently, that don’t cost billions of dollars. We can take a zero, and over time, maybe two zeros off of that. And if the governments around the world leave that to the commercial side, then there are a lot more resources that are freed up for the science side, for the national prestige side, and those types of things.”

The bottom line

Limp followed these comments with a dose of realism you don’t often hear from space industry executives. While there’s a growing list of commercially viable markets in space (things like Starlink and satellite servicing wouldn’t have been money-makers 20 years ago), the market for human spaceflight still requires some level of government commitment.

“I think the thing about bringing commercial aspects to exploration, to science, to the Moon, to Mars, is that we have to see a business prospect for it,” Limp said. “We have to turn it into a business, and that benefits American taxpayers because we will use that capital as efficiently as we can to get to the Moon, to get to Mars in a safe way, but in a way that’s the most efficient.

“We’re committed to that, no matter what the architecture looks like, but it does take the US government and international governments to have the motivation to do it,” he continued. “There’s not yet a commercial reason only to go to the Moon with humans. There are lots of commercial reasons to put robotics on the Moon and other types of things. So, we do need to have conviction that the Moon is important and Mars is important as well.”

Trump and Musk, an ally and advisor to the president, rekindled the question of Moon or Mars in a series of remarks during the early weeks of the new Trump administration. The Artemis Moon program began during the first Trump administration, with the goal of returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972. NASA would establish a sustained presence at the Moon, using our nearest planetary body as a proving ground for the next destination for humans in Solar System exploration: Mars.

Space industry rivals Jeff Bezos, second from left, and Elon Musk, second from right, inside the US Capitol for President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

SpaceX’s Starship, while capable of one day landing on the Moon, was designed for long-duration cruises to Mars. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is tailored for lunar landings.

“As an American, I don’t want another Sputnik moment,” Limp said. “From my standpoint, getting boots on the Moon and setting the groundwork for permanence on the Moon is of national importance and urgency. Rest assured, Blue will do everything in its power to try to make that happen, but in a cost-effective way.”

NASA, please don’t leave us

Since retaking office in January, Trump has mentioned human missions to Mars multiple times, but not the Moon. Isaacman, who may be confirmed as NASA administrator by the Senate as soon as next week, told lawmakers in April that the agency should pursue human missions to the Moon and Mars simultaneously. The details of how that might work haven’t been released but could come out in the White House’s detailed budget proposal for fiscal-year 2026.

A blueprint of Trump’s spending proposal released May 2 includes a 25 percent cut to NASA’s overall budget, but the plan would provide additional money for human space exploration at the Moon and Mars. “The budget funds a program to replace SLS and Orion flights to the Moon with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions,” the White House budget office wrote.

This part of the budget request is not controversial for industry leaders like Limp. On the other hand, the budget blueprint proposes slashing NASA’s space science budget by nearly $2.3 billion, Earth science by almost $1.2 billion, and space technology by $531 million.

While Limp didn’t directly address these budget proposals, these parts of NASA are largely focused on research projects that lack a commercial business case. Who else but a government space agency, or perhaps an especially generous type of philanthropic multi-billionaire, would pay to send a probe to study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa? Or a robot to zip by Pluto? Or how about a mission like Landsat, which documents everything from water resources to farms and urban sprawl and makes its data freely available to anyone with an Internet connection?

Most experts agree there are better ways to do these things. Reusable rockets, mass-produced satellite platforms, and improved contracting practices can bring down the costs of these missions. Bezos’ long-term goal for Blue Origin, which is to move all polluting factories off the Earth and into space, will be easier to achieve with government support, not just funding, Limp said.

“Getting up there, building factories on the Moon is a great step, and the government can really help with research dollars around that,” he said. “But it still does need the labs. The science missions need the JPLs [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] of the world. To make the human experience right, we need the Johnson Space Centers of the world to be able to kind of use that gold mine of institutional knowledge.

“I would say, and it might be a little provocative, let’s have those smart brains look on the forward-thinking types of things, the really edge of science, planning the really exotic missions, figuring out how to get to planetary bodies we haven’t gotten to before, and staying there,” Limp said.

Mark it down

For the first decade after Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, the company operated under the radar and seemed to move at a glacial pace. It launched its first small rocket in 2006 to an altitude of less than 300 feet and reached space with the suborbital New Shepard booster in 2015. Blue Origin finally reached orbit in January of this year on the debut test flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. Meanwhile, Blue Origin inked a deal with United Launch Alliance to supply a version of its New Glenn main engine to power that company’s Vulcan rocket.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 lander, seen in the center, is taller than NASA’s Apollo lunar lander, currently the largest spacecraft to have landed on the Moon. Blue Moon MK2 is even larger, but all three landers are dwarfed in size by SpaceX’s Starship, NASA’s other Artemis lunar lander. Credit: Blue Origin

The next big mission for Blue Origin will be the first flight of its Blue Moon lander. The first version of Blue Moon, called MK1, will launch on a New Glenn rocket later this year and attempt to become the largest spacecraft to ever land on the Moon. This demonstration, without anyone onboard, is fully funded by Blue Origin, Limp said.

A future human-rated version, called MK2, is under development with the assistance of NASA. It will be larger and will require refueling to reach the lunar surface. Blue Moon MK1 can make a landing on one tank.

These are tangible achievements that would be the envy of any space industry startup not named SpaceX. But Musk’s rocket company left Blue Origin in the dust as it broke launch industry records repeatedly and began delivering NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020. My colleague, Eric Berger, wrote a story in January describing Blue Origin’s culture. For much of its existence, one former employee said, Blue Origin had “zero incentive” to operate like SpaceX.

To ensure he would be in lock-step with his boss, Limp felt he had to ask a question that was on the minds of many industry insiders. He got the answer he wanted.

“The only question I really asked Jeff when I was talking about taking this job was, ‘What do you want Blue to be? Is it a hobby, or is it a business?'” Limp said. “And he had the right answer, which is, it’s a business, because I don’t know how to run a hobby, and I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions Read More »

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As preps continue, it’s looking more likely NASA will fly the Artemis II mission

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NASA’s existing architecture still has a limited shelf life, and the agency will probably have multiple options for transporting astronauts to and from the Moon in the 2030s. A decision on the long-term future of SLS and Orion isn’t expected until the Trump administration’s nominee for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, takes office after confirmation by the Senate.

So, what is the plan for SLS?

There are different degrees of cancellation options. The most draconian would be an immediate order to stop work on Artemis II preparations. This is looking less likely than it did a few months ago and would come with its own costs. It would cost untold millions of dollars to disassemble and dispose of parts of Artemis II’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. Canceling multibillion-dollar contracts with Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin would put NASA on the hook for significant termination costs.

Of course, these liabilities would be less than the $4.1 billion NASA’s inspector general estimates each of the first four Artemis missions will cost. Most of that money has already been spent for Artemis II, but if NASA spends several billion dollars on each Artemis mission, there won’t be much money left over to do other cool things.

Other options for NASA might be to set a transition point when the Artemis program would move off of the Space Launch System rocket, and perhaps even the Orion spacecraft, and switch to new vehicles.

Looking down on the Space Launch System for Artemis II. Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

Another possibility, which seems to be low-hanging fruit for Artemis decision-makers, could be to cancel the development of a larger Exploration Upper Stage for the SLS rocket. If there are a finite number of SLS flights on NASA’s schedule, it’s difficult to justify the projected $5.7 billion cost of developing the upgraded Block 1B version of the Space Launch System. There are commercial options available to replace the rocket’s Boeing-built Exploration Upper Stage, as my colleague Eric Berger aptly described in a feature story last year.

For now, it looks like NASA’s orange behemoth has a little life left in it. All the hardware for the Artemis II mission has arrived at the launch site in Florida.

The Trump administration will release its fiscal-year 2026 budget request in the coming weeks. Maybe then NASA will also have a permanent administrator, and the veil will lift over the White House’s plans for Artemis.

As preps continue, it’s looking more likely NASA will fly the Artemis II mission Read More »

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Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing

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Darkness fell over Mare Crisium, ending a daily dose of dazzling images from the Moon.

