• On February 25, NASA rolled back the SLS rocket and its attached Orion spacecraft from the vehicle’s launchpad at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to its assembly building about seven kilometers away. Technicians then replaced a dislodged seal in a fueling interface of the rocket’s upper stage to fix the helium flow issue encountered last month. Ahead of the impending launch of the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back, teams were to also replace batteries across the vehicle, service its flight termination system, and replace a seal on the rocket’s core stage liquid oxygen line feed system. On March 12, NASA completed the Artemis II Flight Readiness Review, which polled positive to target launching the mission in the first week of April. NASA is targeting March 19 to roll the SLS to its launchpad.
• NASA’s plans to fully rejig Artemis, including canceling the SLS rocket’s upper stage upgrade & new pad, is getting support from the US Senate. If the US House agrees, such a bill can pass and make the rejig fully formal. Moreover, a notice on sam.gov published on March 6 states that the new standardized upper stage for the SLS rocket, to replace the previously planned upgraded one, will be based on the potent Centaur V stage used on ULA’s Vulcan rocket. From the notice:

NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA) in accordance with FAR 6.103-1(c), Only One Responsible Source and No Other Supplies or Services Will Satisfy Agency Requirements due to the highly specialized nature of this requirement. A determination by the Government not to compete this acquisition on a full and open competition basis is solely within the discretion of the Government.

• In the meanwhile, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which formally functions as an agency watchdog, released a scathing report on March 10 pointing out the various shortcomings and risks in the crewed lunar landing systems being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin for NASA Artemis. Marcia Smith has provided the best rundown of the report which captures all major issues, from both landers facing developmental delays and targeting insufficient robotic landing demonstrations prior to carrying crew to Lunar Starship’s crew risks with autonomous navigation, stability during touchdown, and its elevator. This was the first time any such low-level details about the in-development Artemis landers were made public.

• Jack Congram reported that following China’s in-flight abort test of its next-generation astronaut capsule last month, CASC has revealed that the capsule used for that flight was the same one used in the prior launchpad escape and air drop tests. In fact, the capsule will continue to be further tested in the sea, such as examining how it floats in an unassisted manner, which is an indicator of how well it can protect future lunar taikonauts awaiting to be rescued post splashdown on Earth. Congram also reports that lunar taikonauts will be chosen from among those with prior experience at China’s Tiangong Space Station.
• Adithya Kothandhapani’s article “Mars gets a network, the Moon gets a market” notes how the patchwork of political solutions by the US in planning lunar communications and navigation infrastructure at the Moon contrasts against the necessity-first, engineering-driven approach NASA adopted at Mars—and which China has taken at Luna too.

We can build cities on the Moon—but who will govern them?

Amid a global lunar rush, will we land peaceful norms alongside our spacecraft?

Last month SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk flipped their stance on the Moon from treating it as a distraction to positioning it as central to their idea of preserving our civilization—after more than two decades of emphasizing Mars as the primary destination . The stated rationale for change and the catalyst involves building a Moonbase and a self-growing city within 10 years that can power lunar factories and launch orbital AI data centers, the latter part being the backdrop to SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI.

Even though elements of these visions remain speculative, such ambitious announcements carry real repercussions on lunar governance and global policy. SpaceX’s move is neither self-driven nor made in isolation. Last year when the US saw China’s steady strides towards landing humans on the Moon by 2030, the American government sought to accelerate its delayed Artemis efforts in hopes to land astronauts before China. NASA reopened the Artemis III landing contract to accelerate it. Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin bid for it and also decided to pause the company’s other internal projects to focus most resources and efforts on the Moon. Industry momentum toward the Moon is part of a broader global trajectory, and is now being accelerated.

The last ten years have seen a global interest in lunar exploration, with multiple countries sending diverse missions. Many more are in the pipeline, with the majority of them converging at the water-hosting lunar south pole and in low lunar polar orbit. Continued mission successes by China and renewed focus from the US & its partners will likely accelerate activity further. The economic and scientific implications of any sustained lunar infrastructure could be immense. Regardless of the near-term feasibility, just the fact that public commitments of large scale lunar development are being made by players with theoretical capacities to reach the Moon in substantial forms is enough to affect and alter international policy and regulatory landscapes on Earth. Amid such heated competition and accelerating timelines of humanity’s future, early precedents—such as how actors share information, access resources, understand land usage and rights, and regulate infrastructure—could shape global lunar activity for decades to come. These practices could either enable broad participation or gate future access. It could also gravely affect fundamental lunar science in the process, which is also tied to understanding the Solar System itself. How do we manage such activity?

To counter the many consequences of unilaterally-led large-scale lunar activities by any party, peaceful governance norms and practical coordination mechanisms must develop alongside technological progress. The US has historically favored de facto practices over multilateral agreement in space. Norms set by the US or its partners through the Artemis Accords but not via other, more international means thus would not apply to non-signatories like China. Vice versa is also true. In such low-trust environments, it’s critical that operating parties share minimum viable information and coordinate their activities through the UN and complementary neutral platforms to avoid operational overlaps and disputes over lunar areas and its resources.

Middle space powers including India and Japan can play crucial swing roles by intentionally shaping norms through their capabilities and partnerships. Two such upcoming missions have exactly such potential: India’s Chandrayaan 4 sample return and the joint ISRO-JAXA LUPEX rover, both heading to the lunar south pole. In such ways, we can begin to place mutually beneficial governance frameworks early enough, gradually building trust through transparency for a peaceful future in our skies.

The Moon is an object of hope for cultures all around the world. Retaining that shared meaning requires that lunar governance evolves alongside technological progress.

This section was originally published on The Space Review, authored by myself and Rachel Williams of the Open Lunar Foundation, a Moon Monday sponsor.

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Joe Palca of NPR has reported that the NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft, which was lost shortly after its February 2025 launch, failed because its solar panels were pointing perfectly away from the Sun. This chiefly happened because a) the spacecraft vendor Lockheed Martin did not properly test the craft’s pointing software pre-launch and b) the 180° pointing couldn’t be corrected by Trailblazer’s computer due to a host of distinct onboard software issues in managing faults. These resulted in loss of power and permanent communications loss. The failure analysis report also highlights issues with the lunar orbiter’s mission planning and operations design as considerable contributors to the failure.

The $72 million Trailblazer spacecraft was supposed to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global orbital maps of the amount, distribution, and state of lunar water. Having this geologic context is necessary to effectively plan, conduct, and interpret future lunar water studies from the surface. Understanding lunar water so as to access it is a key goal of the Artemis program, which the US has been repeatedly failing to achieve.

Now one must consider that Trailblazer was designed as part of NASA’s SIMPLEx program, which specifically funds missions to advance the agency’s planetary science goals on low budgets, thereby accepting greater risks than typical NASA missions. Having said that, Trailblazer did go through a NASA continuation/termination review during its development and cleared it. The review had gotten triggered due to engineering cost overruns by Lockheed Martin, which ended up crossing NASA’s $55 million budget cap for SIMPLEX missions. At the end, Trailblazer’s performance issues clearly persisted despite added costs for better engineering.

Coupled with the mission’s outsized scientific importance, which the mission’s science & web teams explained brilliantly pre-launch, definitely file the panel pointing mistake and software oversights under space missions lost to human errors and mistakes to avoid in our grand return to the Moon.

Disappointingly, NASA did not provide this update on the taxpayer-funded mission’s failure analysis findings through its website and associated official public & press channels. This is an oddity for the agency. Even NASA’s Trailblazer blog and mission lead Caltech’s Trailblazer blog did not provide said update. If one engages people pre-launch and expects them to cheer you on, one should also expect people to want to stay engaged post-anomalies. Instead, NASA only provided the failure analysis report to NPR when the latter filed a legal Freedom of Information Act request.

It’s possible that the lack of official updates may be inadvertently stemming from the swath of operational changes at NASA last year by the new Trump administration. But it’s been over six months now since the August 26, 2025 date stamped on the failure analysis report. And there’s also the fact of NPR noting in its story that “neither Lockheed Martin nor NASA would provide a spokesperson” for commenting on the matter, which is February this year, and with a formal administrator, Jared Isaacman, who has repeatedly expressed calls for transparency at NASA. The situation gets disappointing further still because no one in the US or Western media seems to have pointed out these lack of official updates on the failure findings as an issue in itself.

Unfortunately for fans and admirers of NASA worldwide, myself included, this is yet another area where NASA’s communications have faltered off late. Below are other such examples:

• Isaacman started calling the Artemis program “manned” despite NASA explicitly sending a woman to the Moon on Artemis II.
• NASA falsely claimed that it could select landing sites for future Artemis missions through Artemis II.
• The agency has made blanket statements about the world’s lacking lunar capabilities which ignore China’s existing capability and plans.
• NASA has called unsuccessful missions like Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 as successful, and hasn’t changed that stance even after acknowledging the practically identical outcome of IM-2 as not being a success.

Like many, I have grown up being immensely inspired by NASA. I hold great admiration for the many pioneering aspects of the agency, including its general high communications standard. I’m often found urging ISRO officials to follow NASA’s global lead in effectively communicating the science and technology of its civil space missions [pre-launch Trailblazer qualifies]. But with NASA dropping the ball on communications lately, this ideal reference falters. NASA’s aforementioned strays are concerning in the long run. Basing on ISRO’s stints to such opaque ends in dealing with mission failures, as but one example, there’s enough precedence in spaceflight history to show that it doesn’t take too much from hereon to set less-transparent tones as the new default expectation for updates on taxpayer-funded missions. Like people, every space agency has its issues. But NASA’s technical and science communications have demonstrated the highest bar for long periods. We should hold them to that standard. It’s also how other space agencies, companies, and organizations can see a live example to match, and even aspire to outperform later on.

Open access NASA, the best

• When NASA brought lunar samples from Apollo missions, the agency knew that scientists will be able to study them better in the future in new ways to answer new questions as technology advances. And so the agency kept some core sample tubes sealed and frozen for decades. In 2018, NASA formed the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program (ANGSA) initiative to examine these specially stored samples, particularly ones from Apollo 17. In 2022, a team of 90 scientists and engineers at ANGSA began the meticulous, months-long process of opening and studying such sample tubes one by one. Now the JGR Planets journal has published a special collection of papers on ANGSA-studied lunar samples. Many of these papers are published as “open access”. To pair, NASA has also made available laboratory-analysis datasets of ANGSA samples on a dedicated site.
• The Planetary Science Journal has also published a special paper collection, this one as “open access” research works on NASA’s VIPER rover’s science and engineering planning in the mission’s quest to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole.
• NASA has made more new datasets available from its ultra-sensitive ShadowCam imager aboard South Korea’s first lunar orbiter KPLO, bringing the latest observations available publicly to Q1 2025. ShadowCam has been capturing unique observations of permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s poles to help scientists & engineers plan future surface resource prospecting missions. A cool ASU web portal also lets you browse and search all public ShadowCam datasets in full-resolution.
• Relatedly, NASA has partnered with DLR for a project which is progressing through the development of an automated pipeline for generating high-resolution 3D terrain models of lunar sites imaged by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Once ready, this will accelerate mission planning and advanced geology studies.

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After years of the US government, American space companies & industry, NASA, and associated media raving about how the country’s Artemis program will be a sustained return of humans to the Moon by explicitly not being Apollo-style, and having repeatedly called China’s crewed lunar ambitions only Apollo-esque, NASA on February 27 announced an Artemis rejig which touts and takes an Apollo style approach to land humans on the Moon again. The changes are as follows:

• Artemis III will no longer be a crewed Moon landing mission. Instead, the SLS & Orion spacecraft will fly astronauts to Low Earth Orbit in 2027. There separately launched prototype lunar landing systems from SpaceX and/or Blue Origin will test docking with Orion, Apollo 9 style. Astronauts will then transfer over to the lander(s) to check life support systems. If possible, NASA would also like to test the Axiom Space provided lunar spacesuits onboard, including conducting a spacewalk if feasible. The delayed suit development is still undergoing critical design review as we speak.
• Artemis IV is now the earliest targeted crewed Moon landing, with NASA hoping for an early 2028 lunar touchdown. The next landing with Artemis V is being moved ahead with hope from 2030 to late 2028. The Artemis IV and V landers will be based on unspecified accelerated proposals from SpaceX and Blue Origin (or Blue and SpaceX). The companies provided these fast-tracked proposals after NASA reopened the Artemis III landing contract last year due to SpaceX’s slow progress with Lunar Starship as well as China’s faster pace in its own crewed landing goal.
• The SLS rocket’s upper stage’s planned upgrade targeted for use Artemis IV onward will get canceled. Said upgrade requires a new mobile launch pad for SLS, which has seen inflating costs and timelines due to poor management. It will get cancelled too. NASA wants to simplify the Artemis mission architecture on the SLS side by having a “standardized” upper stage for the rocket that performs similarly to the current one. With this move, NASA also hopes to improve the SLS’ launch rate from one every three years to yearly.

China, which clinched yet another timely milestone last month in its quest to land humans on Luna by 2030, is the key catalyst for these changes. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during the Artemis rejig:

With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays, and achieve our objectives.

