moon

NASA officials sidestepped questions on Artemis II risks—there’s a reason why

artemis, artemis II, human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center, moon, NASA, orion, Space, space launch system / Tim Belzer / March 14, 2026

“This ought to make for some good reading,” NASA’s mission management team chair said.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman joins the Artemis II crew for a press conference at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on January 17, 2026. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

When talking about risk during a press conference on Thursday, the NASA officials in charge of the upcoming Artemis II Moon mission hedged their answers.

Reporters’ questions on the risks were certainly valid and appropriate. In an open society, it is vital to set expectations for any hazardous venture such as spaceflight—most importantly for the astronauts actually making the journey, but also for NASA’s workforce, the White House, lawmakers, and members of the public paying for the endeavor.

What’s more, Artemis II will be the first mission since 1972 to fly humans to the vicinity of the Moon. This is not following the well-trodden yet perilous path that astronauts take to reach the International Space Station, just a few hundred miles above Earth.

Artemis II will travel more than 1,000 times farther from Earth than the ISS, departing on a trajectory taking the mission several thousand miles beyond the far side of the Moon. The mission will last nine days from liftoff in Florida to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. The four-person crew will ride a rocket and spacecraft—the Space Launch System and Orion—that have flown together just once before. The sheer novelty of the mission makes it difficult to quantify the risk, NASA officials said Thursday.

Load and go

With just a single data point from flight testing—the unpiloted Artemis I demo mission in 2022—NASA managers were reluctant to publicize the bottom-line number from the probabilistic risk assessment for Artemis II.

Lori Glaze, NASA’s acting associate administrator for exploration system development, said the agency completed an assessment for Artemis II, but questioned the exercise’s usefulness.

“I think sometimes we get tricked into believing that those numbers are somehow really telling us something critically important,” Glaze said. “I think they’re valuable. I think we can do things in a relative sense to measure what’s more risky or less risky.”

Glaze and other members of the Artemis II management team were speaking with reporters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center following a flight readiness review. The two-day conclave in Florida provided the forum for a “very open” and “transparent” discussion of NASA’s “risk posture” heading into the Artemis II launch, and “how we’re mitigating those risks,” Glaze said.

The decision-makers present for the meeting unanimously agreed to continue final preparations for the Artemis II mission, now scheduled for liftoff no earlier than April 1 at 6: 24 pm EDT (22: 24 UTC). “It is a test flight, and it is not without risk, but our team and our hardware are ready,” Glaze said.

The four astronauts training to fly on Artemis II joined the Flight Readiness Review (FRR) virtually from their home base in Houston. Their participation included discussion of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield and reentry trajectory, a topic that prompted additional review from NASA leadership after Jared Isaacman took the helm as the agency’s administrator last year.

Super-telephoto view of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield tiles. Credit: Trevor Mahlmann

“The question was, ‘Are we going to be able to hit that entry interface and get them back on Earth safely,’” Glaze said of the crew’s comments during the FRR. “They were listening to make sure that we have that really nailed down, and we’ll be able to hit that entry interface. Understanding communication challenges and making sure that they’ll be able to maintain communication with Earth. That’s one of the things. They were looking at those risks. The environmental control and life support systems, power systems, things like that, the things that could cause challenges to them while they’re in flight.”

The Artemis II launch was supposed to take place in early February, but engineers ran into problems with a leaky hydrogen seal in the SLS rocket’s fueling line, followed by an issue loading helium into the rocket’s upper stage. The latter problem forced NASA to return the rocket to the hangar for repairs. It will return to the launch pad next week.

Mission managers have opted not to put the rocket through another fueling test. Before rolling the rocket off the launch pad last month, the launch team completed a successful countdown rehearsal that showed fresh hydrogen seals were leak-tight. “At this point, we’ve demonstrated that the seals that we have are the best seals that we’ve ever seen on the SLS,” Glaze said. “The next time we tank the vehicle will be when we’re attempting to launch.”

NASA has six launch opportunities in early April—officials just added April 2 to the list of possible launch dates—or else will have to wait until the end of April for the next series of launch attempts.

Are the numbers trash?

John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis II mission management team, discussed the mission’s risk uncertainties in an uncharacteristically blunt fashion for a NASA official.

NASA wants to avoid succumbing to a failure of imagination, a term invoked by astronaut Frank Borman after the fatal fire inside the Apollo 1 spacecraft on its launch pad in 1967. “We use that term a lot in human spaceflight,” Honeycutt said. “We want to be sure that we’re thinking about everything that can possibly go wrong, and have we assessed and adjudicated all the risk to put us in the best posture to be successful.”

So, what is the risk of a catastrophic accident on Artemis II? Honeycutt said NASA has “grappled” with the risk probability for some time. “What I would say is we understand the risk associated with the individual components, the subsystems, and then the overall systems.”

Statistically, Honeycutt said, about half of all rockets fail on their first flights. This is essentially true, with the global success rate for new types of orbital-class rockets somewhere between 50 and 60 percent over the last decade, depending on what exactly qualifies as a new launch vehicle. The SLS rocket performed marvelously after clearing the launch pad on Artemis I.

John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s Mission Management Team for the Artemis II mission, speaks during a news conference at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on January 16, 2026. Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Honeycutt, who managed the SLS program before taking over the Artemis mission management team, said he and Glaze want to bring the probability of a failure on an Artemis flight below 1 in 50. Achieving a 2 percent failure rate would assume NASA was “really getting after it and staying on a good cadence,” Honeycutt said. (NASA’s inspector general, in a report released earlier this week, wrote that the agency’s “loss of crew threshold” is 1 in 30 for Artemis missions overall. A NASA spokesperson said Thursday the agency would release more context on the risk assessment, but did not provide additional information by press time.)

The lull between Artemis missions comes with its own risks. Taking so much time—nearly three-and-a-half years—between flights doesn’t improve safety. This is apparent to Isaacman, who announced last month a program shake-up to fly the next mission—Artemis III—next year to low-Earth orbit to demonstrate docking with a commercial lunar lander in low-Earth orbit. Under the previous plan, Artemis III would have gone all the way to the Moon. The audacity of such a mission, wrapping so many untried things into a single flight, meant Artemis III would not have launched for at least two more years, and probably more like three, four, or more.

Now, Artemis IV is in line to attempt the program’s first human landing at the Moon’s south pole. Isaacman hopes to launch Artemis IV in 2028, but the schedule hinges on near-flawless execution on Artemis II, Artemis III, and speeding up the availability of human-rated Moon landers undergoing development by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Long breaks between launches are “not a recipe for success,” Isaacman said last month. Honeycutt said Artemis II’s risk assessment falls short of the 1-in-50 goal.

“On the second or third time, with this gap that we’ve got, it’s probably not even 1 in 50,” Honeycutt said of Artemis II. “It’s probably not 1 in 2 … but it’s probably closer to 1 in 2. That basically means we’re probably not 1 in 50 on the mission exactly like we want it to be, but we’re probably not 1 in 2 like we were on the first flight.

“I think we’re being really careful not to really lay probabilistic numbers on the table for this mission, just given the small amount of data.” Honeycutt continued with an uninhibited appraisal of NASA’s ability to quantify risk.

“It’s interesting that I didn’t get this question asked of me too much on Artemis I, and I understand why,” he said. “We’ve got people on the rocket this time, so people go, ‘Oh, shit’ … I know we have pursued loss of mission, loss of crew type number assessments, but I’m not sure we understand what they mean, in reality.”

Honeycutt used the danger of falling foam on the space shuttle as an example. This is what led to the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia on reentry in 2003, killing seven astronauts at the end of a research mission in low-Earth orbit. The failure was precipitated by an event during launch 16 days earlier.

In order to correctly assess the risk of foam loss, NASA would have had to not only calculate the probability of foam falling from the shuttle’s external fuel tank, but also all the other variables that could lead to a catastrophic failure. “It’s got to be in the right place, and then you’ve got to work the demise chain,” Honeycutt said. “What’s it going to hit? What if it does hit that? What can it do? If you work through all that from a technical standpoint, you can put yourself in a better place rather than just solely relying on a probabilistic number.”

The loss of mission and loss of crew assessments are not the same. Unlike the shuttle, the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft have a Launch Abort System, giving the astronauts the ability to escape a rocket failure during ascent into space.