Firefly’s X-band communications antenna (left) is marked with the logos of NASA, Firefly Aerospace, and the US flag. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost science station accomplished a lot on the Moon in the last two weeks. Among other things, its instruments drilled into the Moon’s surface, tested an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner, and showed that future missions could use GPS navigation signals to navigate on the lunar surface.

These are all important achievements, gathering data that could shed light on the Moon’s formation and evolution, demonstrating new ways of collecting samples on other planets, and revealing the remarkable reach of the US military’s GPS satellite network.

But the pièce de résistance for Firefly’s first Moon mission might be the daily dose of imagery that streamed down from the Blue Ghost spacecraft. A suite of cameras recorded the cloud of dust created as the lander’s engine plume blew away the uppermost layer of lunar soil as it touched down March 2 in Mare Crisium, or the Sea of Crises. This location is in a flat basin situated on the upper right quadrant of the side of the Moon always facing the Earth.

Other images from Firefly’s lander showed the craft shooting tethered electrodes out onto the lunar surface, like a baseball outfielder trying to throw out a runner at home plate. Firefly’s cameras also showed the lander’s drill as it began to probe several meters into the Moon’s crust.

The first Blue Ghost mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program established in 2018 to partner with US companies for cargo transportation to the Moon. Firefly is one of 13 companies eligible to compete for CLPS missions, precursors to future astronaut landings on the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program.

Now, Firefly finds itself at the top of the pack of firms seeking to gain a foothold at the Moon.

Blue Ghost landed just after sunrise at Mare Crisium, an event shown in the blow video captured with four cameras mounted on the lander to observe how its engine plume interacted with loose soil on the lunar surface. The information will be useful as NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon in the coming years.

“Although the data is still preliminary, the 3,000-plus images we captured appear to contain exactly the type of information we were hoping for in order to better understand plume-surface interaction and learn how to accurately model the phenomenon based on the number, size, thrust and configuration of the engines,” said Rob Maddock, project manager for NASA’s SCALPSS experiment.

One of the vehicle’s payloads, named Lunar PlanetVac, dropped from the bottom of the lander and released a blast of gas to blow fine-grained lunar soil into a collection chamber for sieving. Provided by a company named Honeybee Robotics, this device could be used as a cheaper alternative to other sample collection methods, such as robotic arms, on future planetary science missions.

Just over 4 days on the Moon’s surface and #BlueGhost is checking off several science milestones! 8 out of 10 @NASA payloads, including LPV, EDS, NGLR, RAC, RadPC, LuGRE, LISTER, and SCALPSS, have already met their mission objectives with more to come. Lunar PlanetVac for example… pic.twitter.com/i7pOg70qYi

— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) March 6, 2025

After two weeks of pioneering work, the Blue Ghost lander fell into darkness Sunday when the Sun sank below the horizon, robbing it of solar power and plunging temperatures below minus 200° Fahrenheit (148°Celcius). The spacecraft’s internal electronics likely won’t survive the two-week-long lunar night.

A precoded message from Blue Ghost marked the moment Sunday afternoon, signaling a transition to “monument mode.”

“Goodnight friends,” Blue Ghost radioed Firefly’s mission control center in Central Texas. “After exchanging our final bits of data, I will hold vigil in this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity’s continued journey to the stars. Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.”

Blue Ghost’s legacy is now secure as the first fully successful commercial lunar lander. Its two-week mission was perhaps just as remarkable for what didn’t happen as it was for what did. The spacecraft encountered no significant problems on its transit to the Moon, its final descent, or during surface operations.

One of the few surprises of the mission was that the lander got hotter a little sooner than engineers predicted. At lunar noon, when the Sun is highest in the sky, temperatures can soar to 250° F (121° C).

“We started noticing that the lander was getting hotter than we expected, and we couldn’t really figure out why, because it was a little early for lunar noon,” Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s spacecraft program director, told Ars. “So we went back and started evaluating and realized that the crater that we landed next to was actually reflecting a really significant amount of heat. So we went back and we updated our thermal models, incorporated that crater into it, and it matched the environment we were seeing.”

Early Friday morning, the Blue Ghost spacecraft captured the first high-definition views of a total solar eclipse from the Moon. At the same time that skywatchers on Earth were looking up to see the Moon turn an eerie blood red, Firefly’s cameras were looking back at us as the Sun, Earth, and Moon moved into alignment and darkness fell at Mare Crisium.

Diamond ring

The eclipse was a bonus for Firefly. It just happened to occur during the spacecraft’s two-week mission at the Moon, the timing of which was dependent on numerous factors, ranging from the readiness of the Blue Ghost lander to weather conditions at its launch site in Florida.

“We weren’t actually planning to have an eclipse until a few months prior to our launch, when we started evaluating and realizing that an eclipse was happening right before lunar sunset,” Allensworth said. “So luckily, that gave us some time to work some procedures and basically set up what we wanted to take images of, what cameras we wanted to run.”

The extra work paid off. Firefly released an image Friday showing a glint of sunlight reaching around the curvature of the Earth, some 250,000 miles (402,000 kilometers) away. This phenomenon is known as the “diamond ring” and is a subject of pursuit for many eclipse chasers, who travel to far-flung locations for a few minutes of totality.

A “diamond ring” appears around the edge of the Earth, a quarter-million miles from Firefly’s science station on the lunar surface. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

The Blue Ghost spacecraft, named for a species of firefly, took eclipse chasing to new heights. Not only did it see the Earth block the Sun from an unexplored location on the Moon, but the lander fell into shadow for 2 hours and 16 minutes, about 18 times longer than the longest possible total solar eclipse on the Earth.

The eclipse presented challenges for Firefly’s engineers monitoring the mission from Texas. Temperatures at the spacecraft’s airless landing site plummeted as darkness took hold, creating what Allensworth called a “pseudo lunar night.”

“We were seeing those temperatures rapidly start dropping,” Allensworth said Friday. “So it was kind of an interesting game of to play with the hardware to keep everything in its temperature bounds but also still powered on and capturing data.”

Shaping up

Using navigation cameras and autonomous guidance algorithms, the spacecraft detected potential hazards at its original landing site and diverted to a safer location more than 230 feet (70 meters) away, according to Allensworth.

Finally happy with the terrain below, Blue Ghost’s computer sent the command for landing, powered by eight thrusters pulsing in rapid succession to control the craft’s descent rate. The landing was gentler than engineers anticipated, coming down at less than 2.2 mph (1 meter per second).

According to preliminary data, Blue Ghost settled in a location just outside of its 330-foot (100-meter) target landing ellipse, probably due to the last-minute divert maneuvers ordered by the vehicle’s hazard avoidance system.

“It looks like we’re slightly out of it, but it’s really OK,” Allensworth said. “NASA has told us, more than anything, that they want us to make sure we land softly… They seem comfortable where we’re at.”

Firefly originally intended to develop a spacecraft based on the design of Israel’s Beresheet lander, which was the first private mission to attempt a landing on the Moon in 2019. The spacecraft crashed, and Firefly opted to go with a new design more responsive to NASA’s requirements.

“Managing the center of gravity and the mass of the lander is most significant, and that informs a lot of how it physically takes shape,” Allensworth said. “So we did want to keep certain things in mind about that, and that really is what led to the lander being wider, shorter, broader. We have these bigger foot pads on there. All of those things were very intentional to help make the lander as stable and predictable as possible.”

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, seen here inside the company’s spacecraft manufacturing facility in Cedar Park, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

These design choices must happen early in a spacecraft’s development. Landing on the Moon comes with numerous complications, including an often-uneven surface and the lack of an atmosphere, rendering parachutes useless. A lander targeting the Moon must navigate itself to a safe landing site without input from the ground.

The Odysseus, or Nova-C, lander built by Intuitive Machines snapped one of its legs and fell over on its side after arriving on the Moon last year. The altimeter on Odysseus failed, causing it to come down with too much horizontal velocity. The lander returned some scientific data from the Moon and qualified as a partial success. The spacecraft couldn’t recharge its batteries after landing on its side, and Odysseus shut down a few days after landing.