The layers below

What’s notable but missed in most of the coverage is that NASA has effectively expanded the scope of the reopened Artemis III landing contract over to the revised Artemis III, IV, and V missions. Isaacman and NASA’s Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya have thus incentivized both SpaceX and Blue Origin to compete even more fiercely for landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon this decade. Remarkably, the agency leadership duo also seem to have managed to align the US Congress and NASA’s traditional prime contractors like Boeing in this new plan to fast-track the SLS rocket’s availability and streamline its operations. Isaacman says that for NASA to achieve this goal, it aims to hire the majority of its thousands of related contractors as agency employees instead. To fund these SLS improvements, NASA hopes to chiefly source the money from the supplementary ~$4 billion funding for SLS which the US Congress passed last year. These funds are separate from NASA’s annual budgets.

All that being said, here are things NASA has not yet shared but said in the announcement event it would later on, at unspecified times in the future:

• Details on the revised Artemis III mission and its exact objectives, and who its astronauts will be.
• What the accelerated crewed lunar lander proposals from SpaceX and Blue Origin actually look like, especially in the case of Starship where a sea of key milestones remain untouched.
• Specifics of the new, standardized SLS rocket upper stage, and how it will affect the planning, deployment, or existence of the upcoming US-led Gateway orbital habitat, which as originally planned needs the now-canceled SLS upper stage upgrade.

Add to this the aspect left unspecified at the event that we don’t even have firm launch targets for the uncrewed lunar landing demonstrations by either SpaceX or Blue Origin. Without such a demonstration, the respective lander cannot safely carry Artemis astronauts. Still, the overall development is welcome and long overdue. Simplifying mission objectives and the Artemis architecture as a whole is also exactly in line with what the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) recommended NASA in its 2025 report released just two days before the Artemis changes were announced. ASAP formally advises NASA and the US Congress on spaceflight safety. Marcia Smith captured the crux of ASAP’s 2025 report well:

Among other things, ASAP is concerned about the number of “firsts” needed for the mission to succeed. That includes the first operational use of the HLS [Human Landing System] version of SpaceX’s Starship, which requires in-space refueling, another first; first use of Axiom Space’s [lunar] spacesuits; first lunar landing since 1972 and the first ever at the lunar South Pole; first lunar ascent [for the US] since 1972 and the first on SpaceX’s HLS; first docking of the Orion spacecraft and SpaceX’s HLS in lunar orbit; and more. ASAP found this “stacking of firsts” a problem because it “elevates mission risk and reduces margin.” It wants to ensure “schedule pressure does not override prudent risk reduction—particularly for the HLS development, spacesuit readiness, and cryogenic propellant transfer capabilities.” But it doesn’t see that in the existing architecture.

The report also doubts Starship’s ability to land humans on the Moon this decade:

The development and test progress necessary for a version of Starship that has not yet flown in time to support a human lunar landing mission within the next few years appears daunting and, to the Panel, probably not achievable. Beyond this, the physics of landing a six-to-one height-to-width ratio vehicle on the uneven, poorly lit polar lunar surface seems questionable at best.

Key developments to watch out for this year

• Tests China will conduct in prep towards landing humans on Luna
• Launch of China’s Chang’e 7 mission to the Moon’s south pole in the second half of this year to study water ice and other volatile resources.
• The pace at which SpaceX achieves Starship milestones since the company and founder Elon Musk have now prioritized the Moon following China, the US, and Blue Origin.
• The first lunar landing attempt by Blue Origin:
  • Blue Origin’s successful launch of its New Glenn rocket last January followed by another in November finally opened up a second line of pursuit for NASA to send lunar astronauts vis-à-vis Blue Moon. Blue aims to launch its first robotic Blue Moon ‘Mark I’ lander by the end of this year to test and validate key design decisions and systems ahead of use in crewed flights.

• Based on the first Mark I’s expected performance, NASA has tentatively chosen the second Mark I’s 2027 flight to carry the agency’s VIPER rover—whose mission to study polar water ice has been critical yet deprioritized. Any kind of crewed Blue Moon lander will depend on the Mark I succeeding, and swiftly so. Between NASA’s new focus on accelerating Artemis and the opportunity to sidestep Musk-owned SpaceX in landing US astronauts on the Moon, Jeff Bezos-owned Blue decided to pause its other internal projects to focus the company’s resources and efforts on Luna.

Despite Blue’s fast-tracked efforts and simplified architecture compared to SpaceX, the short timeline and still-present complexity comprising at least four launches compared to China’s focused two-launch approach means the US will likely not meet its self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon. Either way, it’ll be amazing to have a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna. We should be happy that we now have two distinct efforts to sustain crewed and robotic exploration of our Moon. It gives humanity a better chance to do so since a dichotomic political system is apparently only able to do better under a competitive mindset driven by fear-mongering rather than collaboration.

From crewed Artemis to manned Apollo

Adopting an Apollo style approach to Artemis seems to have gone beyond the technical planning. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who has previously flown to space alongside woman astronauts on both his private space missions, used the words “mankind” and “manned” in recent tweets evangelizing the Trump-created Artemis program while the same program is trying to send the female astronaut Christina Koch to the Moon on Artemis II in a matter of weeks. Just as importantly, the Artemis program from its inception itself has touted landing the first woman on the Moon with Artemis III, with the word Artemis itself being chosen to allude to that ambition. That social advancement now no longer explicitly matters to NASA while fluffy communications take greater charge. In fact, last year NASA deleted the following prominently presented language from the Artemis landing page on its website:

With the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.

Eric Berger had then reported NASA’s response to the change as conveyed via an agency spokesperson:

In keeping with the President’s Executive Order, we’re updating our language regarding plans to send crew to the lunar surface as part of NASA’s Artemis campaign. We look forward to learning more from about the Trump Administration’s plans for our agency and expanding exploration at the Moon and Mars for the benefit of all.

Many inferred and reported this development as a change of mission crew plans but that’s not the case—not yet anyway. The reasonably diverse Artemis astronaut corps of 18 people hasn’t changed. It incudes women and people of color. Of course, the selection criteria for Artemis IV and V could very well change going ahead or be selectively interpreted given the US-wide inclusion purge since last year. In any case, when you have a female astronaut going to the Moon on Artemis II, and when NASA’s 6 out of 10 latest astronaut candidates for future missions are women, it should not be hard to simply use the words crewed or human instead of manned.

In the meanwhile, China’s CASC is using the phrase “crewed lunar landing” and “crewed lunar exploration” despite the country’s human spaceflight agency itself being named the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) by its original English translators.

P.S. Thank you to all who have so creatively and kindly signed my blog’s public guestbook. 🌝

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On February 19, NASA successfully fully fueled the SLS rocket and performed a practice countdown test ahead of the upcoming launch of the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back. This was a repeat of the February 2 test which hadn’t gone as planned due to excessive hydrogen leaks. This time around the leaks remained under NASA’s deemed allowable limits thanks to new seals installed after the first test. All seemed set for Artemis II to attempt a March launch but on February 21 teams observed issues with a nominal flow of helium into the SLS rocket’s upper stage. The inert gas is used to pressurize the propellant tanks. For technicians to access the upper stage to diagnose the issue and fix it, NASA has to roll back the rocket to its assembly building now, which lies almost seven kilometers away. This process rules out the March launch windows for Artemis II, making April first week the earliest possible attempt now.

A Canadian capcom on Artemis II

Astronaut Jenni Gibbons was selected as Canada’s backup of Jeremy Hansen, one of the two Artemis II Mission Specialists. Even though the backup role is not needed at the moment for the mission, Gibbons has many other key tasks in the Artemis program. She is a lunar capcom, whose job is to be an efficient communications bridge between mission control and in-flight astronauts. Gibbons has also helped define and validate astronaut training methods for future lunar missions. In a nice CSA article about Canada’s contributions to Artemis II, the agency outlines two key ones led by Gibbons:

She will be on console at NASA's Mission Control Center for several shifts during the mission, including the lunar flyby. [And] Just before launch, a closeout crew will be responsible for preparing Orion, securing the Artemis II astronauts in Orion and closing its hatches. Jenni is part of the extended closeout team. As such, she will perform voice checks from inside the capsule to make sure the astronauts can communicate with the ground as well as cabin set-up tasks and verifications.

Chandrayaan 4 landing site in sight

ISRO has narrowed down areas in Mons Mouton (84-85° S) as good candidate landing sites for the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission, which aims to bring the first lunar polar samples to Earth in 2028. ISRO is using data from its own Chandrayaan 2 orbiter for the finer site selection process, thanks to the orbiter’s advanced reconnaissance capabilities. The following criteria is being used for the final landing site selection:

• Slopes in the region < 10°.
• A 1 x 1 kilometer patch with low crater and boulder density, with boulders being smaller than 32 centimeters.
• The site should be sunlit for at least 11 days, with local terrain not shadowing the lander or its critical parts for long.

Chandrayaan 4 samples are expected to bring immense scientific value. NASA’s Apollo missions helped scientists confirm that our celestial companion had a fiery origin tied to Earth. On the other hand, the Soviet Luna missions were the world’s first robotic sample return missions, establishing the modern approach that fetching planetary material to Earth generates scientific results for decades. Samples fetched by China’s robotic Chang’e 5 mission confirmed that the Moon was volcanically active and thermally complex geologically recently. And Chang’e 6 transformed our understanding of how our Moon evolved thanks to the first ever samples from the mysterious lunar farside. As I wrote in my article ‘Why explore our Moon’, continuing to fetch diversely sourced and distinct geological material will help scientists piece together the complex origin and evolution of the Earth-Moon system. We currently don’t have any samples from the lunar poles, including potential water ice or water-mixed regolith from there. It’s important to understand this water’s sources, its abundance, and how its relation or lack of it to Earth’s water. Said knowledge is equally crucial in helping us plan sustained lunar exploration and build future Moonbases. As such, when Chandrayaan 4 brings unique lunar polar samples to Earth, it will help humanity make tactile leaps into these fundamental open questions about our Moon, Earth, Solar System, and future in space.

Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX update

For the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole, JAXA and Mitsubishi have continued validating and refining the LUPEX rover and instruments designs through a series of tests using qualification and engineering models. The sophisticated rover, whose mass has increased from 350 kilograms to 420, will be delivered to the Moon by a lander being made by ISRO. The lander will be launched on the heavy-lift Japanese H3 rocket. The rover will feature instruments from both Japan and India, with a contribution each from NASA and ESA. The joint mission targeting launch by end of decade will bring a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA, and can provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions. An abstract co-authored by various mission team members describes specific milestones achieved or in progress for each LUPEX instrument.

Choosing the Long March 10

Jack Congram has an interesting article on how China selected CALT’s competitive proposal for the Long March 10 rocket to be used for the country’s crewed Moon missions over other two contenders. An illustrative excerpt:

So why did the CALT’s designs win out over those from SAST and CASIC? Comparing the designs and considering the hardware needed for development, CALT’s proposal needed fewer newer parts while being more uniform overall, with all of its stages and two boosters utilizing a 5-meter diameter, requiring less structural reinforcements, and utilizing improved designs of existing hardware. CASIC’s designs would have required developing some massive solid rocket motors, while SAST’s has a sizable diameter change atop of a central booster, which would have four others hanging off the side of it, requiring a significant amount of structural reinforcement. Alongside that, SAST was looking to develop three rockets for what CALT and CASIC could do with two.

Fun new guestbook!

My blogs have a guestbook now. You can drop a public note if you’ve liked visiting my words on space and our Moon. Or draw using your hand or cursor! I love how people are being creative with it, like this stellar message from reader and friend Shreya Santra.

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On February 11, China successfully conducted an emergency escape test of its next-generation Mengzhou capsule, variants of which will fly astronauts to Earth orbit and the Moon. The uncrewed capsule flew atop a Long March 10A booster, and escaped the rocket while the combined vehicle was experiencing maximum aerodynamic pressure. This phase is the most literally stressful one for a vehicle ascending to space, and so Mengzhou demonstrating a safe escape when it did provides confidence that the craft can keep astronauts safe during emergencies. Post-escape, the capsule guided itself to a safe, parachuted splashdown in the South China sea. The Long March 10A booster, itself on its first test flight as well, rose just past the Karman line and peaked at 105 kilometers. It then successfully performed a guided oceanic splashdown as well, marking the first booster stage recovery for China.

This test follows Mengzhou’s previous launchpad escape test last year, also successful. Notably, Chinese engineers have designed the emergency escape to be handled by the Mengzhou craft itself instead of the rocket. This makes the solution somewhat launch vehicle agnostic, giving China flexibility to scale its crewed Moon mission plans in the run up to the China-led ILRS Moonbase ambitions. It’s to this end that the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) previously noted these tests as laying “an important technical foundation for the subsequent manned lunar exploration missions.”

The latest test demonstrated the working of yet another element of its crewed lunar program. The test was a first launch from the brand new 301 launch complex in Wenchang which China will continue developing to use for crewed Moon missions. Jack Congram previously noted the following key point related to the Wenchang launch site in his coverage of last year’s launchpad escape test:

A few days ahead of this test, China Central Television released a report regarding launch escape systems for crewed spacecraft, which briefly touched on Mengzhou’s launch system. That report notes that due to the density of launch infrastructure at Wenchang, Mengzhou’s escape system boasts a higher thrust-to-weight ratio, compared to Shenzhou, to pull the spacecraft out toward the ocean quickly. Additionally, the report stated that should a launch abort be triggered late into flight, Mengzhou’s propulsion systems on the service module can propel the spacecraft a safe distance away or into orbit.

