2025 will be another great year for commercial moon missions

As soon as the end of February, a lunar landing will depart from the NASA Kennedy Space Center on its way to the Moon that carries instruments that could investigate what is just below the surface. Just two months in the year, it will be the third mission that undertook a trip to the Moon until now in 2025. If it were 2024, 2025 is the year of duplicating. Well, unless Trump And change the focus to Mars under the direction of Elon Musk, pulling the entire timeline. But as it is, it should be an occupied year for the moon.

Last year he began with the launch of Peregrine Lander of Astrobotics, which marked the first of several missions led by companies that work under multimillion -dollar contracts as part of the NASA Lunar Useful Cargo Services Program (CLP) of the NASA. Finally, after suffering a propellant leak after the launch, but only a few weeks later, intuitive machines were launched and on the moon, the first for a private spacecraft. (Odysseus, but their useful loads could still collect and transmit some data).

Now, progressing quickly until this year, and NASA has half a dozen Clps missions at its time. The first one, Mission 1 of Ghost Ghost of Firefly Aerospace, was launched on January 15 in a Spacex Falcon 9. That same rocket also carried a lunar landing made by the Japanese company Ispace, which is making an effort, Hakuto -R.

The Firefly land, Blue Ghost, is expected to arrive first to the moon, with an target landing date of March 2 in an area called Mare Crisium. The spacecraft with solar energy 6.6 feet high carries 10 science loads for NASA and other partners. That includes a new dust protection system to demonstrate how future missions could prevent particles from accumulating in spacecraft, instruments to test sampling and navigation based on the global navigation system (GNSS) and a tolerant computer to radiation. “The objectives of the mission are to investigate the heat flow of the lunar interior, the interactions of the pen surface, (y) electric and magnetic cortical fields,” according to NASA. “It will also take X -ray images of the Earth’s magnetosphere.”

Resilience, the scary of the ISPACE, is taking a different and low energy energy And it will not reach its place, Mare Frigoris, until the end of May or June. That craft has a micro rover called Tenacious on board that is designed to explore, collect surface material and retransmission data. In addition to a camera and a shovel, Tenacious has a small mounted model house, specifically the ““By Swedish artist Mikael Genberg. The landing module carries water electrolyzed equipment, a deep space radiation probe and a food production experiment module (and how we could forget, it also contains a commemorative alloy plate of the Bandai Namco Research Institute carried out in the style of the “Charter of the Universal Century” of the Gundam franchise).

ISPACIO

Intuitive Machines, the company that achieved the first commercial Luna landing with its Odysseus Craft last year, is scheduled to launch its second Clps mission in next month or so, at the end of February. The same Nova-C Lander called Athena is directed to the South Lunar Pole with a long subway drill and a mass spectrometer for the Ice mining experiment of NASA-1 polar resources (Prime-1). Its objective is to demonstrate the viability of drilling samples and analyzing those samples on the site for things like water. It will also serve as a shared trip for NASA’s lunar pioneer, a small orbiter that “will study the shape, abundance and distribution of lunar water and its relationship with geology.”

In addition to the Prime-1 instruments, Athena will transport a laser retrrorflector matrix, an intuitive machines micro-novas hopper, described as “a propulsive drone that unfolds from a nova-C landing and jumps through the lunar surface “, and a lunar surface communication system” network in a box “made by Nokia. The two companies plan to establish the first moon cell network, which is “designed to handle the surface connectivity between landing and vehicles, transporting high -definition video transmission, command communications and control and telemetry data.”

Intuitive machines

There is the possibility that Blue Moon Mark 1’s lunar wool from Blue Origin took his first trip to the moon as soon as this spring or summer. John Couluris, senior vice president in Blue Origin, said in an interview with Last March, “we hope to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months as of today.” At that time, the company had not yet launched its new Glenn Rocket, which would be the vehicle for this mission, even once, so that statement did not have much weight. But after many, many delays, in mid -January.

NASA revealed, in a presentation of the FCC stained by In August, which had selected Blue Origin’s landing to bring a camera system, stereo cameras for lunar plume surface studies (spoiled leather horns), to the southern pole of the moon this year under the Clps program. In the presentation, NASA points out that this must be done before it ends before 2025, since the data collected by the instrument in Landing will help inform the plans for the first landing of the Moon of Artemis. The useful loads of the SCALPSs have flown in other Clps missions, but the thrust level of the Blue Origin Lander 1 is closer to the scale of the human landing system It will be used for astronauts.

Blue Origin said in another The same month as its demonstration lunar mission, Pathfinder, could be launched since March 2025, Espacenews reported. Don’t be surprised if it really happens much later.

It is not expected that the next mission of CLPS takes off until the fall, when Astrobotic will have another chance to land on the moon. This time, he will send his froster of bigger Griffin to a region near the South Pole. Initially, Griffin Mission 1 was supposed to transport the NASA volatiles that investigate the Polar Exploration Rover (Viper), but of that project at the end of last year due to delays and growing costs. However, Astrobotic’s landing will not appear on the moon with empty hands. It will have a small cuberver with solar energy in tow, as well as a laser retrror lounge matrix to identify the landing location.

Astrobotic

We can see a third mission of intuitive machines before the end of this year. The company and NASA are observing at the end of 2025 or early 2026 for the launch of IM-3, which will deliver a set of instruments focused on study Mini-Magnetasfera. The Laser Laser Retréctor of the European Space Agency will also fly with IM-3, together with and the Environment Monitor of the Lunar Space, of the Institute of Astronomy Sciences and South Korean Korea space (Kasi).

While this year will surely bring a lot of activity on the moon and around the moon, we will not see there: humans. NASA has adjusted the timeline of Artemis missions several times since the announcement of the program, and In December that the first crew flight is pushing, Artemis II, as of April 2026. The agency said previously that it was shooting by September 2025. Artemisa III, the mission in which two astronauts will go to the lunar surface, now not Wait for them to launch until mid -2027.

This article originally appeared in Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/2025-is-ing-to-be-another-big-for-commercial-moon-mssions-160038622.html?src = RSS
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