The second mission by Intuitive Machines reached the Moon on March 6, but it suffered the same fate. After tipping over, the Athena lander succumbed to low power within hours, preventing it from accomplishing its science mission for NASA.

The landers designed by Intuitive Machines are tall and skinny, towering more than 14 feet (4.3 meters) tall with a width of about 5.2 feet (1.6 meters). The Blue Ghost vehicle is short and squatty in shape—about 6.6 feet tall and 11.5 feet wide (2-by-3.5 meters). Firefly’s approach requires fewer landing legs than Intuitive Machines—four instead of six.

Steve Altemus, co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines, defended the design of his company’s lander in a press briefing after the second lunar landing tip-over earlier this month. The Nova-C lander isn’t too top-heavy for a safe landing because most of its cargo attaches to the bottom of the spacecraft, and for now, Altemus said Intuitive Machines is not considering a redesign.

Intuitive Machines stacked its two fuel and oxidizer tanks on top of each other, resulting in a taller vehicle. The Nova-C vehicle uses super-cold methane and liquid oxygen propellants, enabling a fast journey to the Moon over just a few days. The four propellant tanks on Blue Ghost are arranged in a diagonal configuration, with two containing hydrazine fuel and two holding an oxidizer called nitrogen tetroxide. Firefly’s Blue Ghost took about six weeks to travel from launch until landing.

The design trade-off means Firefly’s lander is heavier, with four tanks instead of two, according to Will Coogan, Blue Ghost’s chief engineer at Firefly. By going with a stockier lander design, Firefly needed to install four tanks because the spacecraft’s fuel and oxidizer have different densities. If Firefly went with just two tanks side-by-side, the spacecraft’s center of mass would change continually as it burns propellant during the final descent to the Moon, creating an unnecessary problem for the lander’s guidance, navigation, and control system to overcome.

“You want to avoid that,” Coogan told Ars before Blue Ghost’s launch. “What you can do is you can either get four tanks and have fuel and oxidizer at diagonal angles, and then you’re always centered, or you can stay with two tanks, and you can stack them.”

A camera on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander captured a view of its shadow after touching down on the Moon just after sunrise on March 2. Earth looms over the horizon. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

The four landing legs on the Blue Ghost vehicle have shock-absorbing feet, with bowl-shaped pads able to bend if the lander comes down on a rock or a slope.

“If we did come in a little bit faster, we needed the legs to be able to take that, so we tested the legs really significantly on the ground,” Allensworth said. “We basically loaded them up on a makeshift weight bench at different angles and slammed it into the ground, slammed it into concrete, slammed it into regular simulant rocks, boulders, at different angles to really characterize what the legs could do.

“It’s actually really funny, because one of the edge cases that we didn’t test is if we came down very lightly, with almost no acceleration,” she said. “And that was the case that the lander landed in. I was joking with our structural engineer that he wasted all his time.”

Proof positive

Firefly delivered 10 NASA-sponsored science and technology demonstration experiments to the lunar surface, operating under contract with NASA’s CLPS program. CLPS builds on the commercial, service-based business model of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program for transportation to the International Space Station.

NASA officials knew this approach was risky. The last landing on the Moon by a US spacecraft was the last Apollo mission in 1972, and most of the companies involved in CLPS are less than 20 years old, with little experience in deep space missions.

A Pittsburgh company named Astrobotic failed to reach the Moon on its first attempt in January 2024. The next month, Houston-based Intuitive Machines landed its Nova-C spacecraft on the lunar surface, but it tipped over after one of its legs snapped at the moment of touchdown.

Firefly, based in Cedar Park, Texas, was the third company to try a landing. Originally established as a rocket developer, Firefly signed up to be a CLPS provider and won a $101 million contract with NASA in 2021 to transport a government-funded science package to the Moon. NASA’s instruments aboard the Blue Ghost lander cost about $44 million.

The successful landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost earlier this month buoyed NASA’s expectations for CLPS. “Overall, it’s been a fabulous, wonderful proof positive that the CLPS model does work,” said Brad Bailey, assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

NASA has seven more CLPS missions on contract. The next could launch as soon as August when Blue Origin plans to send its first Blue Moon lander to the Moon. NASA has booked two more Blue Ghost missions with Firefly and two more landing attempts with Intuitive Machines, plus one more flight by Astrobotic and one lander from Draper Laboratory.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing Read More »

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Yes, we are about to be treated to a second lunar landing in a week

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Because the space agency now has some expectation that Intuitive Machines will be fully successful with its second landing attempt, it has put some valuable experiments on board. Principal among them is the PRIME-1 experiment, which has an ice drill to sample any ice that lies below the surface. Drill, baby, drill.

The Athena lander also is carrying a NASA-funded “hopper” that will fire small hydrazine rockets to bounce around the Moon and explore lunar craters near the South Pole. It might even fly into a lava tube. If this happens it will be insanely cool.

Because this is a commercial program, NASA has encouraged the delivery companies to find additional, private payloads. Athena has some nifty ones, including a small rover from Lunar Outpost, a data center from Lonestar Data Holdings, and a 4G cellular network from Nokia. So there’s a lot riding on Athena‘s success.

So will it be a success?

“Of course, everybody’s wondering, are we gonna land upright?” Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ chief technology officer, told Ars. “So, I can tell you our laser test plan is much more comprehensive than those last time.”

During the first landing about a year ago, Odysseus‘ laser-based system for measuring altitude failed during the descent. Because Odysseus did not have access to altitude data, the spacecraft touched down faster, and on a 12-degree slope, which exceeded the 10-degree limit. As a result, the lander skidded across the surface, and one of its six legs broke, causing it to fall over.

Crain said about 10 major changes were made to the spacecraft and its software for the second mission. On top of that, about 30 smaller things, such as more efficient file management, were updated on the new vehicle.

In theory, everything should work this time. Intuitive Machines has the benefit of all of its learnings from the last time, and nearly everything worked right during this first attempt. But the acid test comes on Thursday.

The company and NASA will provide live coverage of the attempt beginning at 11: 30 am ET (16: 30 UTC) on NASA+, with landing set for just about one hour later. The Moon may be a harsh mistress, but hopefully not too harsh.

Yes, we are about to be treated to a second lunar landing in a week Read More »

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Here’s what NASA would like to see SpaceX accomplish with Starship this year

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Iterate, iterate, and iterate some more

The seventh test flight of Starship is scheduled for launch Thursday afternoon.

SpaceX’s upgraded Starship rocket stands on its launch pad at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX plans to launch the seventh full-scale test flight of its massive Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket Thursday afternoon. It’s the first of what might be a dozen or more demonstration flights this year as SpaceX tries new things with the most powerful rocket ever built.

There are many things on SpaceX’s Starship to-do list in 2025. They include debuting an upgraded, larger Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, on the test flight preparing to launch Thursday. The one-hour launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 22: 00 UTC) at SpaceX’s launch base in South Texas. You can watch SpaceX’s live webcast of the flight here.

SpaceX will again attempt to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster—more than 20 stories tall and wider than a jumbo jet—back at the launch pad using mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” mounted to the launch tower. Read more about the Starship Block 2 upgrades in our story from last week.

You might think of next week’s Starship test flight as an apéritif before the entrées to come. Ars recently spoke with Lisa Watson-Morgan, the NASA engineer overseeing the agency’s contract with SpaceX to develop a modified version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon. NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop and fly two Starship human landing missions under the umbrella of the agency’s Artemis program to return humans to the Moon.

We are publishing the entire interview with Watson-Morgan below, but first, let’s assess what SpaceX might accomplish with Starship this year.

There are many things to watch for on this test flight, including the deployment of 10 satellite simulators to test the ship’s payload accommodations and the performance of a beefed-up heat shield as the vehicle blazes through the atmosphere for reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

If this all works, SpaceX may try to launch a ship into low-Earth orbit on the eighth flight, expected to launch in the next couple of months. All of the Starship test flights to date have intentionally flown on suborbital trajectories, bringing the ship back toward reentry over the sea northwest of Australia after traveling halfway around the world.