In a single test, China has multi-laterally advanced in preparing many of its next-generation building blocks to fly astronauts to Earth orbit later this year, a key step before scaling the system to the Moon. No other country preparing for human spaceflight has tested all such elements at once.

Artemis updates

NASA teams tried partially fueling the SLS rocket core stage’s liquid hydrogen tank to assess the newly replaced seals, hoping to counter leaks observed during the full-fueling test on February 2 which didn’t go as planned and therefore delayed the launch of the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back to no earlier than March. But during the latest partial fueling test, teams noticed a reduced propellent flow, a new problem now being inspected. In the meanwhile, Stephen Clark has reported how NASA relaxed its fueling safety limit vis-à-vis hydrogen leaks by four times in the period between Artemis I and II:

During the first Wet Dress Rehearsal earlier this month, hydrogen gas concentrations in the area around the fueling connection spiked higher than 16 percent, NASA’s safety limit. This spike was higher than any of the leak rates observed during the Artemis I launch campaign in 2022. Since then, NASA reassessed their safety limit and raised it from 4 percent—a conservative rule NASA held over from the Space Shuttle program—to 16 percent.

• Seeing China’s steady strides towards landing humans on the Moon by 2030, the US and NASA decided to focus on accelerating their Artemis efforts and reopened the Artemis III landing contract last year due to SpaceX Starship delays. Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin bid for it, and also decided to pause its other internal projects to focus the company’s resources and efforts on Luna. Ergo, SpaceX and founder Elon Musk have now prioritized the Moon.

• NASA provided an update on the development of Artemis III lunar spacesuits, contracted to Axiom Space.

NASA and Axiom Space have conducted over 850 hours of pressurized testing with a person inside the AxEMU. Leading up to the review, teams conducted underwater and simulated lunar gravity tests of the AxEMU in facilities at NASA Johnson that demonstrate how the spacesuit’s capabilities will offer increased mobility as astronauts explore the Moon’s surface.

Agency and Axiom Space teams recently finished the first series of test runs in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA Johnson. While in the 40-foot-deep [12-meter] pool, they weighted the AxEMU to match lunar gravity and assessed functionality and ease of movement.

• NASA will now conduct a critical design review to evaluate and confirm the development status of the suits against Axiom’s own assessment. Stephen Clark recently reported on the many operational and safety challenges in the suit’s development. After SpaceX Lunar Starship, the Axiom-provided lunar suits remain the second biggest pacing item for flying and landing Artemis III astronauts on the Moon.

More Moon

• Sierra Space’s carbothermal reactor, funded and aided by NASA, successfully extracted oxygen from simulated lunar soil on Earth using concentrated solar energy. Being built at a gradual pace as part of NASA’s Game Changing Development program, the agency ultimately intends to demonstrate the system on the Moon on a future CLPS mission. Such future systems on the Moon could provide breathable oxygen for astronauts and fuel for spacecraft without having to rely on only the supplies lugged from Earth’s gruesome gravity well. Here’s a note on the collaborative nature of the test setup from the NASA release:

The integrated prototype brought together a carbothermal oxygen production reactor developed by Sierra Space, a solar concentrator designed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, precision mirrors produced by Composite Mirror Applications, and avionics, software, and gas analysis systems from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

• Relatedly, in the FY2026 Presidential Budget Request, NASA did not even request funds for its LIFT-1 mission to extract oxygen from lunar soil. Previously, NASA had said it would fund $200-250 million in total for the mission but later pivoted to stating in the budget request that the agency will “prioritize ground-based high-fidelity systems testing” instead.

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The January 12 launch of India’s PSLV rocket failed due to the third stage’s mysteriously anomalous performance, the resulting tumbling of which was visible even on telemetry screens in the mission control and livestream. 16 spacecraft were lost to the air and sea, spanning a key national hyperspectral satellite, seven private Indian ones, five from Brazil, and one each from the UK, Nepal, and Europe. The European one, called KID, briefly survived and transmitted some information despite experiencing loads up to 30g.

This was the 64th flight of a PSLV, a vehicle which has served India for three decades and is supposed to be the country’s workhorse in space. The flight being PSLV’s second consecutive failure, following the one in May 2025, has invited heightened public criticism and scrutiny, three of which I feel are notable to link and summarize below:

• Mukunth called for transparency in the failure investigation and timely public communications so as to avoid a culture of deviance and complacency, the kind NASA suffered from during the Space Shuttle era.
• Bosky Khanna wrote for The New Indian Express how none of the private Indian company satellites aboard had taken insurance due to cost concerns that exist more so for small satellites than large ones.
• Sidharth MP noted how three national satellite losses over just one year will now cost India several years to replace. This also means India’s dependency on foreign satellite data buys will increase, not decrease.

Now let’s discuss several more key aspects that I haven’t seen talked about so far to understand how it’s non-optional for India to fly the aging PSLV nominally again even as the country expands its launch vehicle options and capabilities—an endeavor in itself throttled. We will also illustrate how the safety of our astronauts on Gaganyaan missions is ultimately linked to the PSLV failure and its misleading communications.

The launchpads of India

India’s only active orbital spaceport is the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on the country’s south-eastern coast, a low-latitude location (13.7°N) suitable for many kinds of launches. The port primarily houses two launchpads, and their many associated facilities. The two pads are literally called the First Launch Pad (FLP) and the Second Launch Pad (SLP) respectively. India built the FLP in the early 1990s for ISRO to launch the then-new PSLV rocket. Today, the pad also supports launches of the new SSLV rocket, a PSLV-derived but much smaller vehicle dedicated for lofting small satellites.

As for the SLP, it can also host PSLV launches but does so less frequently as ISRO built that pad in 2005 to primarily launch the heavier rockets GSLV Mk II and LVM3. While these vehicles share some aspects like the liquid Vikas engine with the PSLV, their biggest differentiator lies in their cryogenic upper stages which deliver enhanced performance. However, the same stages make the FLP unable to launch the Mk II or the LVM3. The increased preparatory requirements for these cryogenic stages are hard to retrospectively fit on a launchpad that predates them.

Given these launchpad availability dynamics, it becomes clear that when a PSLV rocket fails, India effectively loses the value of its First Launch Pad. The SSLV exists but is not a sufficiently distinct rocket. Its second stage motor is derived straight from the PSLV’s third stage one—precisely the stage that has now failed twice in a row. As such, the PSLV getting grounded has been pulling down the SSLV along with it. Similarly, the PSLV and the GSLV Mk II share their core stage S139 solid rocket booster.

When the PSLV was flying reliably like a workhorse all these years, ISRO rightly considered the modular reuse from it for the SSLV or other vehicles to be an advantage. Now, however, that has become a restraint. Even when the SSLV gets its own launchpad, planned for later this decade, the issue of potential two-way technological dependency of one vehicle on the other would remain.

No place is building a PSLV replacement

People have expressed hope that upcoming private Indian launch vehicles will resolve India’s launch bottlenecks soon, particularly the PSLV. It’s hard to reconcile this hope with reality. Of all the launch vehicle companies in India, the only one that might launch this year for real is Skyroot. Their rocket, named Vikram-I, though falls in the same category as the SSLV in terms of lift capacity, both lifting six to seven times lower mass than the PSLV for equivalent orbits. In fact, Vikram-I is designed by many ex-ISRO people who were associated with the PSLV or the SSLV, and possibly may be using many common contractors. It’s therefore not a strictly distinct vehicle. Even if Vikram-I is successful in its very first orbital launch attempt, a tall order for any new vehicle, its lift capacity is simply not enough to replace the PSLV. Even its eventual upgrade, Vikram-II, does not come close to the PSLV’s prowess as the latter will still be able to lift about three times more mass to space at once. Another Indian rocket company hoping to launch later this decade, Agnikul, has an even smaller lift capacity to offer than Vikram-I.

There’s also the aspect that the SSLV and Vikram rockets all utilize, or will utilize, the FLP to launch. Even when flying successfully, using the same pad means they will effectively keep blocking PSLV’s FLP launches due to pre-launch planning and post-launch refurbishments while not putting enough mass in orbit by themselves. It’s a tradeoff between the PSLV’s greater lift capacity and the swiftness but low capacity of small rockets.

Now, yes, to improve the SSLV’s own launch rate and lift capacity, ISRO is making a dedicated launchpad optimized for polar orbits. The agency is also aiming to production-ize the SSLV through a technology transfer contract with Indian aerospace industry giant HAL. Skyroot’s Vikram rockets will use this new pad as well. But the fruits of these efforts are not expected to begin until at least 2028, which is when the new launchpad is supposed to host its first orbital launch. And that’s assuming no further delays for the pad that’s already slipped past an originally intended 2025 debut.

If India leans on the SSLV and private Indian rocket companies in their current state for small-to-medium-lift space launches this decade, the country will end up launching far less useful mass to orbit than through PSLVs. There is simply no place in India building a PSLV replacement.

The ambitious transitions ahead

The SLP is the pad India will use to launch its astronauts in the near future using the human-rated variant of the LVM3 rocket. As such, the SLP will further deprioritize PSLV launches to cater to human spaceflight over and above heavier launches. The PSLV will thus increasingly launch from the FLP as years go by. The dedicated PSLV Integration Facility which ISRO built to double the rate of PSLV launches is also at and for the FLP. Moreover, the government’s intent of productionizing the PSLV this decade through the industry also depends on these same existing facilities for the foreseeable future. The PSLV and FLP are two sides of the same coin.

In its early days, the PSLV was a humble rocket that allowed India to place modest satellites in orbit to meet the country’s most basic space applications needs. ISRO then evolved the PSLV with variants to increase and optimize the vehicle’s overall performance and payload capacity. Through continuous refinements, ISRO has been able to use a PSLV in some form to successfully launch a lunar orbiter, a Mars orbiter, a space telescope, a solar observatory to the Earth-Sun L1 point, a record 104 satellites in one flight, and also important missions for other space agencies such as the recent launch of the Proba-3 Sun-studying craft for ESA. This is what people mean when they say India takes pride in the PSLV.

As India’s space ambitions have risen this century, and this decade in particular, the PSLV has reached its ceiling of novelty at last. The next set of complex space missions executed by ISRO involved much heavier launch vehicles to get the job done. To launch Chandrayaan 2 and 3, ISRO required its LVM3 rocket to enter operations. India also needed the LVM3 to loft satellite constellations and heavy commercial craft. A Venus orbiter will also await a ride at the end of the decade. Even more complex missions India has announced to fly soon enough include the Chandrayaan 4 sample return, Gaganyaan human spaceflight missions, the first module of the Bharatiya Anthariksh Station (BAS) astronaut habitat in Earth orbit, and indigenously launched heavy geostationary satellites. But for all of these to work, the LVM3 core stage needs to be upgraded with a semi-cryogenic engine, a project that has been delayed for years now.

In the meanwhile, the Indian Government has approved the building of a third launch pad (TLP) in Sriharikota for $460 million, which will support launches of ISRO’s upcoming heavy-lift NGLV rocket starting next decade. The TLP will also act as a secondary pad for robotic LVM3 launches, and be a standby for human spaceflight ones to handle contingencies and emergencies. The TLP can support launching the GSLV Mk II as well but ISRO is planning to phase out the vehicle itself since the LVM3 is superior to it in performance, price, and reliability beyond bespoke launches.

It’s important to note that just like how the LVM3 and Mk II can’t launch from the FLP, the upcoming NGLV rocket won’t be able to lift off from the SLP. From a technical standpoint, this is obvious. But it’s interesting that the same dynamic that ties the PSLV with the FLP also ties the LVM3 and SLP. This means India cannot afford to lose an LVM3 even more so than a PSLV. And that’s why ISRO’s culture and communications being authentic matter even more today than it did in the past.

Our astronauts on the line

While India can manage a PSLV failure or two, the LVM3 failing would be far more disastrous. The PSLV and LVM3 do share the liquid Vikas engine for the foreseeable future, visibly tying technological reliability of one vehicle to the other. Thankfully, the LVM3 has never failed in its eight orbital flights so far. But then so didn’t the PSLV for 18 years, or a SpaceX Falcon 9 for almost a decade, NASA’s Space Shuttle until its 25th flight, and so on and so forth. We are talking about rockets after all. With LVM3 selected to launch astronauts in the near future, we simply cannot afford it to fail. It’s important to look at any aspect that we can inspect. This is why it’s prudent to note ISRO’s lack of transparency vis-à-vis the PSLV as a sign of the organization’s culture issues.

In 2022 when the SSLV failed on its inaugural flight, we got some decent details like “Cause of anomaly” and “Recommendations & Correction actions”, as probed and implemented by ISRO with the involvement of the failure analysis committee. But for the PSLV rocket which failed in May 2025, we did not get any such details. And that’s despite the fact that the failure triggered multiple mission delays since the launch vehicle’s modules and component designs are also utilized by other ISRO rockets. Even the second PSLV failure last month has still not prompted the taxpayer-funded space organization to release the failure analysis report of the first one, much less its key findings along with a list of corrective measures ISRO took as with the SSLV failure.