The Artemis II crew virtually joined the flight readiness review held at Kennedy Space Center this week. Credit: NASA/Amber Jean Notvest

Facing reality

The way NASA is assessing and communicating risk for Artemis II sharply contrasts with how the agency formulated and discussed risk assessments for several recent notable missions.

On Artemis I, NASA assessed there was a 1-in-125 probability that the Orion spacecraft could be lost in flight, an estimate that far exceeds Honeycutt’s evaluation of statistical risk. Before Artemis I’s launch in 2022, NASA said the probability took into account known failure modes, redundancy in the rocket and the spacecraft, and “common cause failures” that might take out multiple systems in flight.

The top risk for Artemis I was the potential for collisions with small pieces of space junk or tiny naturally occurring fragments of asteroids or comets. The catch-all term for this material is micrometeoroids and orbital debris (MMOD). NASA officials also cited risks with avionics and software on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft’s heat shield propulsion system.

Honeycutt and Glaze are not the first NASA officials to question the validity of probabilistic risk assessments, which rely on numerical and statistical inputs, many of which are grounded in assumptions, especially for flights early in a program.

Bill Gerstenmaier, the former longtime chief of NASA’s human spaceflight programs and now a SpaceX vice president, has cited the agency’s erroneous risk assessment ahead of the first space shuttle flight in 1981. Engineers estimated a 1-in-500 to 1-in-5,000 chance of losing the crew on that mission. In retrospect, the first shuttle flight actually had a 1-in-10 to 1-in-12 chance of killing the crew. The odds of crew loss for each Apollo mission were about the same. By the end of the shuttle program, after two fatal disasters, NASA calculated that the risk of losing the crew on any single mission was about 1 in 90.

NASA assessed 1-in-276 odds for loss of crew on the first flight of astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in 2020. For Boeing’s Starliner in 2024, the probability was 1 in 295. You wouldn’t be wrong to question those numbers given the proven performance of Dragon and Starliner.

This chart from NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance describes the agency’s process for conducting probabilistic risk assessments. Credit: NASA

So, what do the Artemis II astronauts make of all this?

The mission’s commander, Reid Wiseman, said the crew members were trying to prepare their families “honestly and openly” for the hazards of a circumlunar flight.

“I went on a walk with my kids, and I told them, ‘Here’s where the will is, here’s where the trust documents are, and if anything happens to me, here’s what’s going to happen to you,’” Wiseman said. “That is a part of this life. I actually wish more people in everyday life talked to their families that way because you never know what the next day is going to bring.”

Any sailor knows you can’t stay in the harbor forever. Test pilots and astronauts take calculated risks for a living.

“When you see numbers like Mach 39 at entry, when you see numbers like 38,000 miles, 250,000 miles, and 5 or 6 million pounds on the pad, those are just insane numbers,” Wiseman said. “These numbers, you don’t even comprehend. There’s risk in that. We don’t know what we don’t know right now, so we’ll go learn all that [on the mission].

Despite the unknowns, Wiseman is ready: “For me, I actually feel completely 100 percent bought in. When I get into Orion, it’s like climbing into my bed, and I’ll feel warm and tucked in.”

The formal risk matrix for Artemis II is similar to that of Artemis I, with MMOD again at the top of the list. Matt Ramsey, NASA’s Artemis II mission manager, told Ars in January that the Orion spacecraft’s environmental control and life support system, which didn’t fly with its full capability on Artemis I, is the second-highest risk for Artemis II. “Those two are my biggest worries,” said Ramsey, who has been with NASA since 2002.

Honeycutt, a 36-year NASA veteran, has a different view.

“When have the last two events occurred?” Honeycutt said, referring to the root causes of NASA’s Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters. “Going uphill, in that highly energetic event, that’s when it occurred. We can fool ourselves sometimes into thinking, ‘Really, is that the biggest risk to the mission, MMOD?’

“When we’ve got the most dynamic activities going on, like during ascent, when we’re doing those burns, doing the perigee raise, and then we’re doing the TLI (Trans-Lunar Injection) burn, those are going to be the times that we’re introducing the most risk into the whole mission,” Honeycutt said. “There’s a lot of time where we’re steady state, and we’re going to be feeling pretty good about what’s going on in the mission.”

Ramsey’s role as mission manager will transition to Honeycutt two days before launch. The Launch Abort System reduces the risk of a rocket failure harming the crew, Ramsey said. “That mitigates a lot of the ascent risk,” he said. “Certainly, the entry, descent, landing is risky. You’ve got to get the parachutes out and that sort of thing.”

“At the end of the day, we want to accomplish as many goals as we’ve laid out for ourselves in the mission,” Honeycutt said. “But the main thing that I want to do is I want to hit that damn entry interface right down the middle and make sure that I’m bringing the crew home safely.”

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.

NASA officials sidestepped questions on Artemis II risks—there’s a reason why Read More »

No fooling: NASA targets April 1 for Artemis II launch to the Moon

artemis, artemis II, human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center, moon, NASA, Space, space launch system / Tim Belzer / March 3, 2026

NASA has fixed the problem that forced the removal of the rocket for the Artemis II mission from its launch pad last month, but it will be a couple of weeks before officials are ready to move the vehicle back into the starting blocks at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket could have launched as soon as this week after it passed a key fueling test on February 21. During that test, NASA loaded the Space Launch System rocket with super-cold propellants without any major problems, apparently overcoming a persistent hydrogen leak that prevented the mission from launching in early February.

However, another problem cropped up just one day after the successful fueling demo. Ground teams were unable to flow helium into the rocket’s upper stage. Unlike the connections to the core stage, which workers can repair at the launch pad, the umbilical lines leading to the upper stage higher up the rocket are only accessible inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy.

Mission managers quickly decided to roll the rocket back to the assembly building for troubleshooting. The rocket returned to the VAB on February 25, and within a week, engineers found the source of the helium flow issue. Inspections revealed that a seal in the quick disconnect, through which helium flows from ground systems into the rocket, was obstructing the pathway, according to NASA.

Sealing the deal

“The team removed the quick disconnect, reassembled the system, and began validating the repairs to the upper stage by running a reduced flow rate of helium through the mechanism to ensure the issue was resolved,” NASA said in an update posted Tuesday. “Engineers are assessing what allowed the seal to become dislodged to prevent the issue from recurring.”

No fooling: NASA targets April 1 for Artemis II launch to the Moon Read More »

NASA reports no significant leaks in Artemis II fueling test, eyes March 6 launch

artemis, artemis II, human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center, moon, NASA, Space, space launch system / Rejus Almole / February 20, 2026

A second fueling test on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket ended Thursday night, giving senior managers enough confidence to move forward with plans to launch four astronauts around the Moon as soon as March 6.

Unlike the first attempt to load propellants into the SLS rocket on February 2, there were no major leaks during Thursday’s practice countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Technicians swapped seals at the launch pad after hydrogen gas leaked from the rocket’s main fueling line earlier this month. This time, the seals held.

“For the most part, those fixes all performed pretty well yesterday,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s exploration programs. “We were able to fully fuel the SLS rocket within the planned timeline.”

The results keep the Artemis II mission on track for liftoff as soon as next month. NASA gave up on a series of February launch opportunities after encountering a persistent hydrogen leak during the first Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR).

“We’re now targeting March 6 as our earliest launch attempt,” Glaze said. “I am going to caveat that. I want to be open, transparent with all of you that there is still pending work. There’s work, a lot of forward work, that remains.”

If teams complete all of that work, liftoff of the Artemis II mission could occur within a two-hour window opening at 8: 29 pm EST on March 6 (01: 29 UTC on March 7). NASA has other launch dates available on March 7, 8, 9, and 11, but the mission may have to wait until April. There are approximately five days per month that the mission can depart the Earth after accounting for the position of the Moon in its orbit, the flight’s trajectory, and thermal and lighting constraints.

The Artemis II mission will last between nine and 10 days, taking NASA’s Orion spacecraft with commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen around the far side of the Moon before returning to Earth for splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Wiseman’s crew will set the record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth, and will become the first people to fly to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972.

NASA reports no significant leaks in Artemis II fueling test, eyes March 6 launch Read More »

Why would Elon Musk pivot from Mars to the Moon all of a sudden?