Then, there’s an even bigger version of Starship called Block 3 that could begin flying before the end of the year. This version of the ship is the one that SpaceX will use to start experimenting with in-orbit refueling, according to Watson-Morgan.

In order to test refueling, two Starships will dock together in orbit, allowing one vehicle to transfer super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into the other. Nothing like this on this scale has ever been attempted before. Future Starship missions to the Moon and Mars may require 10 or more tanker missions to gas up in low-Earth orbit. All of these missions will use different versions of the same basic Starship design: a human-rated lunar lander, a propellant depot, and a refueling tanker.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

Questions for 2025

Catching Starship back at its launch tower and demonstrating orbital propellant transfer are the two most significant milestones on SpaceX’s roadmap for 2025.

SpaceX officials have said they aim to fly as many as 25 Starship missions this year, allowing engineers to more rapidly iterate on the vehicle’s design. SpaceX is constructing a second launch pad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, to help speed up the launch cadence.

Can SpaceX achieve this flight rate in 2025? Will faster Starship manufacturing and reusability help the company fly more often? Will SpaceX fly its first ship-to-ship propellant transfer demonstration this year? When will Starship begin launching large batches of new-generation Starlink Internet satellites?

Licensing delays at the Federal Aviation Administration have been a thorn in SpaceX’s side for the last couple of years. Will those go away under the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who counts SpaceX founder Elon Musk as a key adviser?

And will SpaceX gain a larger role in NASA’s Artemis lunar program? The Artemis program’s architecture is sure to be reviewed by the Trump administration and the nominee for the agency’s next administrator, billionaire businessman and astronaut Jared Isaacman.

The very expensive Space Launch System rocket, developed by NASA with Boeing and other traditional aerospace contractors, might be canceled. NASA currently envisions the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as the transportation system to ferry astronauts between Earth and the vicinity of the Moon, where crews would meet up with a landing vehicle provided by commercial partners SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Watson-Morgan didn’t have answers to all of these questions. Many of them are well outside of her purview as Human Landing System program manager, so Ars didn’t ask. Instead, Ars discussed technical and schedule concerns with her during the half-hour interview. Here is one part of the discussion, lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: What do you hope to see from Flight 7 of Starship?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: One of the exciting parts of working with SpaceX are these test flights. They have a really fast turnaround, where they put in different lessons learned. I think you saw many of the flight objectives that they discussed from Flight 6, which was a great success. I think they mentioned different thermal testing experiments that they put on the ship in order to understand the different heating, the different loads on certain areas of the system. All that was really good with each one of those, in addition to how they configure the tiles. Then, from that, there’ll be additional tests that they will put on Flight 7, so you kind of get this iterative improvement and learning that we’ll get to see in Flight 7. So Flight 7 is the first Version 2 of their ship set. When I say that, I mean the ship, the booster, all the systems associated with it. So, from that, it’s really more just understanding how the system, how the flaps, how all of that interacts and works as they’re coming back in. Hopefully we’ll get to see some catches, that’s always exciting.

Ars: How did the in-space Raptor engine relight go on Flight 6 (on November 19)?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Beautifully. And that’s something that’s really important to us because when we’re sitting on the Moon… well, actually, the whole path to the Moon as we are getting ready to land on the Moon, we’ll perform a series of maneuvers, and the Raptors will have an environment that is very, very cold. To that, it’s going to be important that they’re able to relight for landing purposes. So that was a great first step towards that. In addition, after we land, clearly the Raptors will be off, and it will get very cold, and they will have to relight in a cold environment (to get off the Moon). So that’s why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA’s return to the Moon.

A recent artist’s illustration of two Starships docked together in low-Earth orbit. Credit: SpaceX

Ars: Which version of the ship is required for the propellant transfer demonstration, and what new features are on that version to enable this test?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We’re looking forward to the Version 3, which is what’s coming up later on, sometime in ’25, in the near term, because that’s what we need for propellant transfer and the cryo fluid work that is also important to us… There are different systems in the V3 set that will help us with cryo fluid management. Obviously, with those, we have to have the couplers and the quick-disconnects in order for the two systems to have the right guidance, navigation, trajectory, all the control systems needed to hold their station-keeping in order to dock with each other, and then perform the fluid transfer. So all the fluid lines and all that’s associated with that, those systems, which we have seen in tests and held pieces of when we’ve been working with them at their site, we’ll get to see those actually in action on orbit.

Ars: Have there been any ground tests of these systems, whether it’s fluid couplers or docking systems? Can you talk about some of the ground tests that have gone into this development?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Oh, absolutely. We’ve been working with them on ground tests for this past year. We’ve seen the ground testing and reviewed the data. Our team works with them on what we deem necessary for the various milestones. While the milestone contains proprietary (information), we work closely with them to ensure that it’s going to meet the intent, safety-wise as well as technically, of what we’re going to need to see. So they’ve done that.

Even more exciting, they have recently shipped some of their docking systems to the Johnson Space Center for testing with the Orion Lockheed Martin docking system, and that’s for Artemis III. Clearly, that’s how we’re going to receive the crew. So those are some exciting tests that we’ve been doing this past year as well that’s not just focused on, say, the booster and the ship. There are a lot of crew systems that are being developed now. We’re in work with them on how we’re going to effectuate the crew manual control requirements that we have, so it’s been a great balance to see what the crew needs, given the size of the ship. That’s been a great set of work. We have crew office hours where the crew travels to Hawthorne [SpaceX headquarters in California] and works one-on-one with the different responsible engineers in the different technical disciplines to make sure that they understand not just little words on the paper from a requirement, but actually what this means, and then how systems can be operated.

Ars: For the docking system, Orion uses the NASA Docking System, and SpaceX brings its own design to bear on Starship?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: This is something that I think the Human Landing System has done exceptionally well. When we wrote our high-level set of requirements, we also wrote it with a bigger picture in mind—looked into the overall standards of how things are typically done, and we just said it has to be compliant with it. So it’s a docking standard compliance, and SpaceX clearly meets that. They certainly do have the Dragon heritage, of course, with the International Space Station. So, because of that, we have high confidence that they’re all going to work very well. Still, it’s important to go ahead and perform the ground testing and get as much of that out of the way as we can.

Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s HLS program manager, is based at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Credit: ASA/Aubrey Gemignani

Ars: How far along is the development and design of the layout of the crew compartment at the top of Starship? Is it far along, or is it still in the conceptual phase? What can you say about that?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: It’s much further along there. We’ve had our environmental control and life support systems, whether it’s carbon dioxide monitoring fans to make sure the air is circulating properly. We’ve been in a lot of work with SpaceX on the temperature. It’s… a large area (for the crew). The seats, making sure that the crew seats and the loads on that are appropriate. For all of that work, as the analysis work has been performed, the NASA team is reviewing it. They had a mock-up, actually, of some of their life support systems even as far back as eight-plus months ago. So there’s been a lot of progress on that.

Ars: Is SpaceX planning to use a touchscreen design for crew displays and controls, like they do with the Dragon spacecraft?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We’re in talks about that, about what would be the best approach for the crew for the dynamic environment of landing.

Ars: I can imagine it is a pretty dynamic environment with those Raptor engines firing. It’s almost like a launch in reverse.

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Right. Those are some of the topics that get discussed in the crew office hours. That’s why it’s good to have the crew interacting directly, in addition to the different discipline leads, whether it’s structural, mechanical, propulsion, to have all those folks talking guidance and having control to say, “OK, well, when the system does this, here’s the mode we expect to see. Here’s the impact on the crew. And is this condition, or is the option space that we have on the table, appropriate for the next step, with respect to the displays.”

Ars: One of the big things SpaceX needs to prove out before going to the Moon with Starship is in-orbit propellant transfer. When do you see the ship-to-ship demonstration occurring?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: I see it occurring in ’25.