You typically expect companies, not tax-funded organizations, to be reserved and even deflective when dealing with failures. Yet even among those there have been companies which lead with transparency. ispace Japan faced two out of two failures of its Moon landers in 2023 and 2025 respectively. Yet, despite being a publicly traded company, it showed remarkable transparency by not only immediately accepting the outcomes in plain words but also by sharing detailed findings of what went wrong within weeks. Shouldn’t our taxpayer-funded agencies be at least as transparent as a good faith space company?

What we have instead are not only no details but outright false statements on ISRO’s website. The mission page for the last PSLV mission, which ISRO published before the launch and its failure, states the following [emphasis mine]:

PSLV is the workhorse launch vehicle of ISRO that has completed 63 flights including notable missions like Chandrayaan-1, Mars Orbiter Mission, Aditya-L1 and Astrosat Mission. In 2017, PSLV set a world record by launching 104 satellites in a single mission.

Except that the 63rd flight of 2025 itself failed. And so did three others in the past. It’s deceiving to call all PSLV flights completed. In the aftermath of the two PSLV failures, India’s Union Minister of Science & Technology and Space, Jitendra Singh, said the following as reported by Soumya Pillai for The Print:

The success rate of our launches is still pretty high compared to any other country around the world. We have been riding high on success, and yes, these failures have come as a disappointment, but we are working to rectify them and be back in the game.

The spirit of the statement resonates but to say that the success rate of our rockets is still pretty high compared to any other country is obviously incorrect when you contrast India’s launch statistics with any major rockets from the US, China, Russia, or even Europe. The PSLV’s success rate may be high but it’s not high enough, and certainly not among the best. That India again had a mixed year in space in 2025 continues to show there’s much more work to do.

There’s no doubt that engineers at ISRO take failures seriously internally. But those efforts also need to be communicated by the agency with honest clarity and effectiveness to retain trust. If an LVM3 fails on a robotic mission, what if ISRO’s opaqueness continues despite the lives of our astronauts being linked to essentially the same vehicle? The world lost astronauts on two human spaceflight disasters with the Space Shuttle due to NASA’s cultural complacency. ISRO would be wise to not repeat history.

The PSLV has a unique place in India’s space program and launch complex. It has to return to flight. But it’s not enough to merely fly the rocket again successfully. The PSLV and ISRO itself need to be made more robust, fixing fundamentals issues and mistakes instead of taping over them, just as ISRO methodically achieved Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon after Chandrayaan 2’s landing failure by carefully planning and testing a more robust and realistically redundant spacecraft.

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Launch of Artemis II astronauts delayed

NASA’s fueling test of the SLS rocket on February 2 in preparation to launch the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back did not go as planned. There were repeat hydrogen leaks beyond acceptable thresholds at multiple points despite trying gentle liquid hydrogen flows and all such related techniques NASA tried during Artemis I, which itself needed seven fueling attempts across months to then finally have the rocket fly. The core leak area this time was the same that nagged Artemis I, the tail service mast umbilical at the bottom of the SLS rocket’s mobile launcher used for fueling. Stephen Clark noted how the core objectives of the test at the end of the launch countdown couldn’t be met:

The objective was to stop the countdown clock 33 seconds prior to launch, about the same time the rocket would take control of the countdown during a real launch attempt. Instead, the clock stopped at T-minus 5 minutes and 15 seconds. NASA said the countdown terminated “due to a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate.” The countdown ended before the rocket switched to internal power and fully pressurized its four propellant tanks. The test also concluded before the rocket activated its auxiliary power units to run the core stage’s four main engines through a preflight steering check, all milestones engineers hoped to cross off their checklist.

NASA did achieve two other aspects of the test: 1) a specialized team went up the launcher and closed the Orion spacecraft’s hatches as they would on launch day for astronauts inside the capsule, and 2) safe defueling of the SLS rocket. Teams then began reviewing the test data to form mitigation plans, and will return for a fueling test at some point before setting an official target launch date, which now can be March at the earliest.

Dear NASA, Chinese space missions exist too

NASA recently published a post on how the agency will track the Artemis II mission using a network of ground stations. In the release, NASA included the following statement [emphasis mine]:

Orion will experience a planned communications blackout lasting approximately 41 minutes. The blackout will occur as the spacecraft passes behind the Moon, blocking radio frequency signals to and from Earth. Similar blackouts occurred during the Apollo-era missions and are expected when using an Earth-based network infrastructure. When Orion reemerges from behind the Moon, the Deep Space Network will quickly reacquire Orion’s signal and restore communications with mission control. These planned blackouts remain an aspect of all missions operating on or around the Moon’s far side.

All missions? These kinds of blackouts have been solved by China, who have had two relay satellites, Queqiao 1 and Queqiao 2, for communicating with its Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6 landers respectively on the lunar farside. As such, NASA saying that the blackouts remain an aspect of all farside missions is incorrect. The statement needs to be qualified by noting that the issue stands for all US missions.

This isn’t the first time NASA has made statements about global missions while discarding what China does or aims to. In 2024, when the US agreed to land Japanese astronauts on the Moon in return for Japan providing an advanced pressurized crewed rover for the Artemis program, the announcement called “a Japanese national to be the first non-American astronaut to land on the Moon”, conveniently ignoring China’s plans to land astronauts on Luna end of decade.

What science will Artemis II do? Zilch?

NASA has proudly pioneered effective science and technical communications with the public for decades, elevating understanding of space exploration worldwide. But the agency’s communications over the last few years haven’t been as eloquent, with fluffy narratives taking the driver’s seat even in aspects that aren’t politically charged. This is the case with Artemis II as well. When inaugurating the Artemis Science Team Flight Control Room in June 2025, NASA wrote the following in a release on its website:

Artemis II astronauts will observe the Moon during their 10-day mission around the Moon and back, taking photographs and verbally recording what they see. Their observations will support science objectives and provide data for potential landing sites for future Moon missions.

Now, Artemis II is not even an orbiter mission. The four astronauts inside the Orion capsule will be flying more than 7000 kilometers from the Moon at their closest approach. What science can they even do from such large distances? And so in less than 10 days? Certainly no landing sites will be selected.

For selecting actual landing sites, NASA has used over a decade worth of observations from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which flies within 100 kilometers of the Moon’s surface. NASA is also getting aid from India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to leverage its superior imagery and radar system for filtering Artemis landing site candidates. Are we now supposed to believe that a few days worth of Artemis II observations several thousands of kilometers from the Moon will help NASA select landing sites? This fluffy communications ultimately disrespects NASA’s own LRO efforts.

There is a nuanced element to the Artemis II observations. All Artemis II activities will certainly be useful operationally to feed forward into coordinating the science team with astronauts on Artemis III and missions beyond. But doing science as an objective in itself is a different ballgame altogether. There are also limits to what a few days of coordination can teach us when astronauts are this far from the Moon. The work that the science team is doing is important but not for the fluffy reasons being conveyed by NASA around this topic.

Of course, like the beautiful images from Artemis I, views of the Moon and our Earth from near Luna can have great impact on people’s minds. With Artemis II, we have an opportunity again to view our Moon and Earth through the eyes of astronauts, and their iPhones, building on the beauty of the Apollo 8 Earthrise. As such, Artemis II’s lunar observation campaign has a lot of emotional value. It just doesn’t have a scientific one, especially when the same agency does real science missions.

Now, every space agency does PR pieces. But NASA’s science communications have had the highest bar. We should hold them to that high standard while pushing other agencies to match.

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On February 1, NASA powered up the SLS rocket’s core stage at its launchpad at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Today, February 2, the agency began preparing for a fueling, launch countdown, and defueling test suite. If this “wet dress rehearsal” with cryogenic propellants is successful, the agency is clear to launch the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back, knowing that the launch procedures are working as expected. The earliest possible launch dates for the astronauts are February 8, 10, and 11, each having five-hour windows. If the wet dress rehearsal finds issues to be fixed, the next available launch dates are in March and April.

In the meanwhile, astronauts remain in quarantine to keep them safe against exposure to pathogens. To ensure the astronauts are safe and keeping well during the entire mission, NASA has planned to guard many aspects at once. Other than having global-standard safety measures like an emergency rocket escape system for the Orion crew capsule and an urgent launchpad egress system for astronauts, NASA has also developed systems to have real time monitoring of the Artemis II mission and its crew so as to tweak things as needs arise.

This applies to pre-launch preparations too. The SLS rocket’s aforementioned fueling test was delayed to stick to the mission’s weather criteria amid cold conditions and avoid potentially unwarranted effects on the mission hardware while also ensuring testing in conditions similar enough to actual launch. NASA also noted the following in an update on January 26:

During an evaluation of the emergency egress system, the baskets used to transport the crew and other pad personnel from the mobile launcher in an emergency stopped short of the terminus area located inside the pad perimeter. Since then, the brakes of the system have been adjusted to ensure the baskets fully descend.

The astronauts have also been trained to handle various permutations of such escape scenarios. Teams at NASA also work to ensure the crew’s Orion spacecraft and its life support systems keep functioning nominally, as noted in the same release:

In the coming days, technicians also will take additional samples of Orion’s potable water system to ensure the crew’s water is drinkable. Initial samples showed higher levels of total organic carbon than expected.

This brings us into the next aspect, monitoring the health of the astronauts themselves during the mission. To that end, NASA includes a wristband and multiple advanced tools for astronauts to check their physiological patterns. Since space and payload mass aboard Orion is limited, many of these experiment packages are miniaturized versions of those previously flown on the International Space Station. Some of them will report metrics and outputs in real time for NASA to monitor while others will be analyzed post-flight.

Radiation protection

Given the scarcity of data on human health in lunar and deep space environments, Orion will carry even more radiation sensors than on Artemis I to review post-mission. A notable upgrade comes from a partnership with the German Space Agency (DLR):

NASA has again partnered the German Space Agency DLR for an updated model of their M-42 sensor—an M-42 EXT—for Artemis II. The new version offers six times more resolution to distinguish between different types of energy, compared to the Artemis I version. This will allow it to accurately measure the radiation exposure from heavy ions which are thought to be particularly hazardous for radiation risk. Artemis II will carry four of the monitors, affixed at points around the cabin by the crew.

This collaboration builds on results from Artemis I whose radiation data was evaluated by NASA, ESA, and DLR scientists last year. They found that radiation exposure to future astronauts will vary not only based on time spent at locations within the capsule but also on Orion’s orientation in space. For example, the paper says when Orion’s orientation was altered during an engine burn, exposure levels dropped nearly in half due to the highly directional nature of the radiation in the Van Allen belt. NASA will continue to study lunar and deep space radiation environments with scientific payloads on the upcoming NASA-led Gateway orbital habitat.

From August 4 through 7 in 1972, the Sun blurted several bursts of flares and associated energetic particles between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the Moon. Had the astronauts been in lunar orbit or on the surface, they could’ve faced damaging levels of radiation. This could, in turn, lead to increased cancer risk. Likewise, radiation particles from such strong solar events can reach Artemis II astronauts within hours. Since we are around the peak of solar activity in this cycle, teams will be monitoring bursts from the Sun that might pass through Orion in its flight paths. Sensors onboard Orion will also provide warnings when radiation influx crosses a certain threshold. For such events, NASA’s strategy is for the crew to increase their radiation protection by repositioning items inside Orion:

To protect themselves, astronauts will position themselves in the central part of the crew module largely reserved for storing items they’ll need during flight and create a shelter using the stowage bags on board. The method protects the crew by increasing mass directly surrounding them, and therefore making a denser environment that solar particles would have to travel through, while not adding mass to the crew module itself. If the warning were to sound, the crew would create the shelter within an hour and in some cases would need to stay inside for as long as 24 hours.

Mission monitoring

In terms of real-time monitoring of the mission, there are specific aspects too. For example, in Eric Berger’s interview of the Artemis II astronauts last year, which provided a good rundown of the mission’s timeline and key checkpoints & fallbacks post launch, the Mission Pilot Victor Glover shared an interesting detail:

The first workout [for astronauts] is a checkout of that exercise hardware, but it's also a checkout of the environmental control system. Because I'm going to be breathing, I'm going to be sweating, making more humidity and more CO2 for the life support system to scrub out. And then if that's good, that's another check that means we can go to the Moon.

Back to a broader scale, NASA built a new Orion “Mission Evaluation Room” (MER) at the agency’s Johnson Space Center which didn’t exist for Artemis I. NASA built MER last year to complement flight control teams during the mission. The MER team comprises about 48 engineers from across NASA, ESA, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus with deep knowledge of Orion’s subsystems. They will analyze technical data as the mission unfolds, assisting flight control with optimizations as well as any anomalies.

Complementary to MER is NASA having trained the astronauts to fly Orion in a realistic emulator:

Inside the Orion Mission Simulator at Johnson, the crew [has] rehearsed every phase of the mission, from routine operations to emergency responses. Simulations are designed to teach astronauts how to diagnose failures, manage competing priorities, and make decisions with delayed communication from Earth.

For the most happening events during the mission, like the tumultuous launch and the fiery atmospheric reentry, NASA has developed the Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS). It’s a specialized spacesuit with a flame-resistant outer layer which astronauts will wear during such mission phases to protect themselves against potential anomalies. Astronauts would also wear OCSS if other high risk events occur during the mission since the suit is their lifeboat if and when critical systems in Orion fail. It may seem like an extended feature but it’s quite central to astronaut safety. From a 2019 NASA release:

Even though it’s primarily designed for launch and reentry, the Orion suit can keep astronauts alive if Orion were to lose cabin pressure during the journey [...]. Astronauts could survive inside the suit for up to six days as they make their way back to Earth.