Mars, moon, musk, Space, spacex / Rejus Almole / February 9, 2026

As more than 120 million people tuned in to the Super Bowl for kickoff on Sunday evening, SpaceX founder Elon Musk turned instead to his social network. There, he tapped out an extended message in which he revealed that SpaceX is pivoting from the settlement of Mars to building a “self-growing” city on the Moon.

“For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years,” Musk wrote, in part.

Elon Musk tweet at 6: 24 pm ET on Sunday. Credit: X/Elon Musk

This is simultaneously a jolting and practical decision coming from Musk.

Why it’s a jolting decision

A quarter of a century ago, Musk founded SpaceX with a single-minded goal: settling Mars. One of his longest-tenured employees, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, described her very first interview with Musk in 2002 to me as borderline messianic.

“He was talking about Mars, his Mars Oasis project,” Shotwell said. “He wanted to do Mars Oasis, because he wanted people to see that life on Mars was doable, and we needed to go there.”

She was not alone in this description of her first interaction with Musk. The vision for SpaceX has not wavered. Even in the company’s newest, massive Starship rocket factory at the Starbase facility in South Texas—also known as the Gateway to Mars—there are reminders of the red planet everywhere. For example, the carpet inside Musk’s executive conference room is rust red, the same color as the surface of Mars.

In the last 25 years, Musk has gone from an obscure, modestly wealthy person to the richest human being ever, from a political moderate to chief supporter of Donald Trump; from a respected entrepreneur to, well, to a lot of things to a lot of people: world’s greatest industrialist/supervillain/savant/grifter-fraudster.

But one thing that has remained constant across the Muskverse is his commitment to “extending the light of human consciousness” and to the belief that the best place to begin humanity’s journey toward becoming a multi-planetary species was Mars.

Why would Elon Musk pivot from Mars to the Moon all of a sudden? Read More »

The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff

artemis, artemis II, Christina Koch, human spaceflight, Jeremy Hansen, Kennedy Space Center, moon, NASA, orion, Reid Wiseman, Science, Space, space launch system, victor glover / Rejus Almole / January 19, 2026

After a remarkably smooth launch campaign, Artemis II reached its last stop before the Moon.

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket rolls to Launch Complex 39B on Saturday. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad.

The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

“This is the start of a very long journey,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17.”

The Artemis II mission will set several notable human spaceflight records. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will travel farther from Earth than any human in history. They won’t land. That distinction will fall to the next mission in line in NASA’s Artemis program.

But the Artemis II astronauts will travel more than 4,000 miles beyond the far side of the Moon (the exact distance depends on the launch date), setting up for a human spaceflight speed record during their blazing reentry over the Pacific Ocean a few days later. Koch will become the first woman to fly to the vicinity of the Moon, and Hansen will be the first non-US astronaut to do the same.

“We really are ready to go,” said Wiseman, the Artemis II commander, during Saturday’s rollout to the launch pad. “We were in a sim [in Houston] for about 10 hours yesterday doing our final capstone entry and landing sim. We got in T-38s last night and we flew to the Cape to be here for this momentous occasion.”

The rollout began around sunrise Saturday, with NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule riding a mobile launch platform and a diesel-powered crawler transporter along a throughway paved with crushed Alabama river rock. Employees, VIPs, and guests gathered along the crawlerway to watch the 11 million-pound stack inch toward the launch pad. The rollout concluded about an hour after sunset, when the crawler transporter’s jacking system lowered the mobile launch platform onto pedestals at Pad 39B.

Hitting the launch window

The rollout keeps the Artemis II mission on track for liftoff as soon as next month, when NASA has a handful of launch opportunities on February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11.

The big milestone leading up to launch day will be a practice countdown or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), currently slated for around February 2, when NASA’s launch team will pump more than 750,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket. NASA had trouble keeping the cryogenic fluids at the proper temperature, then encountered hydrogen leaks when the launch team first tried to fill the rocket for the unpiloted Artemis I mission in 2022. Engineers implemented the same fixes on Artemis II that they used to finally get over the hump with propellant loading on Artemis I.

So, what are the odds NASA can actually get the Artemis II mission off the ground next month?

“We’ll have to have things go right,” said Matt Ramsey, NASA’s Artemis II mission manager, in an interview with Ars on Saturday. “There’s a day of margin there for weather. There’s some time after WDR that we’ve got for data reviews and that sort of thing. It’s not unreasonable, but I do think it’s a success-oriented schedule.”

The Moon has to be in the right position in its orbit for the Artemis II launch to proceed. There are also restrictions on launch dates to ensure the Orion capsule returns to Earth and reenters the atmosphere at an angle safe for the ship’s heat shield. If the launch does not happen in February, NASA has a slate of backup launch dates in early March.

Ars was at Kennedy Space Center for the rocket’s move to the launch pad Saturday. The photo gallery below shows the launcher emerging from the Vehicle Assembly Building, the same facility once used to stack Saturn V rockets during the Apollo Moon program. The Artemis II astronauts were also on hand for a question and answer session with reporters.

Around the clock

The first flight of astronauts on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft is running at least five years late. The flight’s architecture, trajectory, and goals have changed multiple times, and technical snags discovered during manufacturing and testing repeatedly shifted the schedule. The program’s engineering and budgetary problems are well documented.

But the team readying the rocket and spacecraft for launch has hit a stride in recent months. Technicians inside the Vehicle Assembly Building started stacking the SLS rocket in late 2024, beginning with the vehicle’s twin solid-fueled boosters. Then ground teams added the core stage, upper stage, and finally installed the Orion spacecraft on top of the rocket last October.

Working nearly around the clock in three shifts, it took about 12 months for crews at Kennedy to assemble the rocket and prepare it for rollout. But the launch campaign inside the VAB was remarkably smooth. Ground teams shaved about two months off the time it took to integrate the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission, which launched on the program’s first full-up unpiloted test flight in 2022.

“About a year ago, I was down here and we set the rollout date, and we hit it within a day or two,” said Matt Ramsey, NASA’s mission manager for Artemis II. “Being able to stay on schedule, it was a daily grind to be able to do that.”

Engineers worked through a handful of technical problems last year, including an issue with a pressure-assisted device used to assist the astronauts in opening the Orion hatch in the event of an emergency. More recently, NASA teams cleared a concern with caps installed on the rocket’s upper stage, according to Ramsey.

The most significant engineering review focused on proving the Orion heat shield is safe to fly. That assessment occurred in the background from the perspective of the technicians working on Artemis II at Kennedy.

The Artemis II team is now focused on activities at the launch pad. This week, NASA plans to perform a series of tests extending and retracting the crew access mark. Next, the Artemis II astronauts will rehearse an emergency evacuation from the launch pad. That will be followed by servicing of the rocket’s hydraulic steering system.

The big question mark

All of this leads up to the crucial practice countdown early next month. The astronauts won’t be aboard the rocket for the test, but almost everything else will look like launch day. The countdown will halt around 30 seconds prior to the simulated liftoff.

It took repeated tries to get through the Wet Dress Rehearsal for the Artemis I mission. There were four attempts at the countdown practice run before the first actual Artemis I launch countdown. After encountering hydrogen leaks on two scrubbed launch attempts, NASA performed another fueling test before finally successfully launching Artemis I in November 2022.

The launch team repaired a leaky hydrogen seal and introduced a gentler hydrogen loading procedure to overcome the problem. Hydrogen is an extremely efficient fuel for rockets, but its super-cold temperature and the tiny size of hydrogen molecules make it prone to leakage. The hydrogen feeds the SLS rocket’s four core stage engines and single upper stage engine.

“Artemis I was a test flight, and we learned a lot during that campaign getting to launch,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA’s Artemis II launch director. “The things that we’ve learned relative to how to go load this vehicle, how to load LOX (liquid oxygen), how to load hydrogen, have all been rolled in to the way in which we intend to load the Artemis II vehicle.”

NASA is hesitant to publicly set a target launch date until the agency gets through the dress rehearsal, but agency officials say a February launch remains feasible.

“We’ve held schedule pretty well getting to rollout today,” Isaacman said. “We have zero intention of communicating an actual launch date until we get through wet dress. But look, that’s our first window, and if everything is tracking accordingly, I know the teams are prepared, I know this crew is prepared, we’ll take it.”

“Wet dress is the driver to launch,” Blackwell-Thompson said. “With a wet dress that is without significant issues, if everything goes to plan, then certainly there are opportunities within February that could be achievable.”