Ars: Anything more specific about the schedule for that?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: That’d be a question for SpaceX because they do have a number of flights that they’re performing commercially, for their maturity. We get the benefit of that. It’s actually a great partnership. I’ll tell you, it’s really good working with them on this, but they’d have to answer that question. I do foresee it happening in ’25.

Ars: What things do you need to see SpaceX accomplish before they’re ready for the refueling demo? I’m thinking of things like the second launch tower, potentially. Do they need to demonstrate a ship catch or anything like that before going for orbital refueling?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: I would say none of that’s required. You just kind of get down to, what are the basics? What are the basics that you need? So you need to be able to launch rapidly off the same pad, even. They’ve shown they can launch and catch within a matter of minutes. So that is good confidence there. The catching is part of their reuse strategy, which is more of their commercial approach, and not a NASA requirement. NASA reaps the benefit of it by good pricing as a result of their commercial model, but it is not a requirement that we have. So they could theoretically use the same pad to perform the propellant transfer and the long-duration flight, because all it requires is two launches, really, within a specified time period to where the two systems can meet in a planned trajectory or orbit to do the propellant transfer. So they could launch the first one, and then within a week or two or three, depending on what the concept of operations was that we thought we could achieve at that time, and then have the propellant transfer demo occur that way. So you don’t necessarily need two pads, but you do need more thermal characterization of the ship. I would say that is one of the areas (we need to see data on), and that is one of the reasons, I think, why they’re working so diligently on that.

Ars: You mentioned the long-duration flight demonstration. What does that entail?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: The simple objectives are to launch two different tankers or Starships. The Starship will eventually be a crewed system. Clearly, the ones that we’re talking about for the propellant transfer are not. It’s just to have the booster and Starship system launch, and within a few weeks, have another one launch, and have them rendezvous. They need to be able to find each other with their sensors. They need to be able to come close, very, very close, and they need to be able to dock together, connect, do the quick connect, and make sure they are able, then, to flow propellant and LOX (liquid oxygen) to another system. Then, we need to be able to measure the quantity of how much has gone over. And from that, then they need to safely undock and dispose.

Ars: So the long-duration flight demonstration is just part of what SpaceX needs to do in order to be ready for the propellant transfer demonstration?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We call it long duration just because it’s not a 45-minute or an hour flight. Long duration, obviously, that’s a relative statement, but it’s a system that can stay up long enough to be able to find another Starship and perform those maneuvers and flow of fuel and LOX.

Ars: How much propellant will you transfer with this demonstration, and do you think you’ll get all the data you need in one demonstration, or will SpaceX need to try this several times?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: That’s something you can ask SpaceX (about how much propellant will be transferred). Clearly, I know, but there’s some sensitivity there. You’ve seen our requirements in our initial solicitation. We have thresholds and goals, meaning we want you to at least do this, but more is better, and that’s typically how we work almost everything. Working with commercial industry in these fixed-price contracts has worked exceptionally well, because when you have providers that are also wanting to explore commercially or trying to make a commercial system, they are interested in pushing more than what we would typically ask for, and so often we get that for an incredibly fair price.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Here’s what NASA would like to see SpaceX accomplish with Starship this year Read More »

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Two lunar landers are on the way to the Moon after SpaceX’s double moonshot

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Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science missions for SpaceX, said it made sense to pair the Firefly and ispace missions on the same Falcon 9 rocket.

“When we have two missions that can each go to the Moon on the same launch, that is something that we obviously want to take advantage of,” Scheiman said. “So when we found a solution for the Firefly and ispace missions to fly together on the same Falcon 9, it was a no-brainer to put them together.”

SpaceX stacked the two landers, one on top of the other, inside the Falcon 9’s payload fairing. Firefly’s lander, the larger of the two spacecraft, rode on top of the stack and deployed from the rocket first. The Resilience lander from ispace launched in the lower position, cocooned inside a specially designed canister. Once Firefly’s lander separated from the Falcon 9, the rocket jettisoned the canister, performed a brief engine firing to maneuver into a slightly different orbit, then released ispace’s lander.

This dual launch arrangement resulted in a lower launch price for Firefly and ispace, according to Scheiman.

“At SpaceX, we are really interested in and invested in lowering the cost of launch for everybody,” she said. “So that’s something we’re really proud of.”

The Resilience lunar lander is pictured at ispace’s facility in Japan last year. The company’s small Tenacious rover is visible on the upper left part of the spacecraft. credit: ispace Credit: ispace

The Blue Ghost and Resilience landers will take different paths toward the Moon.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost will spend about 25 days in Earth orbit, then four days in transit to the Moon. After Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, Firefly’s ground team will verify the readiness of the lander’s propulsion and navigation systems and execute several thruster burns to set up for landing.

Blue Ghost’s final descent to the Moon is tentatively scheduled for March 2. The target landing site is in Mare Crisium, an ancient 350-mile-wide (560-kilometer) impact basin in the northeast part of the near side of the Moon.

After touchdown, Blue Ghost will operate for about 14 days (one entire lunar day). The instruments aboard Firefly’s lander include a subsurface drill, an X-ray imager, and an experimental electrodynamic dust shield to test methods of repelling troublesome lunar dust from accumulating on sensitive spacecraft components.

The Resilience lander from ispace will take four to five months to reach the Moon. It carries several intriguing tech demo experiments, including a water electrolyzer provided by a Japanese company named Takasago Thermal Engineering. This demonstration will test equipment that future lunar missions could use to convert the Moon’s water ice resources into electricity and rocket fuel.

The lander will also deploy a “micro-rover” named Tenacious, developed by an ispace subsidiary in Luxembourg. The Tenacious rover will attempt to scoop up lunar soil and capture high-definition imagery of the Moon.

Ron Garan, CEO of ispace’s US-based subsidiary, told Ars that this mission is “pivotal” for the company.

“We were not fully successful on our first mission,” Garan said in an interview. “It was an amazing accomplishment, even though we didn’t have a soft landing… Although the hardware worked flawlessly, exactly as it was supposed to, we did have some lessons learned in the software department. The fixes to prevent what happened on the first mission from happening on the second mission were fairly straightforward, so that boosts our confidence.”

The ispace subsidiary led by Garan, a former NASA astronaut, is based in Colorado. While the Resilience lander launched Wednesday is not part of the CLPS program, the company will build an upgraded lander for a future CLPS mission for NASA, led by Draper Laboratory.

“I think the fact that we have two lunar landers on the same rocket for the first time in history is pretty substantial,” Garan said. I think we all are rooting for each other.”

Investors need to see more successes with commercial lunar landers to fully realize the market’s potential, Garan said.

“That market, right now, is very nascent. It’s very, very immature. And one of the reasons for that is that it’s very difficult for companies that are contemplating making investments on equipment, experiments, etc., to put on the lunar surface and lunar orbit,” Garan said. “It’s very difficult to make those investments, especially if they’re long-term investments, because there really hasn’t been a proof of concept yet.”

“So every time we have a success, that makes it more likely that these companies that will serve as the foundation of a commercial lunar market movement will be able to make those investments,” Garan said. “Conversely, every time we have a failure, the opposite happens.”

Two lunar landers are on the way to the Moon after SpaceX’s double moonshot Read More »

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There was a straight shot from Earth to the Moon and Mars last night

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The most recent lunar occultation of Mars that was visible from the United States occurred on December 7, 2022. A handful of these events occur every few years around each Martian opposition, but they are usually only visible from a small portion of Earth, often over the ocean or in polar regions. The next lunar occultation of Mars visible across most of the United States will happen on the night of February 4–5, 2042. There are similar occultations of Mars in 2035, 2038, and 2039 visible in narrow swaths of South Florida and the Pacific Northwest.

This photo was taken with a handheld Canon 80D and a 600 mm lens. Settings were 1/2000 sec, f/8, ISO 400. The image was cropped and lightly edited in Adobe Lightroom.

The Moon also periodically covers Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Solar System’s more distant planets. A good resource on lunar occultations is In-The-Sky.org, which lists events where the Moon will block out a planet or a bright star. Be sure you choose your location on the upper right corner of the page and toggle year by year to plan out future viewing opportunities.

