Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander is slated to blast off on Monday, January 8, carrying an assortment of goodies, including cutting-edge scientific rovers, bitcoin, and a piece of Mount Everest. No doubt, this ain’t your grandfather’s Moon mission, as the era of commercial space deliveries is now upon us.
It’s time to look back at spaceflight in 2023, a real “two steps forward, one step back” kind of year, filled with highs, lows, and everything in between.
Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are all set with their Moon landers. Now they just need their rockets prepped and the launch windows to swing open. But once underway, these NASA-funded missions, slated for early 2024, will chart a new course for the future of private space exploration.
A Martian moons mission, a plethora of private lunar landers, probes to Venus and Jupiter, and reusable heavy-lift rocket tests are among the many highlights we’ll be watching in the coming 12 months, in what looks to be an extraordinary year in spaceflight. Here’s your 2024 calendar.
The Moon is about to be a busy place, with a series of crewed missions planned by NASA as part of its Artemis program, as well as an influx of upcoming commercial landers eyeing a spot on the lunar surface. Before it sends a fleet of spacecraft to the Moon, however, NASA first wants to understand the impact these…
A new payload has been added to Firefly’s upcoming mission to the far side of the Moon, one that will explore the lunar subsurface to find out if it can support future infrastructure.
Blue Origin has revealed a life-sized model of its upcoming lunar cargo lander, Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), achieving a significant step in its plans to facilitate cargo transport to the Moon’s surface.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission launched on July 14, headed towards a historic touchdown on the lunar surface. But before the lunar lander took off, it had to wait a few seconds until its path to orbit was clear.
From its new headquarters in the U.S., Tokyo-based startup ispace will develop its Apex 1.0 lunar lander to transport NASA payloads to the Moon in 2026.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander and rover have been asleep on the surface of the Moon while efforts to revive the pair continue until the end of the lunar day.