One constraint that threw a wrench into NASA’s Artemis I launch campaign is no longer a significant factor for Artemis II. On Artemis I, NASA had to roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) after the wet dress rehearsal to complete final installation and testing on its flight termination system, which consists of a series of pyrotechnic charges designed to destroy the rocket if it flies off course and threatens populated areas after liftoff.

The US Space Force’s Eastern Range, responsible for public safety for all launches from Florida’s Space Coast, requires the flight termination system be retested after 28 to 35 days, a clock that started ticking last week before rollout. During Artemis I, technicians could not access the parts of the rocket they needed to in order to perform the retest at the launch pad. NASA now has structural arms to give ground teams the ability to reach parts higher up the rocket for the retest without returning to the hangar.

With this new capability, Artemis II could remain at the pad for launch opportunities in February and March before officials need to bring it back to the VAB to replace the flight termination system’s batteries, which still can’t be accessed at the pad.

The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff Read More »

Managers on alert for “launch fever” as pressure builds for NASA’s Moon mission

artemis, artemis II, human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center, moon, NASA, orion, Science, Space, space launch system / Paul Patrick / January 17, 2026

“Putting crew on the rocket and taking the crew around the Moon, this is going be our first step toward a sustained lunar presence,” Honeycutt said. “It’s 10 days [and] four astronauts going farther from Earth than any other human has ever traveled. We’ll be validating the Orion spacecraft’s life support, navigation and crew systems in the really harsh environments of deep space, and that’s going to pave the way for future landings.”

NASA’s 322-foot-tall (98-meter) SLS rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building on the eve of rollout to Launch Complex 39B. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

There is still much work ahead before NASA can clear Artemis II for launch. At the launch pad, technicians will complete final checkouts and closeouts before NASA’s launch team gathers in early February for a critical practice countdown. During this countdown, called a Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), Blackwell-Thompson and her team will oversee the loading of the SLS rocket’s core stage and upper stage with super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants.

The cryogenic fluids, particularly liquid hydrogen, gave fits to the Artemis launch team as NASA prepared to launch the Artemis I mission—without astronauts—on the SLS rocket’s first test flight in 2022. Engineers resolved the issues and successfully launched the Artemis I mission in November 2022, and officials will apply the lessons for the Artemis II countdown.

“Artemis I was a test flight, and we learned a lot during that campaign getting to launch,” Blackwell-Thompson said. “And the things that we’ve learned relative to how to go load this vehicle, how to load LOX (liquid oxygen), how to load hydrogen, have all been rolled in to the way in which we intend to do for the Artemis II vehicle.”

Finding the right time to fly

Assuming the countdown rehearsal goes according to plan, NASA could be in a position to launch the Artemis II mission as soon as February 6. But the schedule for February 6 is tight, with no margin for error. Officials typically have about five days per month when they can launch Artemis II, when the Moon is in the right position relative to Earth, and the Orion spacecraft can follow the proper trajectory toward reentry and splashdown to limit stress on the capsule’s heat shield.

In February, the available launch dates are February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11, with launch windows in the overnight hours in Florida. If the mission isn’t off the ground by February 11, NASA will have to stand down until a new series of launch opportunities beginning March 6. The space agency has posted a document showing all available launch dates and times through the end of April.

John Honeycutt, chair NASA’s Mission Management Team for the Artemis II mission, speaks during a news conference at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on January 16, 2026. Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

NASA’s leaders are eager for Artemis II to fly. NASA is not only racing China, a reality the agency’s former administrator acknowledged during the Biden administration. Now, the Trump administration is pushing NASA to accomplish a human landing on the Moon by the end of his presidential term on January 20, 2029.

One of Honeycutt’s jobs as chair of the Mission Management Team (MMT) is ensuring all the Is are dotted and Ts are crossed amid the frenzy of final launch preparations. While the hardware for Artemis II is on the move in Florida, the astronauts and flight controllers are wrapping up their final training and simulations at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“I think I’ve got a good eye for launch fever,” he said Friday.

“As chair of the MMT, I’ve got one job, and it’s the safe return of Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy. I consider that a duty and a trust, and it’s one I intend to see through.”

Managers on alert for “launch fever” as pressure builds for NASA’s Moon mission Read More »

Intuitive Machines—known for its Moon landers—will become a military contractor

artemis, Commercial space, golden dome, intuitive machines, lanteris, Maxar, military space, moon, Space / Mike M. / November 10, 2025

The company’s success in just reaching the Moon’s surface has put it in position to become one of NASA’s leading lunar contractors. NASA has awarded more robotic lunar lander contracts to Intuitive Machines than to any other company, with two missions complete and at least two more in development. Intuitive Machines is also one of the companies NASA selected to compete for a contract to develop an unpressurized Moon buggy for astronauts to drive across the lunar surface.

Branching out

The addition of Lanteris will make Intuitive Machines competitive for work outside of the lunar realm.

“This marks the moment Intuitive Machines transitions from a lunar company to a multi-domain space prime, setting the pace for how the industry’s next generation will operate,” said Steve Altemus, the company’s CEO.

Altemus said Lanteris will initially become a subsidiary of Intuitive Machines, followed by a complete integration under the Intuitive Machines banner.

Lanteris builds numerous satellites for the US Space Force, NASA, and commercial customers. The company can trace its history to 1957, when it was established as the Western Development Laboratories division of Philco Corporation, a battery and electronics manufacturer founded in 1892.

Philco constructed a satellite factory in Palo Alto, California, and produced its first spacecraft for launch in 1960. The satellite, named Courier 1B, made history as the world’s first active repeater communications relay station in orbit, meaning it could receive messages from the ground, store them, and then retransmit them.

The contractor underwent numerous mergers and acquisitions, becoming part of Ford Motor Company, Loral Corporation, and the Canadian company MDA Space before it was bought up by Advent more than two years ago. In nearly 70 years, the company has produced more than 300 satellites, many of them multi-ton platforms for broadcasting television signals from geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. Lanteris has contracts to build dozens more satellites in the next few years.

Intuitive Machines—known for its Moon landers—will become a military contractor Read More »

SpaceX teases simplified Starship as alarms sound over Moon landing delays

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“SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible.”

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

SpaceX on Thursday released the most detailed public update in nearly two years on its multibillion-dollar contract to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA, amid growing sentiment that China is likely to beat the United States back to the lunar surface with humans.

In a lengthy statement published on SpaceX’s website Thursday, the company said it “will be a central enabler that will fulfill the vision of NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a lasting presence on the lunar surface… and ultimately forge the path to land the first humans on Mars.”

Getting to Mars is SpaceX’s overarching objective, a concise but lofty mission statement introduced by Elon Musk at the company’s founding nearly a quarter-century ago. Musk has criticized NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return US astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972, as unambitious and too reliant on traditional aerospace contractors.

Is this a priority for SpaceX?

The Starship rocket and its massive Super Heavy booster are supposed to be SpaceX’s solution for fulfilling Musk’s mission of creating a settlement on Mars. The red planet has been the focus each time Musk has spoken at length about Starship in the last couple of years, with Moon missions receiving little or no time in his comments, whether they’re scripted or off the cuff.

In the background, SpaceX’s engineers have been busy developing a version of the Starship rocket to fly crews to and from the surface of the Moon for NASA. The agency’s current architecture calls for astronauts to transit from the Earth to the vicinity of the Moon inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft, made by Lockheed Martin, then link up with Starship in lunar orbit for a ride to the Moon’s south pole.

After completing their mission on the surface, the astronauts will ride Starship back into space and dock with Orion to bring them home. Starship and Orion may also link together by docking at the planned Gateway mini-space station orbiting the Moon, but Gateway’s future is in question as NASA faces budget cuts.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX valued at more than $4 billion to land two astronaut crews on the Moon on NASA’s Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. The contract also covers milestones ahead of any human mission, such as an uncrewed Starship landing and takeoff at the Moon, to prove the vehicle is ready.

SpaceX’s Starship descends toward the Indian Ocean at the conclusion of Flight 11 on October 3. Credit: SpaceX

The fresh update from SpaceX lists recent achievements the company has accomplished on the path to the Moon, including demos of life support and thermal control systems, the docking adapter to link Starship with Orion, navigation hardware and software, a landing leg structural test, and engine firings in conditions similar to what the ship will see at the Moon.