Viewing these kinds of events can be breathtaking and humbling. In 2012, I was lucky enough to observe the transit of Venus in front of the Sun, something that only happens twice every 121 years.

Seeing Mars, twice the size of the Moon, rising above the lunar horizon like a rusty BB pellet next to a dusty volleyball provided a perfect illustration of the scale and grandeur of the Solar System. Similarly, viewing Venus dwarfed by the Sun was a revealing moment. The worlds accompanying Earth around the Sun are varied in size, shape, color, and composition.

In one glance, an observer can see the barren, airless lunar surface and a cold, desert planet that once harbored rivers, lakes, and potentially life, all while standing on our own planet, an oasis in the cosmos. One thing that connects them all is humanity’s quest for exploration. Today, robots are operating on or around the Moon and Mars. Governments and private companies are preparing to return astronauts to the lunar surface within a few years, then moving on to dispatch human expeditions to the red planet.

Plans to land astronauts on the Moon are already in motion, but significant financial and technological hurdles remain for a crew mission to put humans on Mars. But for a short time Monday night, it looked like there was a direct path.

There was a straight shot from Earth to the Moon and Mars last night Read More »

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A taller, heavier, smarter version of SpaceX’s Starship is almost ready to fly

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Starship will test its payload deployment mechanism on its seventh test flight.

SpaceX’s first second-generation Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, could launch as soon as January 13. Credit: SpaceX

An upsized version of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week.

The two-mile transfer moved the bullet-shaped spaceship one step closer to launch Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase test site in South Texas. The launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 2200 UTC). This will be the seventh full-scale test flight of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft and the first of 2025.

In the coming days, SpaceX technicians will lift the ship on top of the Super Heavy booster already emplaced on the launch mount. Then, teams will complete the final tests and preparations for the countdown on Monday.

“The upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with significant upgrades, attempt Starship’s first payload deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster,” SpaceX officials wrote in a mission overview posted on the company’s website.

The mission Monday will repeat many of the maneuvers SpaceX demonstrated on the last two Starship test flights. The company will again attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and attempt to catch it with two mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” on the launch tower approximately seven minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX accomplished this feat on the fifth Starship test flight in October but aborted a catch attempt on a November flight because of damaged sensors on the tower chopsticks. The booster, which remained healthy, diverted to a controlled splashdown offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX’s next Starship prototype, Ship 33, emerges from its assembly building at Starbase, Texas, early Thursday morning. Credit: SpaceX/Elon Musk via X

For the next flight, SpaceX added protections to the sensors on the tower and will test radar instruments on the chopsticks to provide more accurate ranging measurements for returning vehicles. These modifications should improve the odds of a successful catch of the Super Heavy booster and of Starship on future missions.

In another first, one of the 33 Raptor engines that will fly on this Super Heavy booster—designated Booster 14 in SpaceX’s fleet—was recovered from the booster that launched and returned to Starbase in October. For SpaceX, this is a step toward eventually flying the entire rocket repeatedly. The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft are designed for full reusability.

After separation of the booster stage, the Starship upper stage will ignite six engines to accelerate to nearly orbital velocity, attaining enough energy to fly halfway around the world before gravity pulls it back into the atmosphere. Like the past three test flights, SpaceX will guide Starship toward a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia around one hour after liftoff.

New ship, new goals

The most significant changes engineers will test next week are on the ship, or upper stage, of SpaceX’s enormous rocket. The most obvious difference on Starship Version 2, or Block 2, is with the vehicle’s forward flaps. Engineers redesigned the flaps, reducing their size and repositioning them closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Cameras onboard Starship showed heat damage to the flaps during reentry on test flights last year.

SpaceX is also developing an upgraded Super Heavy booster that is slightly taller than the existing model. The next version of the booster will produce more thrust and will be slightly taller than the current Super Heavy, but for the upcoming test flight, SpaceX will still use the first-generation booster design.

Starship Block 2 has smaller flaps than previous ships. The flaps are located in a more leeward position to protect them from the heat of reentry. Credit: SpaceX

For next week’s flight, Super Heavy and Starship combined will hold more than 10.5 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer. The ship’s propellant tanks have 25 percent more volume than previous iterations of the vehicle, and the payload compartment, which contains 10 mock-ups of Starlink Internet satellites on this launch, is somewhat smaller. Put together, the changes add nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) to the rocket’s height, bringing the full stack to approximately 404 feet (123.1 meters).

This means SpaceX will break its own record for launching the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. And the company will do it again with the even larger Starship Version 3, which SpaceX says will have nine upper stage engines, instead of six, and will deliver up to 440,000 pounds (200 metric tons) of cargo to low-Earth orbit.

Other changes debuting with Starship Version 2 next week include:

• Vacuum jacketing of propellant feedlines

• A new fuel feedline system for the ship’s Raptor vacuum engines

• An improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and reading sensors

• Redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors

• Integrated smart batteries and power units to distribute 2.7 megawatts of power across the ship

• An increase to more than 30 cameras onboard the vehicle.

Laying the foundation

The enhanced avionics system will support future missions to prove SpaceX’s ability to refuel Starships in orbit and return the ship to the launch site. For example, SpaceX will fly a more powerful flight computer and new antennas that integrate connectivity with the Starlink Internet constellation, GPS navigation satellites, and backup functions for traditional radio communication links. With Starlink, SpaceX said Starship can stream more than 120Mbps of real-time high-definition video and telemetry in every phase of flight.

These changes “all add additional vehicle performance and the ability to fly longer missions,” SpaceX said. “The ship’s heat shield will also use the latest generation tiles and includes a backup layer to protect from missing or damaged tiles.”

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, a little more than 17 minutes into the flight, Starship will deploy 10 dummy payloads similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites. The mock-ups will soar around the world on a suborbital trajectory, just like Starship, and reenter over the unpopulated Indian Ocean. Future Starship flights will launch real next-gen Starlink satellites to add capacity to the Starlink broadband network, but they’re too big and too heavy to launch on SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket.

SpaceX will again reignite one of the ship’s Raptor engines in the vacuum of space, repeating a successful test achieved on Flight 6 in November. The engine restart capability is important for several reasons. It gives the ship the ability to maneuver itself out of low-Earth orbit for reentry (not a concern for Starship’s suborbital tests), and will allow the vehicle to propel itself to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars once SpaceX masters the technology for orbital refueling.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

NASA has contracts with SpaceX to build a derivative of Starship to ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the Moon for the agency’s Artemis program. The NASA program manager overseeing SpaceX’s lunar lander contract, Lisa Watson-Morgan, said she was pleased with the results of the in-space engine restart demo last year.

“The whole path to the Moon, as we are getting ready to land on the Moon, we’ll perform a series of maneuvers, and the Raptors will have an environment that is very, very cold,” Morgan told Ars in a recent interview. “To that, it’s going to be important that they’re able to relight for landing purposes. So that was a great first step towards that.

“In addition, after we land, clearly, the Raptors will be off, and it will get very cold, and they will have to relight in a cold environment (to launch the crews off the lunar surface),” she said. “So that’s why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA’s return to the Moon.”

“The biggest technology challenge remaining”

SpaceX continues to experiment with Starship’s heat shield, which the company’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has described as “the biggest technology challenge remaining with Starship.” In order for SpaceX to achieve its lofty goal of launching Starships multiple times per day, the heat shield needs to be fully and immediately reusable.

While the last three ships have softly splashed down in the Indian Ocean, some of their heat-absorbing tiles stripped away from the vehicle during reentry, when it’s exposed to temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).

Engineers removed tiles from some areas of the ship for next week’s test flight in order to “stress-test” vulnerable parts of the vehicle. They also smoothed and tapered the edge of the tile line, where the ceramic heat shield gives way to the ship’s stainless steel skin, to address “hot spots” observed during reentry on the most recent test flight.

“Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry,” SpaceX said.

SpaceX is also flying rudimentary catch fittings on Starship to test their thermal performance on reentry. The ship will fly a more demanding trajectory during descent to probe the structural limits of the redesigned flaps at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure, according to SpaceX.