This pairs well with another safety aspect of the mission. NASA has designed a free return trajectory for Orion’s flight around the Moon such that if the spacecraft’s engines stopped working for some reason, Orion will be pulled back towards Earth due to the net result of the natural gravitational forces acting on the craft. The OCSS can keep astronauts alive amid several such anomalies near the Moon.

The OCSS suit can also help the astronauts after splashdown on Earth. From NASA:

The suits are also equipped with a suite of survival gear in the event they have to exit Orion after splashdown before recovery personnel arrive. Each suit will carry its own life preserver that contains a personal locator beacon, a rescue knife, and a signaling kit with a mirror, strobe light, flashlight, whistle, and light sticks.

Should there be some issue or delay for the recovery teams and their vessels to arrive post-splashdown, the astronauts have been trained to stabilize the capsule if necessary, exit it, and board a raft on their own and then use the OCSS survival kit as necessary. Their suits are also bright orange to make them easier to spot amid ocean waters.

Communicating with Orion

Getting back to the mission-wide systems, NASA will track the Orion spacecraft near-continuously and ensure safety of the astronauts by having multiple communications channels. Chiefly, NASA will use a combination of its Near Space Network (NSN) and Deep Space Network (DSN) to track the mission. Managed by the agency’s Goddard and JPL centers respectively, these networks have antennae spread worldwide so that Orion can be in reach despite facing any part of Earth.

Orion will also carry a NASA-MIT-developed optical laser communications terminal called O2O to send some mission data independently, albeit it’s primarily intended to be a test. O2O aims to demonstrate sending more data with lower size, weight, and power requirements compared to traditional radio systems. During the mission, NASA hopes to beam 4K HD videos and pictures during minimal cloud coverage over to likewise two suitably located ground stations. This demonstration is part of the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program’s optical infusion effort, which has been demonstrating laser communications on multiple missions. However, the Artemis III Moon landing mission will not have a laser communications unit from NASA.

The heat shield

And now we come to the final major aspect, the one that’s been contended publicly: the Orion capsule’s heat shield. Two independent investigations by NASA circa 2024 analyzed the unexpected damage caused to Orion’s shield during reentry in 2022 for the uncrewed Artemis I Moon mission. The agency concluded that the heat shield’s ablative Avcoat material was not porous enough to vent and dissipate hot gas buildup during its bounced atmospheric reentry, which led to cracks and loss of entire chunks. NASA then decided to change Orion’s reentry profile for Artemis II to manage the heat buildup, deeming it a safe measure for astronauts.

Jared Isaacman’s first priority after becoming the NASA administrator in December 2025 was to review Orion’s heat shield and its effectiveness in saving the lives of Artemis II astronauts during atmospheric reentry. NASA decided that the altered reentry profile proposal would work. Eric Berger, one of the two reporters with (preferential?) access to the review meeting, noted the worst case scenario as follows:

The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

Not all experts seated in the meeting were convinced, with one publicly citing limitations of the tools used for said analyses. Here’s hoping the Artemis II astronauts fly and get back to Earth safely.

On the other hand, there’s poignant irony in unequivocally debating so much about saving the lives of astronauts but not of those on the ground too, including not only having protective measures for launch teams but also looking out for the safety of passengers in flight against rocket debris, engineers on ground testing hardware, and simply caring about lives of people at large. The pursuit of space does not place us above human life.

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As NASA targets a Q1 launch for the Artemis II mission flying humans around the Moon and back, the four astronauts set to be aboard entered quarantine on January 23 to reduce their exposure to pathogens. This period typically starts 14 days before launch, although other hardware tests remain for NASA as the agency aims to verify cryogenic fueling and de-fueling operations as well as launch countdown procedures with the crew’s SLS rocket by February 2. More quarantine details from the NASA release:

The crew begin quarantine in Houston, and if testing continues to go well and activities progress toward a possible launch next month, they will fly to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida about six days ahead of launch. There, the Artemis II crew will live in the astronaut crew quarters inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building, before launch day. During quarantine, the crew can continue regular contact with friends, family, and colleagues who are able to observe quarantine guidelines, and will avoid public places, wear masks, and maintain distance from others they come into contact with as they continue their final training activities. Those training activities will continue in the days ahead with mission simulations and medical checkouts.

An interesting, related tangent to this is the article ‘Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11’, where Georgia Ray lays down the story of how concerns about two-way biological contamination between Earth and space objects vis-à-vis the Apollo missions led to the birth of planetary protection as a field and set of norms.

From 1959, concern over back contamination risk was extremely niche. By 1966, mitigation of back contamination risk had become a requirement for the entire moon landing mission. How did this happen? In 1957, Sputnik launched, and the USA became very aware that it was losing the space race. Also in 1957, an American biology professor named Joshua Lederberg was talking with a British biologist, J. B. S. Haldane about the possibility of the USSR setting off a nuclear weapon on the moon as a show of force. While this would be bad for US morale, it would also be terrible for future research on the moon–would there be life up there? A nuke would disturb moon dust and scatter radioactive isotopes all over the moon. It would be impossible to study the moon in its untouched state and might interfere with finding delicate chemical structures that could even relate to the origin of life. Shortly after, Lederberg began pushing the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to avoid taking actions in space that would permanently close off aspects of research.

In the meanwhile, NASA selected 34 volunteers from across 14 countries to track the crew’s Orion spacecraft’s signals during the mission, an increase from 10 volunteers who tracked Artemis I. The Artemis II trackers comprise space agencies, companies, universities, communities, and even individuals. Notably, the Canadian and German space agencies are on the list, as is Intuitive Machines which hopes to build its own lunar communications network. NASA will evaluate the tracking data shared by these volunteers against the canonical data to validate their abilities for potential use in future missions. From the release:

These volunteers will submit their data to NASA for analysis, helping the agency better assess the broader aerospace community’s tracking capabilities and identify ways to augment future Moon and Mars mission support. There are no funds exchanged as a part of this collaborative effort. This initiative builds on a previous effort in which 10 volunteers successfully tracked the Orion spacecraft during Artemis I in 2022. That campaign produced valuable data and lessons learned, including implementation, formatting, and data quality variations for Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, which develops communications and data standards for spaceflight. To address these findings, SCaN now requires that all tracking data submitted for Artemis II comply with its data system standards.

NASA also announced that the Artemis II Orion spacecraft will carry several mementos, two of which stood out to me:

Orion also will carry a copy of a 4-by-5-inch negative of a photo from the Ranger 7 mission, the first US mission to successfully make contact with the lunar surface. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California managed the Ranger series of spacecraft, built to help identify safe Moon landing sites for Apollo astronauts.

On Artemis I, a variety of tree seeds flew and were distributed to educational organizations and teachers after the mission, following in the footsteps of tree seeds flown aboard the Apollo 14 mission sprouted into “Moon Trees” after being returned to Earth. The seeds have since taken root at 236 locations across the US to become their own Artemis I Moon Trees. Soil samples collected from the base of established Artemis I Moon Trees planted at NASA’s 10 centers will fly aboard Artemis II, representing the full cycle of exploration: launch, flight, growth, and return to space again. The CSA (Canadian Space Agency) will fly various tree seeds in the kit with the intention of distributing them after the mission.

More Moon

• As part of a broader move within the planetary science arm of NASA, the agency announced that it will cease funding and support for the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) starting May alongside other such formal community planetary science groups spread US-wide. LEAG helped NASA forge and shape its Moon exploration objectives with scientific, technical, commercial, and operational analysis.
• As expected, Blue Origin’s first robotic Moon lander called Mark I will not launch this quarter. The company announced last week that it completed the spacecraft assembly, and has dispatched the Moonbound vehicle over sea to NASA’s Johnson Space Center where it will undergo space environmental tests. Considering that Mark I aims to land on the Moon’s south pole, the launch will take place only later this year when the landing site will have access to maximum sunlight.

• NASA has selected three scientific payloads to be delivered to the Moon on as-yet-unselected CLPS landers during 2028 or later. These payload suites, intended to study the nature of the Moon’s regolith, interior, and radiation environment respectively, are agnostic to specific locations and therefore can be sent on any lander that is otherwise compatible in terms of mass, volume, power, and other operational requirements.
• NASA replaced a faulty oxidizer valve actuator on an RS-25 engine—which was removed from the Artemis II SLS rocket—and retested and qualified it on January 22 to power the SLS rocket for the future Artemis IV mission.

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It’s been two months since I released Seven uni-verses as a celebratory poetry booklet on humanity’s exploration of space. Some friends and readers have been curious about how it has fared, especially considering my unusual open access approach that also rejects traditional publishing norms. And so for public curiosity as well as for transparency on this experiment, I share below how many times my booklet has been downloaded and/or ordered as of January 20. Note that these numbers represent the lower limit since tracking every single copy of a globally available multi-format and multi-platform book is impossible.

• My own website: 1206
• Ebook platforms: 172
• Paperback: 61
• Audiobook: 89
• Internet Archive & Libraries: 54

So that’s about 1600 copies in total. I don’t know how you’d interpret these numbers but personally I’m happy with it, especially when considering my no-nonsense approach to publishing as an indie author:

• The booklet is self-published, meaning there were no external publisher payments or promotions. Tools-wise, I used a combination of Apple Pages, isbn.gov.in, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Pothi, Google Play Books, Internet Archive, and several more services. These turned out to be the right ones for me only after trying too many services. You’re welcome.
• I did not do any paid ads or sponsored placements anywhere.
• There were only a couple of announcements on my blog & newsletter, which gladly drove most of the downloads & sales as intended—a good sign for future booklets I want to publish.
• I did do a few social media posts (ugh) but which very gladly did not bear much fruit. Instead, sharing the news directly with many friends I thought might be interested worked better and led to interesting conversations as well. I like this because it’s not as much promoting as it’s sharing and answering the curiosities of people about the publishing process.
• I vehemently avoided exclusive distribution of my booklet on any platform, especially Amazon, even if it meant lower visibility. I care more about diverse global access and my long-term independence as a writer. Among other issues, going Amazon-exclusive would’ve meant I wouldn’t be able to provide my booklet digitally for free at all.
• I did not ask any media outlet, journalist, or creator to talk about my booklet, especially out of editorial ethical considerations. Obviously, I did not approach any stupid influencers either; this one doesn’t need any considerations.
• Marketing departments of some publishing platforms I used either reached out or emailed lengthy ads to ask me to promote my booklet in various paid ways, so as to upsell, all of which I rejected. I’d be more interested if they simply did organic shares of some sort for all authors using their platform by default.
• Lastly, I did not promote the booklet at any bookstore with an author event or such. Although this isn’t an inorganic method, and so I’d actually love to engage with real readers at some point if a store is genuinely interested.

If you’re one of the people who has read my verses, thank you. I’d certainly like it if you wished to share your organic thoughts about the poems on any book platform, like this review on Goodreads. Or best, blog about it. If you’ve not yet picked up a copy of my space poetry, you can get one here:

It’s free digitally and priced minimally in print because I wanted my verses to be globally accessible. As such, I don’t make money from any sales directly and instead rely on reader donations to support all my space writing.

What’s next?

Figuring out how to independently publish my poetry on platforms globally in multiple formats with non-exclusive open access has laid a solid logistical foundation for me to publish future booklets & books for public good. These numbers will now help me streamline my publishing process. I’m very excited for this next phase of my career: Merge the worlds of blogs & books to bring affordable and accessible writing on important but undercovered space exploration themes to people all around the world. I aim to publish at least one booklet later this year for which you can get notified via Email or RSS.

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Space and Earth: the decade ahead. The next decade is vanishingly small on the timescale of planets, but it is likely to be a critical one for humanity, with space playing its own crucial role. And while the current US administration is pushing to cut Earth Science programs, personnel, and missions (both in development and operational; c.f. recent NCAR shutdown news), that doesn’t change the fact that modern climate science emerged in part from the truly global vantage point provided by our ability to put people, cameras, and sensors in orbit. While budgets are under fire at NASA/NOAA/USGS/etc, much of the rest of the world seems to understand that this work remains existential. ESA has more Earth Science missions in development and operation than ever before (we’re particularly excited for FORUM, Copernicus CO2M, and FLEX), JAXA is staying the course on its own small set of missions (ISS-hosted MOLI and PMM), China is beginning to add its version of Earth Science missions (TanSat-2 and DQ-2), and multiple smaller nations have missions in progress (Canada’s WildFireSat, Norway’s AOS-P, and South Korea’s recently launched KOMPSAT-7). These missions and the data they’ll produce are critical, as humanity is blowing past its +1.5 ºC warming limit after a decade of record average global temperatures and mounting climate-induced disasters. These realities firmly place us in uncharted territory; we don’t know how quickly or how drastically climate patterns will shift as a result, particularly given our limited understanding of climate tipping points that will likely accelerate warming (if you like board games, Daybreak is fun and our favorite that includes tipping points). Our ability to mitigate atmospheric methane and its sources (leaks, flaring, etc.); understand cloud behavior at particle, single-cloud, and weather system scale; measure carbon cycle components like biomass; and, monitor resilience metrics like surface temperature, moisture levels, and wildfires will only grow in importance as humanity comes face-to-face with its most daunting self-inflicted problem to date (AI may very well be next). As we’ve shared before (c.f. Issue № 48), here at Orbital Index we’re unabashedly in support of treating climate change as the massive problem and opportunity that it is and of focusing humanity’s substantial ability to produce, problem-solve, and build on securing a livable and pleasant future—one where we can turn our focus toward the stars without ignoring existential threats at home.