Many of these milestones were completed ahead of schedule, SpaceX said. But the biggest tests, such as demonstrating in-orbit refueling, remain ahead. Some NASA officials believe mastering orbital refueling will take many tries, akin to SpaceX’s iterative two steps forward, one step back experience with its initial Starship test flights.

The first test to transfer large amounts of cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen between two Starships in low-Earth orbit is now planned for next year. This time a year ago, SpaceX aimed to launch the first orbital refueling demo before the end of 2025.

Orbital refueling is key to flying Starship to the Moon or Mars. The rocket consumes all of its propellant getting to low-Earth orbit, and it needs more gas to go farther. For lunar missions, SpaceX will launch a Starship-derived propellant depot into orbit, refill it with perhaps a dozen or more Starship tankers, and then dock the Starship lander with it to load its tanks before heading off to the Moon.

Officials haven’t given a precise number of tanker flights required for a Starship lunar lander. It’s likely engineers won’t settle on an exact number until they obtain data on how much of the super-cold liquid propellant boils off in space, and how efficient it is to transfer from ship to ship. Whatever the number, SpaceX says Starship’s design for recovery and rapid reuse will facilitate a fast-paced launch and refueling campaign.

SpaceX tests the elevator to be used on Starship. Credit: SpaceX

The upshot of overcoming the refueling hurdle is Starship’s promise of becoming a transformative vehicle. Starship is enormous compared to any other concept for landing on the Moon. One single Starship has a pressurized habitable volume of more than 600 cubic meters, or more than 21,000 cubic feet, roughly two-thirds that of the entire International Space Station, according to SpaceX. Starship will have dual airlocks, or pathways for astronauts and equipment to exit and enter the spacecraft.

An elevator will lower people and cargo down to the lunar surface from the crew cabin at the top of the 15-story-tall spacecraft. For pure cargo missions, SpaceX says Starship will be capable of landing up to 100 metric tons of cargo directly on the Moon’s surface. This would unlock the ability to deliver large rovers, nuclear reactors, or lunar habitats to the Moon in one go. In the long run, the Starship architecture could allow landers to be reused over and over again. All of this is vital if NASA wants to build a permanent base or research outpost on the Moon.

A competition in more ways than one

But hard things take time. SpaceX dealt with repeated setbacks in the first half of this year: three in-flight failures of Starship and one Starship explosion on the ground at the company’s development facility in South Texas. Since then, teams have reeled off consecutive successful Starship test flights ahead of the debut of an upgraded Starship variant called Version 3 in the coming months. Starship Version 3 will have the accoutrements for refueling, and SpaceX says this will also be the version to fly to the Moon.

The recent Starship delays, coupled with the scope of work to go, have raised concerns that the Artemis program is falling behind China’s initiative to land its own astronauts on the Moon. China’s goal is to do it by 2030, a schedule reiterated in Chinese state media this week. The Chinese program relies on an architecture more closely resembling NASA’s old Apollo designs.

The official schedule for the first Artemis crew landing, on Artemis III, puts it in 2027, but that timeline is no longer achievable. Starship and new lunar spacesuits developed by Axiom Space won’t be ready, in part because NASA didn’t award the contracts to SpaceX and Axiom until 2021 and 2022.

All of this adds up to waning odds that the United States can beat China back to the Moon, according to a growing chorus of voices in the space community. Last month, former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, who led the agency during the first Trump administration, told Congress the United States was likely to lose the second lunar space race.

At a space conference earlier this week, Bridenstine suggested the Trump administration use its powers to fast-track a lunar landing, even floating the idea of invoking the Defense Production Act, a law that grants the president authority to marshal industrial might to meet pressing national needs.

An executive order from President Donald Trump could authorize such an effort and declare a “national security imperative that we’re going to beat China to the Moon,” Bridenstine said at the American Astronautical Society’s von Braun Space Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

Charlie Bolden, NASA’s administrator under former President Barack Obama, also expressed doubts that NASA could land humans on the Moon before China, or by the end of Trump’s term in the White House. “Let’s be real, OK? Everybody in this room knows, to say we’re going to do it by the end of the term, or we’re going to do it before the Chinese, that doesn’t help industry.”

But Bolden said maybe it’s not so terrible if China lands people on the Moon before NASA can return with astronauts. “We may not make 2030, and that’s OK with me, as long as we get there in 2031 better than they are with what they have there.”

Sean Duffy, NASA’s acting administrator, doesn’t see it the same way. Duffy said last week he would give contractors until this Wednesday to propose other ways of landing astronauts on the Moon sooner than the existing plan. SpaceX and Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, confirmed they submitted updated plans to NASA this week.

SpaceX released a new rendering of the internal crew cabin for the Starship lunar lander. Credit: SpaceX

Blue Origin has a separate contract with NASA to provide its own human-rated lunar lander—Blue Moon Mark 2—for entry into service on the Artemis V mission, likely not to occur before the early 2030s. A smaller unpiloted lander—Blue Moon Mark 1—is on track to launch on Blue Origin’s first lunar landing attempt next year.

Blue Moon Mark 1 is still a big vehicle, standing taller than the lunar lander used by NASA during the Apollo program. But it doesn’t match the 52-foot (16-meter) height of Blue Origin’s Mark 2 lander, and tops out well short of the roughly 165-foot-tall (50-meter) Starship lander.

What’s more, Blue Moon Mark 1 won’t need to be refueled after launch, unlike Starship and Mark 2. Jacki Cortese, senior director of civil space at Blue Origin, confirmed Tuesday that her company is looking at employing a “more incremental approach” using Mark 1 to accelerate an Artemis crew landing. Ars first reported Blue Origin was studying how to modify Blue Moon Mark 1 for astronauts.

All of this is a reminder of something Blue Origin said in 2021, when NASA passed over Bezos’ company to award the first Artemis lander contract to SpaceX. Blue Origin protested the award and filed a lawsuit against the government, triggering a lunar lander work stoppage that lasted several months until a federal judge dismissed the suit.

Blue Origin said SpaceX’s approach with numerous refueling sorties was “immensely complex and high risk” and argued its proposal was the better option for NASA. The statement has taken on a meme-worthy status among fans of Starship.

But SpaceX bid a lower cost, and NASA officials said it was the only proposal the agency could afford at the time. And then, when Blue Origin won a contract from NASA in 2023 to provide a second lander option, the company’s concept also hinged on refueling the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander in space.

Now, SpaceX is making a new offering to NASA. Like Blue Origin, SpaceX said it has sent in a proposal for a “simplified architecture” for landing astronauts on the Moon, but did not provide details.

“We’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety,” the company said.

Since NASA selected SpaceX for the Human Landing System contract in 2021, the company said it has been “consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed.”

For example, NASA originally required SpaceX to only demonstrate it could land Starship on the Moon before moving forward with a crew mission. Lori Glaze, who leads NASA’s human exploration division, said in July that the agency is now requiring the uncrewed landing demo to also include an ascent from the Moon’s surface. NASA wants to know if Starship can not just land astronauts on the Moon, but also get them back.

“Starship continues to simultaneously be the fastest path to returning humans to the surface of the Moon and a core enabler of the Artemis program’s goal to establish a permanent, sustainable presence on the lunar surface,” SpaceX said. “SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible, approaching the mission with the same alacrity and commitment that returned human spaceflight capability to America under NASA’s Commercial Crew program.”

An artist’s illustration of multiple Starships on the lunar surface, with a Moon base in the background. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX has built a reputation for doing things quickly. One example has been the rapid-fire launch cadence of the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX is setting up launch pads and factories to manufacture and launch Super Heavy and Starship—combining together to make the largest rocket ever built—at an even faster rate than Falcon 9.

The company has launched 11 full-scale test flights of Starship/Super Heavy since April 2023. “This campaign has quickly matured the core Starship and has produced numerous feats,” SpaceX said. The company listed some of them:

Multiple successful ascents of the world’s most powerful rocket
The launch, return, catch, and reuse of that rocket to unlock the high launch rate cadence needed for lunar missions
The transfer of approximately 5 metric tons of cryogenic propellant between tanks while in space
Successful in-space relights of the Raptor engines that are critical for the maneuvers that will send Starship to the Moon
Multiple controlled reentries through Earth’s atmosphere

It’s true that these feats have come fast. Many more remain on the road ahead before SpaceX can make good on its commitment to NASA.