All told, SpaceX’s inclusion of a satellite deployment demo and ship upgrades on next week’s test flight will lay the foundation for future missions, perhaps in the next few months, to take the next great leap in Starship development.

In comments following the last Starship test flight in November, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that the company could try to return the ship to a catch back at the launch site—something that would require the vehicle to complete at least one full orbit of Earth—as soon as the next flight following Monday’s mission.

“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk posted. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

A taller, heavier, smarter version of SpaceX’s Starship is almost ready to fly Read More »

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NASA says Orion’s heat shield is good to go for Artemis II—but does it matter?

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“We have since determined that while the capsule was dipping in and out of the atmosphere, as part of that planned skip entry, heat accumulated inside the heat shield outer layer, leading to gases forming and becoming trapped inside the heat shield,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. “This caused internal pressure to build up and led to cracking and uneven shedding of that outer layer.”

An independent team of experts concurred with NASA’s determination of the root cause, Melroy said.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, Associate Administrator Jim Free, and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman speak with reporters Thursday in Washington, DC. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Counterintuitively, this means NASA engineers are comfortable with the safety of the heat shield if the Orion spacecraft reenters the atmosphere at a slightly steeper angle than it did on Artemis I and spends more time subjected to higher temperatures.

When the Orion spacecraft climbed back out of the atmosphere during the Artemis I skip reentry, a period known as the skip dwell, NASA said heating rates decreased and thermal energy accumulated inside the heat shield’s Avcoat material. This generated gases inside the heat shield through a process known as pyrolysis. 

“Pyrolysis is just burning without oxygen,” said Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Moon to Mars program. “We learned that as part of that reaction, the permeability of the Avcoat material is essential.”

During the skip dwell, “the production of those gases was higher than the permeability could tolerate, so as a result, pressure differential was created. That pressure led to cracks in plane with the outer mold line of the vehicle,” Kshatriya said.

NASA didn’t know this could happen because engineers tested the heat shield on the ground at higher temperatures than the Orion spacecraft encountered in flight to prove the thermal barrier could withstand the most extreme possible heating during reentry.

“What we missed was this critical region in the middle, and we missed that region because we didn’t have the test facilities to produce the low-level energies that occur during skip and dwell,” Kshatriya said Thursday.

During the investigation, NASA replicated the charring and cracking after engineers devised a test procedure to expose Avcoat heat shield material to the actual conditions of the Artemis I reentry.

So, for Artemis II, NASA plans to modify the reentry trajectory to reduce the skip reentry’s dwell time. Let’s include some numbers to help illustrate the difference.

The distance traveled by Artemis I during the reentry phase of the mission was more than 3,000 nautical miles (3,452 miles; 5,556 kilometers), according to Kshatriya. This downrange distance will be limited to no more than 1,775 nautical miles (2,042 miles; 3,287 kilometers) on Artemis II, effectively reducing the dwell time the Orion spacecraft spends in the lower heating regime that led to the cracking on Artemis I.

NASA’s inspector general report in May included new images of Orion’s heat shield that the agency did not initially release after the Artemis I mission. Credit: NASA Inspector General

With this change, Kshatriya said NASA engineers don’t expect to see the heat shield erosion they saw on Artemis I. “The gas generation that occurs during that skip dwell is sufficiently low that the environment for crack generation is not going to overwhelm the structural integrity of the char layer.”

For future Orion spaceships, NASA and its Orion prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, will incorporate changes to address the heat shield’s permeability problem.

Waiting for what?

NASA officials discussed the heat shield issue, and broader plans for the Artemis program, in a press conference in Washington on Thursday. But the event’s timing added a coat of incredulity to much of what they said. President-elect Donald Trump, with SpaceX founder Elon Musk in his ear, has vowed to cut wasteful government spending.

NASA says Orion’s heat shield is good to go for Artemis II—but does it matter? Read More »

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Over the weekend, China debuted a new rocket on the nation’s path to the Moon

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Depending on how you count them, China now has roughly 18 types of active space launchers.

China’s new Long March 12 rocket made a successful inaugural flight Saturday, placing two experimental satellites into orbit and testing uprated, higher-thrust engines that will allow a larger Chinese launcher in development to send astronauts to the Moon.

The 203-foot-tall (62-meter) Long March 12 rocket lifted off at 9: 25 am EST (14: 25 UTC) Saturday from the Wenchang commercial launch site on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province. This was also the first rocket launch from a new commercial spaceport at Wenchang, consisting of two launch sites a short distance from a pair of existing launch pads used by heavier rockets primarily geared for government missions.

The two-stage rocket delivered two technology demonstration satellites into a near-circular 50-degree-inclination orbit with an average altitude of nearly 650 miles (about 1,040 kilometers), according to US military tracking data.

The Long March 12 is the newest member of China’s Long March rocket family, which has been flying since China launched its first satellite into orbit in 1970. The Long March rockets have significantly evolved since then and now include a range of launch vehicles of different sizes and designs.

Versions of the Long March 2, 3, and 4 rockets have been flying since the 1970s and 1980s, burning the same toxic mix of hypergolic propellants as China’s early ICBMs. More recently, China debuted the Long March 5, 6, 7, and 8 rockets consuming the cleaner combination of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants. These new rockets provide China with a spectrum of small, medium, and heavy-lift launch capabilities.

So many rockets

So, why bother with yet another Long March rocket? One reason is that Chinese officials seek a less expensive rocket to deploy thousands of small satellites for the country’s Internet mega-constellations to rival SpaceX’s Starlink network. Another motivation is to demonstrate the performance of upgraded rocket engines, new technologies, and fresh designs, some of which appear to copy SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Like all of China’s other existing rockets, the Long March 12 configuration that flew Saturday is fully disposable. At the Zhuhai Airshow earlier this month, China’s largest rocket company displayed another version of the Long March 12 with a reusable first stage but with scant design details.

The Long March 12 is powered by four kerosene-fueled YF-100K engines on its first stage, generating more than 1.1 million pounds, or 5,000 kilonewtons of thrust at full throttle. These engines are upgraded, higher-thrust versions of the YF-100 engines used on several other types of Long March rockets.

Models of the Long March rockets on display at the China National Space Administration (CNSA) booth during the China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, China, on November 12, 2024. In this image, models of a future reusable version of the Long March 12 (left) and the super-heavy Long March 9 (right) are visible. Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Notably, China will use the YF-100K variant on the heavy-lift Long March 10 rocket in development to launch Chinese astronauts to the Moon. The heaviest version of the Long March 10 will use 21 of these YF-100K engines on its core stage and strap-on boosters. Now, Chinese engineers have tested the upgraded YF-100K in flight, with favorable results from Saturday’s launch.

China is also developing a new crew-rated spacecraft and lunar lander that will launch on Long March 10 rockets, eyeing a human landing on the lunar surface by 2030. The Long March 10 will have a reusable first stage like the Falcon 9, and China is now working on a super-heavy fully reusable rocket that appears to be a clone of SpaceX’s Starship. This Long March 9 rocket, which probably won’t fly until the 2030s, will enable larger-scale sustained lunar exploration by China.

And now, the details

The Long March 12 was developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, also known as SAST, one of the two main state-owned organizations in charge of designing and manufacturing Long March rockets. Together with the Beijing-based China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, SAST is part of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the largest government-run enterprise overseeing the Chinese space program.

According to SAST, the Long March 12 is capable of delivering a payload of at least 12 metric tons (26,455 pounds) into low-Earth orbit and about half that to a somewhat higher Sun-synchronous orbit. Two kerosene-fueled YF-115 engines power the Long March 12’s upper stage.

The Long March 12 is also China’s first 3.8-meter (12.5-foot) diameter rocket, which is an optimal match between the width of the booster and lift capability, allowing it to be transported by railway to launch sites across China, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

China’s older Long March rocket variants are slimmer and generally require engineers to strap together multiple first-stage boosters in a cluster arrangement to achieve performance similar to the Long March 12. The core of the heavy-lift Long March 5 is around 5 meters in diameter and must be transported by sea.