Edition #350 was also The Orbital Index’s last one.

Some of my readers know that Moon Monday was partly inspired by The Orbital Index, a fact I’m proud of because the Index has been a unique resource to track global space activities and not just US ones. In a world where neither traditional media nor social media channels tend to provide linked citations—much less external or even canonical ones—the Index being link-heavy made it one of the few of such archival value. And, to produce the lengthy editions for seven whole years is remarkable. I know firsthand how hard it is to consistently show up every Monday with something useful and thoughtful for thousands in the industry. Kudos and thank you to Andrew Cantino⁩ and ⁨Ben Lachman⁩—as well as contributors like Sarajane—for pulling it off all this while to provide a quality, free resource to Earth. Even as their last edition links to several space sources to follow, it’s a fact that the specific value provided by the Index is now a vacuum.

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In 2025, China progressed on many elements which will help the country land humans on the Moon by 2030, notably including successful tests of the launchpad escape system, lander propulsion, and the rocket booster core stage. This year, China aims to complete testing several more aspects, as outlined by the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA):

• Perform integrated testing of the Lanyue lunar lander systems.
  • Note: This would very likely include tests of the propulsion module. As Ling Xin previously reported, Lanyue comprises a crewed lander and an attached heavy propulsion module. It’s the latter which will initiate lunar descent and shave off the bulk of the combined craft’s orbital velocity. When the crew reaches a few kilometers above the lunar surface, the propulsion module will jettison from the lander, thereby lightening the load for the final landing and touchdown of the crew.
• Conduct another abort test of China’s next-generation Mengzhou crew capsule, this time to verify successful working of safety mechanisms during the period of maximum aerodynamic pressure on the craft.
  • Note: Mengzhou flights aim to carry all future taikonauts to Earth orbit starting later this year, replacing the now old design of Shenzhou. A lunar variant of Mengzhou called ‘Mengzhou Y’ will carry astronauts to lunar orbit and dock with the Lanyue lander system so Lanyue can then land crew.
• Launch low-altitude flights of the Long March 10A rocket, clearing the way for lofting an uncrewed flight of Mengzhou to China’s Tiangong space station so as to prove the readiness of the new rocket and capsule.
  • Note: The lunar Mengzhou Y will incorporate lessons and tweaks from these tests and mission before its first uncrewed flight sometime by 2029.
• Complete ground infrastructure for launch, tracking, and landing of Long March 10A boosters.

Moreover, as Jack Congram reported recently, work on lunar spacesuits called Wangyu will progress as well:

• CMSA aims to conduct comprehensive testing of the Wangyu lunar spacesuit design, including verifying its structural integrity and functioning—like that of thermal control and electrical systems—inside Moon-simulating facilities. Engineers then hope to arrive at the final suit prototype by the end of this year.

At some unspecified point, there are also tests expected of other crewed lunar elements:

• A prototype fairing separation test of the lunar Long March 10 rocket.
• Verification of payload development schedules, and subsequent selection of payloads for the first crewed Moon landing mission based on the previously sought proposals.

Of course, there will be many more tests across various aspects but these are all the specific ones we know of. It would be interesting to see how many of these milestones China accomplishes by the end of this year as the country takes on a very ambitious and fast-paced schedule for landing humans on the Moon by 2030. In any case, China’s lapses would not be as long as that of Artemis barring an unexpected major failure or technical holdup. It will be great to watch a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna. 🌙

Please tell me your Moon time

In 2025, China cemented and further advanced its lead in building a lunar communications and navigation network, including demonstrating automated navigation at the Moon, and achieving the first ever daytime Earth-Moon laser distance measurements with a retroreflector on a lunar orbiter. As lunar activity increases globally as well as from China itself towards its Moonbase plans, it’s becoming increasingly important to coordinate time differences between lunar spacecraft and Earth to operate not just safely but synergistically. To that end, Chinese researchers have released a first-of-its-kind software package to enable engineers to coordinate Moon and Earth times for multiple lunar missions in an integrated manner. The authors consider the timing accuracy of this initial work to be sufficient for coordinating spacecraft over the next decade, and note that improvements will follow. What’s commendable is that the software is public on GitHub, the paper describing the work and methodology open access, and the project is being funded by the Chinese government institutions of CAS and NSFC.

More Moon

• As NASA targets a Q1 launch for the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back, on January 17 the agency transported the mission’s mammoth SLS rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the complex’s Launchpad 39B. The ~6.5-kilometer journey took almost 12 hours. Next in the series of the final set of pre-launch tests, NASA aims to verify cryogenic fueling and de-fueling operations as well as launch countdown procedures for the rocket by February 2. If all goes well, we would then see crew put on their spacesuits and enter Orion on the pad for a countdown demonstration test in tandem with ground teams to verify mission procedures.
• In the meanwhile, NASA has released the Artemis II press kit. CSA’s Artemis II page is also pretty good.
• ESA led a realistic communications test at their Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany, emulating messages between an astronaut, various lunar elements, and mission control to lay the groundwork for planning future missions. In the meanwhile, Italian researchers have identified the country’s Mount Etna’s volcanic material to be remarkably similar to Apollo 14 samples, making the place a good training ground for future astronauts and payload tests.

• On January 11, Portugal became the 30th European country to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration.
• JAXA has tentatively selected ispace Japan to demonstrate a precision landing on the Moon’s south pole later this decade with aid from communications relay satellites in lunar orbit. This development is interesting because JAXA has already achieved a precision robotic landing with the SLIM mission in 2024 without needing any external spacecraft. The move therefore denotes other considerations such as cost and abstracting out the advanced capability to a persistent infrastructure layer at the Moon so every lander can utilize it.

Articles on Japan’s Moon missions

• The joint Indo-Japanese Chandrayaan 5 LUPEX mission will drill for water on the Moon
• JAXA welcomed us into the era of precision Moon landings
  • How ISRO aided this feat
• Japan’s road to landing astronauts on the Moon
• The need for resilience in private Moon landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing
• On the intersection of ispace, NASA CLPS, funding, and science
• On ispace’s failed Moon landing attempt and related tangents for NASA CLPS

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• The US Senate voted and confirmed Jared Isaacman as NASA’s administrator on December 17, 2025, closing a long drawn process of having the entrepreneur, pilot, astronaut, and Trump’s original but later withdrawn nominee be the person leading NASA.
• In parallel, the US White House issued an Executive Order, effectively yet another national policy directive from the country, to try landing humans on the Moon before China. In 2025, due to three back-to-back failures of SpaceX Starship, an explosion during testing, and another booster lost, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon significantly slowed down, making Lunar Starship the pacing item. As such, the executive order formally pushes the Artemis III crewed lunar landing target from 2027 to 2028, hoping that the reopening of the mission’s contract for accelerated proposals—which was done last year by Isaacman’s predecessor Sean Duffy as Acting Administrator—would help the US achieve the feat before the next Presidential elections more so than before China lands humans on Luna. The optimistic executive order also calls for the US to work towards a “permanent lunar outpost by 2030”, and continues the decision to reinvest in nuclear power on the Moon.
• NASA is targeting a Q1 launch this year to fly four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back. The agency is executing the final string of tests only after the successes of which can it safely liftoff the SLS rocket carrying the crew’s Orion spacecraft. The latest of these tests involved the crew donning their spacesuits and entering Orion as a pre-launch countdown demonstration test in tandem with ground teams to verify mission procedures. Next up, NASA is preparing to roll out the SLS rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the complex’s Launchpad 39B no earlier than January 17. The agency also identified and fixed some problems in the process:

During final checkouts before rollout, technicians found a cable involved in the flight termination system was bent out of specifications. Teams are replacing it and will test the new cable over the weekend. Additionally, a valve associated with Orion’s hatch pressurization exhibited issues leading up to a Dec. 20 countdown demonstration test. On Jan. 5, the team successfully replaced and tested it. Engineers also worked to resolve leaky ground support hardware required to load gaseous oxygen into Orion for breathing air.

• In the meanwhile, Isaacman’s first priority after becoming the NASA administrator has been to review the Orion capsule’s heat shield and its effectiveness in saving the lives of Artemis II astronauts during atmospheric reentry on Earth at the end of the mission. Previously, two independent investigations by NASA analyzed the unexpected damage caused to Orion’s shield during reentry in 2022 for the uncrewed Artemis I Moon mission. The agency concluded that the heat shield’s ablative Avcoat material was not porous enough to vent and dissipate hot gas buildup during its bounced atmospheric reentry, which led to cracks and loss of entire chunks. NASA then decided to change Orion’s reentry profile for Artemis II to manage the heat buildup, deeming it a safe measure for astronauts. Following the latest shield review led by Isaacman, wherein two specific reporters were (preferentially?) allowed to attend, NASA has decided to continue with the changed reentry profile proposal. Eric Berger, one of the two reporters with access to the meeting, noted the worst case scenario as follows:

The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

Not all experts seated in the meeting are convinced, with one publicly citing limitations of the tools used for said analyses. Here’s hoping the Artemis II astronauts fly and get back to Earth safely.

On the other hand, there’s poignant irony in unequivocally debating so much about saving the lives of astronauts but not of those on the ground too, including not only ensuring protective measures for launch teams but also looking out for the safety of passengers in flight against rocket debris, engineers on ground testing hardware, and simply caring about lives of people at large. The pursuit of space does not place us above human life.

More mission updates

• US-based Firefly Aerospace has tested and qualified through NASA a structural model of its upcoming second Blue Ghost CLPS Mooncraft for launch vibrations and acoustic stress at JPL’s Environmental Test Laboratory.

A structural qualification model of the full stack was clamped to a “shaker table” inside a clean room at JPL and repeatedly rattled in three directions while hundreds of sensors monitored the rapid movement. Then, inside a separate acoustic testing chamber, giant horns blared at it from openings built into the room’s 16-inch-thick (41-centimeter-thick) concrete walls. The horns use compressed nitrogen gas to pummel spacecraft with up to 153 decibels, noise loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in a human.

• Relatedly, the company announced recently that the mission’s lander will host Volta Space’s CSA-funded wireless power receiver aboard. It’s a technology demonstrator ahead of building receivers for a planned lunar power network and service called LightGrid. It’s unclear when will Firefly launch in 2026 since the spacecraft stack’s flight model hasn’t been built yet.
• Slow but some progress continues on the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat as the agency has shared that it successfully tested powering on the station’s critical Power and Propulsion Element at some unspecified time last year. This element’s solar-electric propulsion system will not only maneuver and attitude-control the Gateway but also provide power and communications for astronauts aboard the station. Gateway’s initiating launch is targeted around 2028.
• Jack Congram reports that the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) trained 28 taikonauts in cave training exercises in Wulong, Chongqing last month to mentally prepare them for upcoming crewed missions, which are aimed to begin from the end of this decade. Wu Bin, the deputy chief designer of astronaut systems at the China Astronautic Scientific Research and Training Center (CARTC), stated the training’s rationale as follows for an official state release:

The training was designed to sharpen astronauts’ capabilities in hazard response, autonomous operation, teamwork, emergency decision making and scientific survey, as well as to improve physical endurance and mental toughness in extreme environments. It was also a comprehensive evaluation of them.

More Moon

• US-based Intuitive Machines and Europe-based Leonardo & Telespazio have agreed to have interoperability between their future communications and navigation orbiters, a welcome move since Moon missions can be cheaper, safer, and better if more countries share navigation and timing infrastructure.
• NASA is soliciting industry-wide feedback for considering a v2 of its CLPS program.
• Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) is hiring a Development Director to support the non-profit’s building of policy infrastructure blocks, like the Lunar Ledger, for peaceful and cooperative global exploration of the Moon.