SpaceX teases simplified Starship as alarms sound over Moon landing delays Read More »

NASA’s next Moonship reaches last stop before launch pad

artemis, artemis II, human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center, launch, Lockheed Martin, moon, NASA, orion, Science, Space, space launch system, vehicle assembly building / Kris Guyer / October 17, 2025

The Orion spacecraft, which will fly four people around the Moon, arrived inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida late Thursday night, ready to be stacked on top of its rocket for launch early next year.

The late-night transfer covered about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from one facility to another at the Florida spaceport. NASA and its contractors are continuing preparations for the Artemis II mission after the White House approved the program as an exception to work through the ongoing government shutdown, which began on October 1.

The sustained work could set up Artemis II for a launch opportunity as soon as February 5 of next year. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will be the first humans to fly on the Orion spacecraft, a vehicle that has been in development for nearly two decades. The Artemis II crew will make history on their 10-day flight by becoming the first people to travel to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972.

Where things stand

The Orion spacecraft, developed by Lockheed Martin, has made several stops at Kennedy over the last few months since leaving its factory in May.

First, the capsule moved to a fueling facility, where technicians filled it with hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, which will feed Orion’s main engine and maneuvering thrusters on the flight to the Moon and back. In the same facility, teams loaded high-pressure helium and ammonia coolant into Orion propulsion and thermal control systems.

The next stop was a nearby building where the Launch Abort System was installed on the Orion spacecraft. The tower-like abort system would pull the capsule away from its rocket in the event of a launch failure. Orion stands roughly 67 feet (20 meters) tall with its service module, crew module, and abort tower integrated together.

Teams at Kennedy also installed four ogive panels to serve as an aerodynamic shield over the Orion crew capsule during the first few minutes of launch.

The Orion spacecraft, with its Launch Abort System and ogive panels installed, is seen last month inside the Launch Abort System Facility at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

It was then time to move Orion to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where a separate team has worked all year to stack the elements of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. In the coming days, cranes will lift the spacecraft, weighing 78,000 pounds (35 metric tons), dozens of stories above the VAB’s center aisle, then up and over the transom into the building’s northeast high bay to be lowered atop the SLS heavy-lift rocket.

NASA’s next Moonship reaches last stop before launch pad Read More »

Blue Origin aims to land next New Glenn booster, then reuse it for Moon mission

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“We fully intend to recover the New Glenn first stage on this next launch.”

New Glenn lifts off on its debut flight on January 16, 2025. Credit: Blue Origin

There’s a good bit riding on the second launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

Most directly, the fate of a NASA science mission to study Mars’ upper atmosphere hinges on a successful launch. The second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifter will send two NASA-funded satellites toward the red planet to study the processes that drove Mars’ evolution from a warmer, wetter world to the cold, dry planet of today.

A successful launch would also nudge Blue Origin closer to winning certification from the Space Force to begin launching national security satellites.

But there’s more on the line. If Blue Origin plans to launch its first robotic Moon lander early next year—as currently envisioned—the company needs to recover the New Glenn rocket’s first stage booster. Crews will again dispatch Blue Origin’s landing platform into the Atlantic Ocean, just as they did for the first New Glenn flight in January.

The debut launch of New Glenn successfully reached orbit, a difficult feat for the inaugural flight of any rocket. But the booster fell into the Atlantic Ocean after three of the rocket’s engines failed to reignite to slow down for landing. Engineers identified seven changes to resolve the problem, focusing on what Blue Origin calls “propellant management and engine bleed control improvements.”

Relying on reuse

Pat Remias, Blue Origin’s vice president of space systems development, said Thursday that the company is confident in nailing the landing on the second flight of New Glenn. That launch, with NASA’s next set of Mars probes, is likely to occur no earlier than November from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

“We fully intend to recover the New Glenn first stage on this next launch,” Remias said in a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. “Fully intend to do it.”

Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, nicknamed the booster stage for the next flight “Never Tell Me The Odds.” It’s not quite fair to say the company’s leadership has gone all-in with their bet that the next launch will result in a successful booster landing. But the difference between a smooth touchdown and another crash landing will have a significant effect on Bezos’ Moon program.

That’s because the third New Glenn launch, penciled in for no earlier than January of next year, will reuse the same booster flown on the upcoming second flight. The payload on that launch will be Blue Origin’s first Blue Moon lander, aiming to become the largest spacecraft to reach the lunar surface. Ars has published a lengthy feature on the Blue Moon lander’s role in NASA’s effort to return astronauts to the Moon.

“We will use that first stage on the next New Glenn launch,” Remias said. “That is the intent. We’re pretty confident this time. We knew it was going to be a long shot [to land the booster] on the first launch.”

A long shot, indeed. It took SpaceX 20 launches of its Falcon 9 rocket over five years before pulling off the first landing of a booster. It was another 15 months before SpaceX launched a previously flown Falcon 9 booster for the first time.

With New Glenn, Blue’s engineers hope to drastically shorten the learning curve. Going into the second launch, the company’s managers anticipate refurbishing the first recovered New Glenn booster to launch again within 90 days. That would be a remarkable accomplishment.

Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, wrote earlier this year on social media that recovering the booster on the second New Glenn flight will “take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution.”

On September 26, Blue Origin shared this photo of the second New Glenn booster on social media.

Blue Origin’s production of second stages for the New Glenn rocket has far outpaced manufacturing of booster stages. The second stage for the second flight was test-fired in April, and Blue completed a similar static-fire test for the third second stage in August. Meanwhile, according to a social media post written by Limp last week, the body of the second New Glenn booster is assembled, and installation of its seven BE-4 engines is “well underway” at the company’s rocket factory in Florida.

The lagging production of New Glenn boosters, known as GS1s (Glenn Stage 1s), is partly by design. Blue Origin’s strategy with New Glenn has been to build a small number of GS1s, each of which is more expensive and labor-intensive than SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This approach counts on routine recoveries and rapid refurbishment of boosters between missions.

However, this strategy comes with risks, as it puts the booster landings in the critical path for ramping up New Glenn’s launch rate. At one time, Blue aimed to launch eight New Glenn flights this year; it will probably end the year with two.

Laura Maginnis, Blue Origin’s vice president of New Glenn mission management, said last month that the company was building a fleet of “several boosters” and had eight upper stages in storage. That would bode well for a quick ramp-up in launch cadence next year.

However, Blue’s engineers haven’t had a chance to inspect or test a recovered New Glenn booster. Even if the next launch concludes with a successful landing, the rocket could come back to Earth with some surprises. SpaceX’s initial development of Falcon 9 and Starship was richer in hardware, with many boosters in production to decouple successful landings from forward progress.

Blue Moon

All of this means a lot is riding on an on-target landing of the New Glenn booster on the next flight. Separate from Blue Origin’s ambitions to fly many more New Glenn rockets next year, a good recovery would also mean an earlier demonstration of the company’s first lunar lander.

The lander set to launch on the third New Glenn mission is known as Blue Moon Mark 1, an unpiloted vehicle designed to robotically deliver up to 3 metric tons (about 6,600 pounds) of cargo to the lunar surface. The spacecraft will have a height of about 26 feet (8 meters), taller than the lunar lander used for NASA’s Apollo astronaut missions.

The first Blue Moon Mark 1 is funded from Blue Origin’s coffers. It is now fully assembled and will soon ship to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for vacuum chamber testing. Then, it will travel to Florida’s Space Coast for final launch preparations.

“We are building a series, not a singular lander, but multiple types and sizes and scales of landers to go to the Moon,” Remias said.

The second Mark 1 lander will carry NASA’s VIPER rover to prospect for water ice at the Moon’s south pole in late 2027. Around the same time, Blue will use a Mark 1 lander to deploy two small satellites to orbit the Moon, flying as low as a few miles above the surface to scout for resources like water, precious metals, rare Earth elements, and helium-3 that could be extracted and exploited by future explorers.

A larger lander, Blue Moon Mark 2, is in an earlier stage of development. It will be human-rated to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis program.

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. Credit: Blue Origin

NASA’s other crew-rated lander will be derived from SpaceX’s Starship rocket. But Starship and Blue Moon Mark 2 are years away from being ready to accommodate a human crew, and both require orbital cryogenic refueling—something never before attempted in space—to transit out to the Moon.