China’s first Long March 12 rocket on its launch pad before liftoff. Credit: Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images

In a post-launch press release, SAST identified several other “technology breakthroughs” flying on the Long March 12 rocket. These include a health management system that can diagnose anomalies in flight and adjust the rocket’s trajectory in real time to compensate for any minor problems. The Long March 12 is also China’s first rocket to use cryogenic helium to pressurize its liquid oxygen tanks, and its tanks are made of an aluminum-lithium alloy to save weight.

The Long March 12 is also the first rocket of its size in the Long March family to be assembled on its side instead of stacked vertically on its launch mount. After integrating the rocket in a nearby hangar, technicians transferred the first Long March 12 to its launch pad horizontally, then raised it vertical with an erector system. This is the same way SpaceX integrates and transports Falcon 9 rockets to the launch pad. SpaceX copied this horizontal integration approach from older Soviet-era rockets, and it offers several advantages, allowing teams to assemble rockets faster without the need for large overhead cranes in tall, cavernous vertical assembly buildings.

A bug or a feature?

We’ve already mentioned the proliferation of different types of Long March rockets, with nine classes of Long March launchers currently in operation. And each of these comes in multiple sub-variants.

This is a starkly different approach from SpaceX, which flies standardized rockets like the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, which almost always fly in the same configuration, regardless of the payload or destination for each mission. The only exception is when SpaceX launches Dragon crew or cargo capsules on the Falcon 9.

Depending on how you count them, China now has roughly 18 different types of active space launchers. This number doesn’t include the Long March 9 or Long March 10, but it counts all the other Long March configurations, plus numerous small- and medium-class rockets fielded by China’s quasi-commercial space industry.

These startups operate with the blessing of China’s government and, in many cases, got their start by utilizing surplus military equipment and investment from Chinese local or provincial governments. However, the Chinese Communist Party has allowed them to raise capital from private sources, and they operate on a commercial basis, almost exclusively to serve domestic Chinese markets.

In some cases, these launch startups compete for commercial contracts directly with the government-backed Long March rocket family. The Long March 12 could be in the mix for launching large batches of spacecraft for China’s planned satellite Internet networks.

Some of these launch companies are working on reusable rockets similar in appearance to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. All of these rockets, government and commercial, are part of an ecosystem of Chinese launchers tasked with hauling military and commercial satellites into orbit.

The Long March 12 launch Saturday was China’s 58th orbital launch attempt of 2024, and no single subvariant of a Chinese rocket has flown more than seven times this year. This is in sharp contrast to the United States, which has logged 142 orbital launch attempts so far this year, 119 of them by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rockets.

There are around a dozen US orbital-class launch vehicle types you might call operational. But a few of these, such as Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL and Minotaur, and NASA’s Space Launch System, haven’t flown for several years.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is now the dominant leader in the US launch industry. Most of the Falcon 9 launches are filled to capacity with SpaceX’s own Starlink Internet satellites, but many missions fly with their payload fairings only partially full. Still, the Falcon 9 is more affordable on a per-kilogram basis than any other US rocket.

In China, on the other hand, none of the commercial launch startups have emerged as a clear leader. When that happens, if China allows the market to function in a truly commercial manner, some of these Chinese rocket companies will likely fold.

However, China’s government has a strategic interest in maintaining a portfolio of rockets and launch sites, same as the US government. For example, Chinese officials said the new launch site at Wenchang, where the Long March 12 took off from over the weekend, can accommodate 10 or more different types of rockets.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Over the weekend, China debuted a new rocket on the nation’s path to the Moon Read More »

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The Moon had volcanic activity much more recently than we knew

astronomy, eruptions, moon, planetary science, Science, volcanism / /

New Moon —

Eruptions seem to have continued long after widespread volcanism had ended.

–

Image of the face of the Moon.

Enlarge / The eruptions that produced the dark mare on the lunar surface ended billions of years ago.

Signs of volcanic activity on the Moon can be viewed simply by looking up at the night-time sky: The large, dark plains called “maria” are the product of massive outbursts of volcanic material. But these were put in place relatively early in the Moon’s history, with their formation ending roughly 3 billion years ago. Smaller-scale additions may have continued until roughly 2 billion years ago. Evidence of that activity includes samples obtained by China’s Chang’e-5 lander.

But there are hints that small-scale volcanism continued until much more recent times. Observations from space have identified terrain that seems to be the product of eruptions, but only has a limited number of craters, suggesting a relatively young age. But there’s considerable uncertainty about these deposits.

Now, further data from samples returned to Earth by the Chang’e-5 mission show clear evidence of volcanism that is truly recent in the context of the history of the Solar System. Small beads that formed during an eruption have been dated to just 125 million years ago.

Counting beads

Obviously, some of the samples returned by Chang’e-5 are solid rock. But it also returned a lot of loose material from the lunar regolith. And that includes a decent number of rounded, glassy beads formed from molten material. There are two potential sources of those beads: volcanic activity and impacts.

The Moon is constantly bombarded by particles ranging in size from individual atoms to small rocks, and many of these arrive with enough energy to melt whatever it is they smash into. Some of that molten material will form these beads, which may then be scattered widely by further impacts. The composition of these beads can vary wildly, as they’re composed of either whatever smashed into the Moon or whatever was on the Moon that got smashed. So, the relative concentrations of different materials will be all over the map.

By contrast, any relatively recent volcanism on the Moon will be extremely rare, so is likely to be from a single site and have a single composition. And, conveniently, the Apollo missions already returned samples of volcanic lunar rocks, which provide a model for what that composition might look like. So, the challenge was one of sorting through the beads returned from the Chang’e-5 landing site, and figuring out which ones looked volcanic.

And it really was a challenge, as there were over 3,000 beads returned, and the vast majority of them would have originated in impacts.

As a first cutoff, the team behind the new work got rid of anything that had a mixed composition, such as unmelted material embedded in the bead, or obvious compositional variation. This took the 3,000 beads down to 764. Those remaining beads were then subject to a technique that could determine what chemicals were present. (The team used an electron probe microanalyzer, which bombards the sample with electrons and uses the photons that are emitted to determine what elements are present.) As expected, compositions were all over the map. Some beads were less than 1 percent magnesium oxide; others nearly 30 percent. Silicon dioxide ranged from 16 to 60 percent.

Based on the Apollo samples, the researchers selected for beads that were high in magnesium oxide relative to calcium and aluminum oxides. That got them down to 13 potentially volcanic samples. They also looked for low nickel, as that’s found in many impactors, which got the number down to six. The final step was to look at sulfur isotopes, as impact melting tends to preferentially release the lighter isotope, altering the ratio compared to intact lunar rocks.

After all that, the researchers were left with three of the glassy beads, which is a big step down from the 3,000 they started with.

Erupted

Those three were then used to perform uranium-based radioactive dating, and they all produced numbers that were relatively close to each other. Based on the overlapping uncertainties, the researchers conclude that all were the product of an eruption that took place about 123 million years ago, give or take 15 million years. Considering that the most recent confirmed eruptions were about 2 billion years ago, that’s a major step forward in timing.

And that’s quite a bit of a surprise, as the Moon has had plenty of time to cool, and that cooling would have increased the distance between its surface and any molten material left in the interior. So it’s not obvious what could be creating sufficient heating to generate molten material at present. The researchers note that the Moon has a lot of material called KREEP (potassium, rare earth elements, phosphorus) that is high in radioactive isotopes and might lead to localized heating in some circumstances.

Unfortunately, it will be tough to associate this with any local geology, since there’s no indication of where the eruption occurred. Material this small can travel quite a distance in the Moon’s weak gravitational field and then could be scattered even farther by impacts. So, it’s possible that these belong to features that have been identified as potentially volcanic through orbital images.

In the meantime, the increased exploration of the Moon planned for the next few decades should get us more opportunities to see whether similar materials are widespread on the lunar surface. Eventually, that might potentially allow us to identify an area with higher concentrations of volcanic material than one particle in a thousand.

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adk6635  (About DOIs).

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