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• Reviewing Mangalyaan, India’s first Mars mission
• India’s Mars orbiter completes six years at the red planet, but where is the science?
  • Debate: Mangalyaan’s low science output still reflects on ISRO
  • Mangalyaan spacecraft terminated—it was never a science mission
• My article on Mangalyaan was rejected 8 times but I published it anyway

• Views of Mars from India's Mangalyaan orbiter
• Book review: Those magnificent women and their stories that must be told

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Alright, with that in mind, here’s a comprehensive and contextualized list of upcoming lunar rovers & mobile robots from around the world, categorized as small, sophisticated, and astronaut-supporting. To learn more about any rover, click its link—that’s what the Web is for. :)

Small but mighty

• Building on the success of its first Moon landing, US-based Firefly’s next three lunar landers, all part of NASA’s CLPS program, will carry rovers. The second Firefly lander will carry UAE’s Rashid 2 rover to the Moon’s farside whereas the third lander will deploy Honeybee Robotics’ first planetary rover on one of the two Gruithuisen Domes, a unique volcanic site on the lunar nearside. Firefly’s fourth lander, heading to the lunar south pole, will carry a versatile CubeRover from US-based Astrobotic called Moonranger and Canada’s first lunar rover through CSA. NASA has also awarded future contracts for Astrobotic CubeRovers to demonstrate power transmission and lunar night survival.
• Intuitive Machines’ third Moon landing attempt will be in the swirl of Reiner Gamma in 2026. The region has a weak local magnetic field, possibly a remnant from the time the Moon had a global magnetic field. The mission’s primary payload suite is Lunar Vertex, a collection of spectrometers and magnetometers on the lander and a rover to study the swirl’s composition and map the strength & direction of magnetic fields on the surface. This will shape our understanding of the Moon’s magnetic evolution and also help us better understand the effects of solar wind and bombarding micrometeorites on planetary bodies across our Solar System. The Intuitive lander will also deploy three shoebox-sized CADRE rovers by NASA. The rovers will autonomously navigate the landed region to demonstrate collectively better mapping it than a single rover would. The rovers will have multistatic ground penetrating radars to create 3D images of the subsurface structure up to 10 meters deep.
• Later on, ispace US’ first CLPS mission through Draper Laboratory is targeting landing on the Moon’s farside in 2027, carrying NASA payloads onboard as well as a rover from ispace Europe.
• China’s Chang’e 8 lander, targeting a 2028 launch, will deploy Pakistan’s first rover and two small mobile bots from private Chinese company STAR.VISION. The latter is being developed in collaboration with universities from China and Turkey. This would be the first payload from a Chinese company flying on a Chang’e spacecraft.
• NASA has announced that on the future crewed Artemis IV Moon landing mission, the astronauts will also deploy a rover made by Lunar Outpost, which will study lunar dust and surface plasma.
• Australia’s first lunar rover called Roo-ver—made with involvement from US-based Lunar Outpost—will launch by 2030 on an as-yet-unidentified CLPS lander to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice.
• An as-yet-unspecified CLPS rover is intended to study the unique mound-like volcanic feature of Ina on the Moon by the end of this decade as well.
• South Korea’s first Moon lander plans to deploy a rover on the Moon by 2032 though details are unavailable at the moment. The country’s interest is certainly substantial though since South Korea is transforming its former mining site of Taebaek into a testing ground for advanced mobile lunar exploration technologies, owing to the mine’s environmental resemblance to the darkness, coldness, and ruggedness of the Moon’s south pole.

Sophisticated

• Launching this year, China’s Chang’e 7 mission will have a rover sporting an intended eight-year lifespan and a panoramic camera, a Raman spectrometer, a ground penetrating radar, a mass spectrometer, and a magnetometer to explore the Moon’s south pole and map water ice. The Chang’e 7 lander will also deploy a small hopper with shock absorbing legs. It will jump into nearby permanently shadowed areas for its onboard Lunar Water Molecular Analyzer (LWMA) to detect water ice and other volatile resources like ammonia. Chang’e 7 will be China’s first attempt to gain such a ground truth understanding of the accessibility, movement, and storage of surface and near-surface water ice on the Moon’s poles, which is crucial to appropriately plan sustained robotic as well as crewed lunar exploration. Virtually all recent missions funded by NASA have failed to advance on this goal despite it being the foundational to the US Artemis program.
• Two years after Chang’e 7, the Chang’e 8 lander will deploy a rover and a dextrous mobile robot to characterize with many instruments the lunar south polar geology and environment. The dextrous robot will melt lunar soil, make 3D-printed parts and bricks from it, and use those to assemble basic structures. That’s a fantastic sounding first demonstration of in-situ utilization of lunar resources. The robot will also fetch rock and soil samples for the lander’s spectrometers to determine their chemical composition, which will likely include water ice. CNSA might leave some intriguing samples on the Moon for future missions to retrieve them and bring them to Earth.
• Astrobotic’s large Griffin lander aims to land on the Moon’s south pole as part of NASA CLPS later this year. It will deploy the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested last year after NASA decided not to fly the critical VIPER rover for studying water ice aboard Griffin. NASA has now tentatively chosen Blue Origin’s second Mark I lander to hopefully fly VIPER in 2027.

• The joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX rover mission later this decade plans to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission will bring a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA, and it can provide NASA with critical data that is currently missing in Artemis planning.
• As an aside, ispace’s European subsidiary led team won a ~€2.7 million ESA contract to collaborate with the agency on the MAGPIE rover mission to study lunar polar water ice and other such volatiles. The mission is not official yet.

Astronaut support

• NASA plans to have a competitively sourced, cutting-edge Lunar Terrain Vehicle being used by Artemis astronauts across missions starting at the end of this decade. It will be a giant leap in roving range, terrain handling, and lift capacity over the Apollo rover.
• China is progressing with prototypes of a competitively sourced crewed rover to be used during the country’s ambitious first human Moon landing by 2030.
• JAXA will provide NASA with an even more advanced rover next decade, which will be pressurized, enabling astronauts to spend weeks in it. In return, NASA has agreed to land two Japanese astronauts on the Moon.
• CSA wants in on that strategy too. The agency has, so far, awarded initial study contracts totaling $10.6 million to three companies—Canadensys, MDA Space, and Mission Control—towards developing a “Lunar Utility Vehicle” (LUV). This kickstarted Canada’s intent from 2023 to invest $1.2 billion over 13 years to develop an assistance rover for future Artemis astronauts. Canada hopes that just like how contributing their Canadarm3 robotics servicing system to the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat bagged seats for their astronauts on circumlunar Artemis missions, contributing a large, durable LUV rover for Artemis surface missions will enable a Canadian to walk on the Moon.
• While not a rover, Italy’s 15,000-kilogram astronaut habitat module being made for Artemis Basecamp usage next decade will have wheels so it can reposition itself as needed on the dynamically lit lunar polar surface.

So that was a comprehensive look at all the rovers promising to explore the Moon over the next 10 years. I wrote it for you, not social media or SEO, and so if you enjoyed my coverage, please share it with other space buffs by grabbing this link.

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• The joint Indo-Japanese Chandrayaan 5 LUPEX mission will drill for water on the Moon
• JAXA welcomed us into the era of precision Moon landings
  • How ISRO aided this feat
• Japan’s road to landing astronauts on the Moon

• The need for resilience in private Moon landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing
• On the intersection of ispace, NASA CLPS, funding, and science
• On ispace’s failed Moon landing attempt and related tangents for NASA CLPS

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A descent energetic yet graceful
methodical and careful
Spawned from the blue marble verse
you bring the best in us.

Poem notes: I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working with amazing editors, bosses, and managers over my space writing career across organizations and media publications worldwide. I wrote this poem recently to appreciate someone I’ve worked with and learnt from last year. Though the gratitude in my verses is also meant for others who have shaped me and my words. :)

If you liked this space poetry of mine, read Seven uni-verses, my globally published poetry pamphlet.

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

About & Read →

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Alright, let’s dive into our worldwide lunar tour. If someone asks you what’s happening at the Moon, say all of this is. When you see this global activity in one place, the scale of the world’s march to explore Luna really hits home. 🌏

China

• Chinese researchers published a volcano of novel lunar science results based on freshly fetched Chang’e 6 Moon samples, and presented it at a symposium. These findings have changed our understanding of our Moon’s origin and evolution, and have helped scientists globally identify new, specific measurements future missions should make for better outcomes.
• China also announced the first set of international organizations whose proposals were selected to study unique lunar samples fetched to Earth by CNSA’s Chang’e 5 mission in 2020. And the nation displayed Chang’e samples at the United Nations headquarters for the first time.
• China progressed on many elements which will help it land humans on the Moon by 2030, notably including successful tests of the launchpad escape system, lander propulsion, and the rocket booster core stage.
• The country cemented and further advanced its lead in building a lunar communications and navigation network, demonstrated automated navigation at the Moon, and achieved the first ever daytime Earth-Moon laser distance measurements with a retroreflector on a lunar orbiter.
• China progressed well in preparations towards the launch of its Chang’e 7 mission to the Moon’s south pole in the second half of next year as planned to study water ice and other volatile resources.
• Building on Chang’e 7’s international cooperation, CNSA announced more international payloads that will be onboard the Chang’e 8 mission to further explore the Moon’s south pole starting 2028.

The US

• With rigor and abundant caution, Firefly’s Blue Ghost spacecraft part of NASA’s CLPS program brought the first true soft landing for the US in the 21st century, involving operations of its science & technology payloads, a precision landing, the first GPS/GNSS lock on the Moon, and a stunning solar eclipse capture. Firefly also won its fourth CLPS Moon landing contract, which will deliver three NASA-funded instruments as well as two rovers to the Moon’s south pole end of decade.
• In March, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS craft hard-landed on the Moon’s south pole and came to rest on its side, which led to the mission being unsuccessful across all of NASA’s primary goals of studying local water ice.
• NASA completed a majority of the preparations and safety improvements planned this year to fly four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back sometime early next year.
• Due to three back-to-back failures of SpaceX Starship, an explosion during testing, and another booster lost, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon with Artemis III significantly slowed down. This led NASA’s Acting Administrator Sean Duffy to reopen the landing contract for accelerated proposals. Duffy also named Amit Kshatriya as the agency’s new Associate Administrator to accelerate Artemis III. Kshatriya previously led NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office for planning and implementing Artemis missions.
• In the meanwhile, Blue Origin’s successful launch of its New Glenn rocket in January followed by another in November finally opened up a second line of pursuit for NASA to send lunar astronauts vis-à-vis Blue Moon. Blue Origin aims to launch its first robotic Blue Moon ‘Mark I’ lander next year as testing and design validations ahead of crewed flights. Based on that, NASA tentatively chose Blue’s second Mark I lander flight to carry the agency’s VIPER rover, whose mission to study polar water ice has been critical yet deprioritized.
• The Trump administration’s budget request for NASA for FY 2026 proposed a historic ~25% cut while the agency went a whole year without an official Administrator. Notably, the Moon-related proposals of the budget and its evaluations do nothing to address the fact that the US has been failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis.
• After nearly six months of trying to establish communications with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft post its February launch, NASA declared an end to the rescue efforts and the mission. The agency-funded Trailblazer was supposed to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global orbital maps of the amount, distribution, and state of lunar water.
• In February, Blue Origin simulated two minutes of lunar gravity inside the New Shepard crew capsule. NASA funded this project, and tested 17 lunar-relevant payloads onboard. As such, NASA continues leveraging New Shepard’s suborbital flights to help verify and refine new lunar technologies at relatively low costs before they can be sent to the Moon.
• NASA un-nuked its decision to not use nuclear power on the Moon. Relatedly, Zeno Power raised $50 million, a major chunk of which will go towards developing and demonstrating the company’s nuclear electric power system on the Moon for NASA by 2027.

India

• Results from the thermal probe experiment on India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander expanded the possible locations for finding water ice beyond the Moon’s poles, thereby benefiting future scouting missions. There are also several notable outcomes from other instruments on the lander.
• The Chandrayaan 3 rover may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material when studying the composition of the local lunar soil using its X-ray spectrometer.
• ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped international researchers produce a galore of science results, notably including continued characterization of the lunar poles using its advanced radar to map potential water ice deposits and gauge surface roughness, densities, and porosities. The orbiter also helped scientists better understand the Sun’s activity and how it affects the Moon’s exosphere.
• ISRO continued development and planning of the ambitious Chandrayaan 4 mission to bring lunar polar samples—albeit at a slower pace than expected.
• India finally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission will bring a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA, and it can provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions.
• ISRO revealed its eventual crewed Moon mission’s initial architecture.

More Asia-Pacific

• ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE crashed on the Moon due to performance issues of the laser rangefinder. The outcome underscores the need for resilience in private lunar landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing. ispace notably continued its remarkable transparency from the first failed landing attempt, sharing detailed findings of what went wrong in mere weeks.
• In October, Japan successfully demonstrated a cargo delivery to the International Space Station using its next-generation HTV-X spacecraft. A variant of it called HTV-X(G) will deliver astronaut supplies to the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat starting 2030.
• ispace was selected as part of Japan’s 1-trillion yen “Space Strategy Fund” initiative to develop, launch, and operate a lunar orbiter which will use a terahertz wave sensor system to locate and map water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. Data from this orbiter will be analyzed in tandem with direct surface and subsurface measurements made by the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX mission.
• South Korea approved plans made by the country’s newly forged space agency KASA to build a Moon lander by 2032 as part of a broader $500+ million annual investment in indigenous space technologies. South Korea is also transforming the former mining site of Taebaek into a testing ground for advanced mobile lunar exploration technologies, owing to the mine’s environmental resemblance to the darkness, coldness, and ruggedness of the Moon’s south pole.
• The Australian Space Agency (ASA) continues funding local companies to build lunar technologies. In February, ASA particularly supported EntX to develop a radioisotope heater unit to enable future landers and rovers to survive frigid lunar nights.

Europe

• ESA started testing instruments, mission concepts, modern astronaut tools, and water ice detection strategies at its new, versatile Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany. A simulated habitat module now adjoins LUNA to better test complex mission scenarios wherein humans and robots interact in varied ways for long periods so as to plan future Moonbases.
• ispace’s European subsidiary led team won a ~€2.7 million ESA contract to collaborate with the agency on the MAGPIE rover mission to study lunar polar water ice and other such volatiles.
• In January, ESA announced a $882 million contract to a European consortium led by Thales Alenia Space for developing the Lunar Descent Element of the agency’s upcoming large Moon lander Argonaut. Launching no earlier than 2031, Argonaut plans to deploy about 2,000 kilograms of infrastructure payloads or astronaut supplies on the Moon with each flight.
• The Italian Space Agency (ASI) awarded a preliminary design contract to a group led by Thales Alenia Space to develop a multi-purpose astronaut habitat module which will be part of NASA’s hoped for Artemis Basecamp on the Moon next decade. The 15,000-kilogram module will have wheels so it can reposition itself as needed on the dynamically lit lunar polar surface.