This has led to a bit of a dilemma at NASA. China is also working on a lunar program, eyeing a crew landing on the Moon by 2030. Many experts say that, as of today, China is on pace to land astronauts on the Moon before the United States.

Of course, 12 US astronauts walked on the Moon in the Apollo program. But no one has gone back since 1972, and NASA and China are each planning to return to the Moon to stay.

One way to speed up a US landing on the Moon might be to use a modified version of Blue Origin’s Mark 1 lander, Ars reported Thursday.

If this is the path NASA takes, the stakes for the next New Glenn launch and landing will soar even higher.

Blue Origin aims to land next New Glenn booster, then reuse it for Moon mission Read More »

Rocket Report: Keeping up with Kuiper; New Glenn’s second flight slips

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Amazon plans to conduct two launches of Kuiper broadband satellites just days apart.

An unarmed Trident II D5 Life Extension (D5LE) missile launches from an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine off the coast of Florida. Credit: US Navy

Welcome to Edition 8.12 of the Rocket Report! We often hear from satellite operators—from the military to venture-backed startups—about their appetite for more launch capacity. With so many rocket launches happening around the world, some might want to dismiss these statements as a corporate plea for more competition, and therefore lower prices. SpaceX is on pace to launch more than 150 times this year. China could end the year with more than 70 orbital launches. These are staggering numbers compared to global launch rates just a few years ago. But I’m convinced there’s room for more alternatives for reliable (and reusable) rockets. All of the world’s planned mega-constellations will need immense launch capacity just to get off the ground, and if successful, they’ll go into regular replacement and replenishment cycles. Throw in the still-undefined Golden Dome missile shield and many nations’ desire for a sovereign launch capability, and it’s easy to see the demand curve going up.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Sharp words from Astra’s Chris Kemp. Chris Kemp, the chief executive officer of Astra, apparently didn’t get the memo about playing nice with his competitors in the launch business. Kemp made some spicy remarks at the Berkeley Space Symposium 2025 earlier this month, billed as the largest undergraduate aerospace event at the university (see video of the talk). During the speech, Kemp periodically deviated from building up Astra to hurling insults at several of his competitors in the launch industry, Ars reports. To be fair to Kemp, some of his criticisms are not without a kernel of truth. But they are uncharacteristically rough all the same, especially given Astra’s uneven-at-best launch record and financial solvency to date.

Wait, what?! … Kemp is generally laudatory in his comments about SpaceX, but his most crass statement took aim at the quality of life of SpaceX employees at Starbase, Texas. He said life at Astra is “more fun than SpaceX because we’re not on the border of Mexico where they’ll chop your head off if you accidentally take a left turn.” For the record, no SpaceX employees have been beheaded. “And you don’t have to live in a trailer. And we don’t make you work six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day.” Kemp also accused Firefly Aerospace of sending Astra “garbage” rocket engines as part of the companies’ partnership on propulsion for Astra’s next-generation rocket.

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A step forward for Europe’s reusable rocket program. No one could accuse the European Space Agency and its various contractors of moving swiftly when it comes to the development of reusable rockets. However, it appears that Europe is finally making some credible progress, Ars reports. Last week, the France-based ArianeGroup aerospace company announced that it completed the integration of the Themis vehicle, a prototype rocket that will test various landing technologies, on a launch pad in Sweden. Low-altitude hop tests, a precursor for developing a rocket’s first stage that can vertically land after an orbital launch, could start late this year or early next.

Hopping into the future … “This milestone marks the beginning of the ‘combined tests,’ during which the interface between Themis and the launch pad’s mechanical, electrical, and fluid systems will be thoroughly trialed, with the aim of completing a test under cryogenic conditions,” ArianeGroup said. This particular rocket will likely undergo only short hops, initially about 100 meters. A follow-up vehicle, Themis T1E, is intended to fly medium-altitude tests at a later date. Some of the learnings from these prototypes will feed into a smaller, reusable rocket intended to lift 500 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. This is under development by MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of ArianeGroup. Eventually, the European Space Agency would like to use technology developed as part of Themis to develop a new line of reusable rockets that will succeed the Ariane 6 rocket.

Navy conducts Trident missile drills. The US Navy carried out four scheduled missile tests of a nuclear-capable weapons system off the coast of Florida within the last week, Defense News reports. The service’s Strategic Systems Programs conducted flights of unarmed Trident II D5 Life Extension missiles from a submerged Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine from September 17 to September 21 as part of an ongoing scheduled event meant to test the reliability of the system. “The missile tests were not conducted in response to any ongoing world events,” a Navy release said.

Secret with high visibility … The Navy periodically performs these Trident missile tests off the coasts of Florida and California, taking advantage of support infrastructure and range support from the two busiest US spaceports. The military doesn’t announce the exact timing of the tests, but warnings issued for pilots to stay out of the area give a general idea of when they might occur. One of the launch events Sunday was visible from Puerto Rico, illuminating the night sky in photos published on social media. The missiles fell in the Atlantic Ocean as intended, the Navy said. The Trident II D5 missiles were developed in the 1980s and are expected to remain in service on the Navy’s ballistic missile submarines into the 2040s. The Trident system is one leg of the US military’s nuclear triad, alongside land-based Minuteman ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable strategic bombers. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Firefly plans for Alpha’s return to flight. Firefly Aerospace expects to resume Alpha launches in the “coming weeks,” with two flights planned before the end of the year, Space News reports. These will be the first flights of Firefly’s one-ton-class Alpha rocket since a failure in April destroyed a Lockheed Martin tech demo satellite after liftoff from California. In a quarterly earnings call, Firefly shared a photo showing its next two Alpha rockets awaiting shipment from the company’s Texas factory.

Righting the ship … These next two launches really need to go well for Firefly. The Alpha rocket has, at best, a mixed record with only two fully successful flights in six attempts. Two other missions put their payloads into off-target orbits, and two Alpha launches failed to reach orbit at all. Firefly went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange last month, raising nearly $900 million in the initial public offering to help fund the company’s future programs, namely the medium-lift Eclipse rocket developed in partnership with Northrop Grumman. There’s a lot to like about Firefly. The company achieved the first fully successful landing of a commercial spacecraft on the Moon in March. NASA has selected Firefly for three more commercial landings on the Moon, and Firefly reported this week it has an agreement with an unnamed commercial customer for an additional dedicated mission. But the Alpha program hasn’t had the same level of success. We’ll see if Firefly can get the rocket on track soon. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Avio wins contract to launch “extra-European” mission. Italian rocket builder Avio has signed a launch services agreement with US-based launch aggregator SpaceLaunch for a Vega C launch carrying an Earth observation satellite for an “extra-European institutional customer” in 2027, European Spaceflight reports. Avio announced that it had secured the launch contract on September 18. According to the company, the contract was awarded through an open international competition, with Vega C chosen for its “versatility and cost-effectiveness.” While Avio did not reveal the identity of the “extra-European” customer, it said that it would do so later this year.

Plenty of peculiarities … There are several questions to unpack here, and Andrew Parsonson of European Spaceflight goes through them all. Presumably, extra-European means the customer is based outside of Europe. Avio’s statement suggests we’ll find out the answer to that question soon. Details about the US-based launch broker SpaceLaunch are harder to find. SpaceLaunch appears to have been founded in January 2025 by two former Firefly Aerospace employees with a combined 40 years of experience in the industry. On its website, the company claims to provide end-to-end satellite launch integration, mission management, and launch procurement services with a “portfolio of launch vehicle capacity around the globe.” SpaceLaunch boasts it has supported the launch of more than 150 satellites on 12 different launch vehicles. However, according to public records, it does not appear that the company itself has supported a single launch. Instead, the claim seems to credit SpaceLaunch with launches that were actually carried out during the two founders’ previous tenures at Spaceflight, Firefly Aerospace, Northrop Grumman, and the US Air Force. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon 9 launches three missions for NASA and NOAA. Scientists loaded three missions worth nearly $1.6 billion on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for launch Wednesday, toward an orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, to measure the supersonic stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun, Ars reports. One of the missions, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will beam back real-time observations of the solar wind to provide advance warning of geomagnetic storms that could affect power grids, radio communications, GPS navigation, air travel, and satellite operations. The other two missions come from NASA, with research objectives that include studying the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space and observing the rarely seen outermost layer of our own planet’s atmosphere.

Immense value … All three spacecraft will operate in orbit around the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitational balance point located more than 900,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. Bundling these three missions onto the same rocket saved at least tens of millions of dollars in launch costs. Normally, they would have needed three different rockets. Rideshare missions to low-Earth orbit are becoming more common, but spacecraft departing for more distant destinations like the L1 Lagrange point are rare. Getting all three missions on the same launch required extensive planning, a stroke of luck, and fortuitous timing. “This is the ultimate cosmic carpool,” said Joe Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division. “These three missions heading out to the Sun-Earth L1 point riding along together provide immense value for the American taxpayer.”

US officials concerned about China mastering reusable launch. SpaceX’s dominance in reusable rocketry is one of the most important advantages the United States has over China as competition between the two nations extends into space, US Space Force officials said Monday. But several Chinese companies are getting close to fielding their own reusable rockets, Ars reports. “It’s concerning how fast they’re going,” said Brig. Gen. Brian Sidari, the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for intelligence. “I’m concerned about when the Chinese figure out how to do reusable lift that allows them to put more capability on orbit at a quicker cadence than currently exists.”

By the numbers … China has used 14 different types of rockets on its 56 orbital-class missions this year, and none have flown more than 11 times. Eight US rocket types have cumulatively flown 145 times, with 122 of those using SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9. Without a reusable rocket, China must maintain more rocket companies to sustain a launch rate of just one-third to one-half that of the United States. This contrasts with the situation just four years ago, when China outpaced the United States in orbital rocket launches. The growth in US launches has been a direct result of SpaceX’s improvements to launch at a higher rate, an achievement primarily driven by the recovery and reuse of Falcon 9 boosters and payload fairings.

Atlas V launches more Kuiper satellites. Roughly an hour past sunrise on Thursday, an Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance took flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Onboard the rocket, flying in its most powerful configuration, were the next 27 Project Kuiper broadband satellites from Amazon, Spaceflight Now reports. This is the third batch of production satellites launched by ULA and the fifth overall for the growing low-Earth orbit constellation. The Atlas V rocket released the 27 Kuiper satellites about 280 miles (450 kilometers) above Earth. The satellites will use onboard propulsion to boost themselves to their assigned orbit at 392 miles (630 kilometers).

Another Kuiper launch on tap … With this deployment, Amazon now has 129 satellites in orbit. This is a small fraction of the network’s planned total of 3,232 satellites, but Amazon has enjoyed a steep ramp-up in the Kuiper launch cadence as the company’s satellite assembly line in Kirkland, Washington, continues churning out spacecraft. Another 24 Kuiper satellites are slated to launch September 30 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and Amazon has delivered enough satellites to Florida for an additional launch later this fall. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

German military will fly with Ariane 6. Airbus Defense and Space has awarded Arianespace a contract to launch a pair of SATCOMBw-3 communications satellites for the German Armed Forces, European Spaceflight reports. Airbus is the prime contractor for the nearly $2.5 billion (2.1 billion euro) SATCOMBw-3 program, which will take over from the two-satellite SATCOMBw-2 constellation currently providing secure communications for the German military. Arianespace announced Wednesday that it had been awarded the contract to launch the satellites aboard two Ariane 6 rockets. “By signing this new strategic contract for the German Armed Forces, Arianespace accomplishes its core mission of guaranteeing autonomous access to space for European sovereign satellites,” said Arianespace CEO David Cavaillolès.

Running home to Europe … The chief goal of the Ariane 6 program is to provide Europe with independent access to space, something many European governments see as a strategic requirement. Several European military, national security, and scientific satellites have launched on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets in the last few years as officials waited for the debut of the Ariane 6 rocket. With three successful Ariane 6 flights now in the books, European customers seem to now have the confidence to commit to flying their satellites on Ariane 6. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Artemis II launch targeted for February. NASA is pressing ahead with preparations for the first launch of humans beyond low-Earth orbit in more than five decades, and officials said Tuesday that the Artemis II mission could take flight early next year, Ars reports. Although work remains to be done, the space agency is now pushing toward a launch window that opens on February 5, 2026, officials said during a news conference on Tuesday at Johnson Space Center. The Artemis II mission represents a major step forward for NASA and seeks to send four astronauts—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—around the Moon and back. The 10-day mission will be the first time astronauts have left low-Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

Orion named Integrity … The first astronauts set to fly to the Moon in more than 50 years will do so in Integrity, Ars reports. NASA’s Artemis II crew revealed Integrity as the name of their Orion spacecraft during a news conference on Wednesday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We thought, as a crew, we need to name this spacecraft. We need to have a name for the Orion spacecraft that we’re going to ride this magical mission on,” said Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission.

FAA reveals new Starship trajectories. Sometime soon, perhaps next year, SpaceX will attempt to fly one of its enormous Starship rockets from low-Earth orbit back to its launch pad in South Texas. A successful return and catch at the launch tower would demonstrate a key capability underpinning Elon Musk’s hopes for a fully reusable rocket. For this to happen, SpaceX must overcome the tyranny of geography. A new document released by the Federal Aviation Administration shows the narrow corridors Starship will fly to space and back when SpaceX tries to recover them, Ars reports.

Flying over people … It was always evident that flying a Starship from low-Earth orbit back to Starbase would require the rocket to fly over Mexico and portions of South Texas. The rocket launches to the east over the Gulf of Mexico, so it must approach Starbase from the west when it comes in for a landing. The new maps show SpaceX will launch Starships to the southeast over the Gulf and the Caribbean Sea, and directly over Jamaica, or to the northeast over the Gulf and the Florida peninsula. On reentry, the ship will fly over Baja California and Mexico’s interior near the cities of Hermosillo and Chihuahua, each with a population of roughly a million people. The trajectory would bring Starship well north of the Monterrey metro area and its 5.3 million residents, then over the Rio Grande Valley near the Texas cities of McAllen and Brownsville.

New Glenn’s second flight at least a month away. The second launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, carrying a NASA smallsat mission to Mars, is now expected in late October or early November, Space News reports. Tim Dunn, NASA’s senior launch director at Kennedy Space Center, provided an updated schedule for the second flight of New Glenn in comments after a NASA-sponsored launch on a Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday. Previously, the official schedule from NASA showed the launch date as no earlier than September 29.

No surprise … It was already apparent that this launch wouldn’t happen on September 29. Blue Origin has test-fired the second stage for the upcoming flight of the New Glenn rocket but hasn’t rolled the first stage to the launch pad for its static fire. Seeing the rocket emerge from Blue’s factory in Florida will be an indication that the launch date is finally near. Blue Origin will launch NASA’s ESCAPADE mission, a pair of small satellites to study how the solar wind interacts with the Martian upper atmosphere.

Blue Origin will launch a NASA rover to the Moon. NASA has awarded Blue Origin a task order worth up to $190 million to deliver its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the Moon’s surface, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Blue Origin, one of 13 currently active Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) providers, submitted the only bid to carry VIPER to the Moon after NASA requested offers from industry last month. NASA canceled the VIPER mission last year, citing cost overruns with the rover and delays in its planned ride to the Moon aboard a lander provided by Astrobotic. But engineers had already completed assembly of the rover, and scientists protested NASA’s decision to terminate the mission.

Some caveats … Blue Origin will deliver VIPER to a location near the Moon’s south pole in late 2027 using a robotic Blue Moon MK1 lander, a massive craft larger than the Apollo lunar landing module. The company’s first Blue Moon MK1 lander is scheduled to fly to the Moon next year. NASA’s contract for the VIPER delivery calls for Blue Origin to design accommodations for the rover on the Blue Moon lander. The agency said it will decide whether to proceed with the actual launch on a New Glenn rocket and delivery of VIPER to the Moon based partially on the outcome of the first Blue Moon test flight next year.

Next three launches

Sept. 26: Long March 4C | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 19: 20 UTC

Sept. 27: Long March 6A | Unknown Payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 12: 39 UTC

Sept. 28: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 23: 32 UTC

Rocket Report: Keeping up with Kuiper; New Glenn’s second flight slips Read More »

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

clps, ispace, Japan, JAXA, moon, Science, Space / Kris Guyer / June 7, 2025

“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.

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