Collaboration and cooperation progress

• The US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration reached 60 signatories.
• China hosted an international symposium on lunar samples with the right intent and effort to enhance its planetary science cooperation. China also formally welcomed India to cooperate on Moon missions and the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project.
  • Relatedly, I delivered a talk at a lunar samples symposium in Hong Kong on the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission and made the case for India and China to exchange lunar samples. 🌜..<>..🌛
• Cooperative analog astronaut missions and related training continued worldwide.
• ESA and NASA progressed on building technologies for future lunar construction.
• An assortment of lunar papers from around the world
  • Also see: Our Moon’s wild places and wonderful samples
• Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) launched the Lunar Ledger (Registry) project. The Ledger aims to be a database of global lunar objects and activities to improve mission operator transparency by enhancing information sharing wherever possible.
• A great example of asynchronous collaboration: To enable efficient exploration by small lunar rovers, which have limited resources and function under the harsh lunar environment, the Japan-based company JAOPS built a lunar surface simulation suite (here’s a demo video) aided by simulated rover camera and sensor data and past missions. This is helping train rover operators amid real mission control setups. Notably, much of the work is open source on GitHub and also converges open source elements from actors worldwide.

Cooperation shortfalls

• We’re building future technologies for the Moon without closing missed milestones. 🕳️
• Western media narratives misrepresent Chinese space, which reduces trust and deters cooperation and collaboration. Also see Jack Congram’s piece China is not racing to the Moon. Moreover, Erika Nesvold made the case of the US not having presented a coherent argument for the country’s self-imposed claim of defeating China in the new lunar “Space Race”.
• Why Moon missions need their own Wikipedia and beyond and improved information sharing
  • Also see: Science does not exist in a (lunar) vacuum
• A giant leap in orbital imagery is what we need to realize advanced Moon missions
  • Moon missions can be cheaper, safer, and better if more countries share navigation and timing infrastructure. Relatedly, US-based Intuitive Machines and Europe-based Leonardo & Telespazio agreed to have interoperability between their communications and navigation orbiters.

So that was a comprehensive look at all the ways countries explored our Moon this year. I wrote it for you, not social media or SEO. If you enjoyed my coverage, please share it with other space buffs by grabbing this link.

Lastly, do not ever forget:

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Orbital launches and shortfalls

• ISRO successfully launched the cutting-edge & collaborative NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite in July, and initialized its Earth observation operations shortly after.
• The agency also launched a communications satellite in November.
• India’s workhorse PSLV rocket failed in May, triggering multiple mission delays since the launch vehicle’s modules and component designs are also utilized by other ISRO rockets. ISRO did not share any specific findings of the PSLV’s failure analysis through the remainder year.
• Considering numerous launch delays over the last 10 years, a review of the state of ISRO’s space rockets reveals a bleak picture of ambitious goals sliding to the right—in stark contrast to the incessant chest thumping about efficiency.
• In January, the Indian Government Union Cabinet approved the establishment of a third launch pad at India’s Sriharikota spaceport for $460 million. After it’s ready by end of decade, it will be used for additional launches of the LVM3 rocket as well as for the later arrival of the in-development heavy-lift NGLV rocket which requires horizontal integration.

Human-to-space flight

• Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla flew to the International Space Station—but was it worth it for ISRO? [Analysis]
• In preparation towards indigenously launching astronauts to space later this decade, ISRO completed parachute deployment tests of the Gaganyaan crew module with an intentionally delayed deployment scenario and an abort mode so as to qualify the system for extreme situations.
• ISRO also successfully completed development of the Gaganyaan service module’s propulsion system in July. The flight module would feature five 440-newton engines and sixteen 100-newton reaction control thrusters. Post Gaganyaan mission launches, the module will inject astronauts in the Crew Module into orbit, circularize it to a 400-kilometer altitude and maintain it, and eventually de-boost the crew module for Earth return before separating from it.

Chandrayaan progress

• Results from the thermal probe experiment on India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander expanded the possible locations for finding water ice beyond the Moon’s poles, thereby benefiting future scouting missions. There are also several notable outcomes from other instruments on the lander.
• The Chandrayaan 3 rover may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material when studying the composition of the local lunar soil using its X-ray spectrometer.
• ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped international researchers produce a galore of science results, notably including continued characterization of the lunar poles using its advanced radar to map potential water ice deposits and also gauge surface roughness, densities, and porosities. The orbiter also helped scientists better understand the Sun’s activity and how it affects the Moon’s exosphere.
• ISRO continued development and planning of the ambitious Chandrayaan 4 mission to bring lunar polar samples—albeit at a slower pace than expected.
• India approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission will bring a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA, and it can provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions.
• ISRO revealed its eventual crewed Moon mission’s initial architecture.

Satellites up and down

• January’s unfortunate failure of the next-generation NVS-02 satellite left India’s NavIC national satellite navigation system in an even more incomplete and underperforming state. ISRO did not share the findings of the NVS-02 failure analysis throughout the year.
• ISRO successfully docked and undocked its twin SPADEX (space docking experiment) satellites and demonstrated power transfer between them, achieving milestones in preparation for Chandrayaan 4 and complex multi-module coordinations required for human spaceflight.
• ISRO released its internal ‘Space Situational Assessment Report’ for the year 2024, whose public executive summary published in May talks about the agency continuing to dynamically dodge orbital debris, avoid congestion, and prevent collisions.
• India’s newest space-based telescopes Aditya-L1 and XPoSat continued uniquely observing solar explosions and cosmic bursts respectively. In January, ISRO released the first datasets from Aditya-L1 on the agency’s ISSDC and PRADAN portals. XPoSat data became available from October.

Private and commercial space

• The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s Transporter 12 launch in January carried five payloads from private Indian companies, including three hyperspectral satellites for Earth observation from Pixxel Space called Fireflies, Digantara’s SCOT satellite for space-based object tracking and situational awareness, and XDLINX Space Labs’ Elevation-1 satellite touting an advanced miniaturized communications payload. Pixxel launched three more Fireflies on another Falcon 9 in August.
• Skyroot progressed through multiple testing milestones of various modules of its Vikram-I rocket, and finally seems set to attempt its first orbital launch in Q1 2026 assuming no more hiccups.
  • Related: Challenges for small rocket companies in India
• After conducting their first orbital demonstration of edge-computing-based smart Earth imaging last year, Bengaluru- and Cupertino-based SkyServe tested NASA JPL’s AI models in space through their software platform on a partner satellite.
• The Indian government through private space promoter and regulator IN-SPACe launched a ~$57 million “Technology Adoption Fund” to encourage the private sector to develop and manufacture space components that can help India reduce its reliance on foreign imports while commercializing them. These funds will be provided on a co-investment basis.

Cooperation and collaboration

• China formally welcomed India to cooperate on Moon missions and the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project.
• Relatedly, I delivered a talk at a lunar samples symposium in Hong Kong on the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission and made the case for India and China to exchange lunar samples. 🌜..<>..🌛
• Since last year, ISRO, in collaboration with organizations like Protoplanet, formally started terrestrial testing for what living and conducting research on the Moon and Mars could be like for its astronauts via baseline analog missions at dry and mountainous Ladakh, adding to global efforts.
• ISRO provided ground tracking support for Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 Moon landing mission part of NASA’s CLPS program.
• Former ISRO Chief K. Kasturirangan passed away in April. His numerous contributions to India’s space program span astrophysics, Earth observation and communications satellites, operationalization of the PSLV rocket, the first GLSV flight test, and laying the foundations for India’s first planetary mission and space telescope as Chandrayaan 1 and AstroSat respectively.

So that was a sweeping look at India’s space activities in 2025. I wrote this for you, not social media or SEO. If you liked my coverage, please share it with other space buffs by grabbing this link.

Aside: I’m giving a talk with Q&A on the history and future of lunar exploration in my hometown Mumbai on Sunday, December 21. On popular demand from Pint of View, this a repeat of the session I conducted in Bangalore past September. The event is offline-only to make the audience comfortable in engaging freely with their curiosities. Bring all your questions about our Moon and how we’re exploring it in India and worldwide! For my readers, the hosts have voluntarily offered a 10% discount with the coupon code “MOONMONDAY”. (Note: My honorarium for the talk is fixed regardless of the tickets sold so there are no commission incentives for me sharing this.)

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Mission updates

• Since US President Donald Trump renominated Jared Isaacman last month for the NASA Administrator position, after abruptly withdrawing his first nomination earlier this year just as the US Congress was about to confirm said position, Isaacman went through his second confirmation hearing last week in the US Senate on a similar vein to his first one. Marcia Smith reports the full US Senate vote can be expected before December 19 to confirm Isaacman’s new job as the head of the premier US space agency. In the meanwhile, the US Congress continued its incessant red hearings about how the US has to beat China in landing humans the Moon, displaying a clear lack of any other core motivation to explore our Moon for itself or “for humanity” as is often claimed.
• ispace Japan has shared a tentative schedule for its next set of Moon missions, including confirmed and anticipated ones through its US subsidiary which can carry NASA CLPS payloads. The next launch to watch out for is ispace US’ first CLPS mission through US-based Draper Laboratory. It’s targeting landing on the Moon’s farside in 2027, carrying NASA payloads onboard as well as another rover from ispace Europe. ispace US will also provide ground communications and relay services for the mission. The ones after that are as follows:

• NASA announced that on the future crewed Artemis IV Moon landing mission, the astronauts will deploy two competitively selected scientific payloads costing $25 million each. These are:
  • DUSTER, comprising a lunar dust analyzer and plasma monitoring instrument duo which will be mounted on a rover made by Lunar Outpost
  • SPSS, a seismic station succeeding and exceeding the one on Artemis III to better understand Moonquakes and what they teach us about the lunar interior and safety of future astronauts.

More Moon

• Astrobotic plans to integrate special imaging sensors across its future landers as well as other hardware on the Moon to track spacecraft in low lunar orbit for the US government.
• NASA awarded University of Alabama a potential $37 million contract to develop freezers for bringing Artemis lunar polar samples to Earth with a minimum high fidelity.
• An interesting article by the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor): An affordable approach to lunar timekeeping in an accelerating industry
• While this article reviewing India’s space rockets is written more in the Indian space context, the assessment and arguments have direct implications for India’s planning of its increasingly complex series of Chandrayaan missions leading up to the goal of sending humans to the Moon circa 2040, which is discussed in the final sections along with ISRO’s current architecture.

Make no mistake, it will be the pinnacle of India’s space program if it launches humans to the Moon circa 2040. Imagine that future for a moment. The only country in the world after the US and China to achieve the immense feat, and one bagged within 100 years of independence from colonial claws. Had ISRO’s founder Vikram Sarabhai been alive, he’d probably tear up at the sight of this feat. He’d also know that a scalable heavy-lift rocket investment was indispensable so that India could orchestrate the increasingly complex sprawls of its space program.

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ISRO’s Chief, and more importantly simultaneously the Secretary of India’s Department of Space (DOS), recently stated that India will be able to launch 50 orbital rockets every year by 2029. As a number that sounds fantastic and is coming from the country’s topmost space official, media outlets in India and abroad propagated the news. This isn’t the first time official claims have been made on growing India’s national space launch capacity. Previous official claims and targets include almost 30 launches in two years during this decade and one almost a decade ago of lofting a rocket every month. Virtually every media outlet tracking space nationally and internationally covered these claims too, without checking and reporting later on if any of them were actually realized.

So what’s the maximum number of successful launches ISRO has conducted in a year? Less than 10. Likewise, ISRO’s payload lift capacity has also expanded slower than expected, meaning continued reliance on foreign rockets to launch the nation’s heaviest satellites. It has kinked ISRO’s core mandate of achieving full self sufficiency for the country’s civil as well as strategic missions. The low launch frequency and capacity combined has also affected strategic programs such as the NavIC national satellite navigation system, which has been lingering in an incomplete and underperforming state for years now. The unfortunate failure of the next-generation NVS-02 satellite earlier this year only worsened the situation.

In the meanwhile, recent big ticket successes in other domains of space such as the epitome that was Chandrayaan 3’s landing on the Moon soared India’s civil space ambitions and vision to include the Bharatiya Anthariksh Station (BAS) astronaut habitat in Earth orbit and even humans on the Moon by the end of the next decade. [Translations for non-Indian readers: Bharat = India and Anthariksh = Space in Hindi and several other Indian languages].

How can India grow its space launch capabilities and performance to realize its faster expanding ambitions while ensuring its fundamental needs across civil and strategic space domains are met?

A launch trifecta

To fulfill the nation’s needs and wants in space, three conditions of launch capacity need to be achieved simultaneously:

1. Have substantially greater lift mass. The current maximum, by India’s most powerful rocket Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), is only ~8,000 kilograms to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and barely above 4,000 kilograms to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). For comparison, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and China’s Long March 5 each have more than double LVM3’s lift performance. Amping up the lift capacities of India’s rockets will allow the country to launch all of its heavy satellites by itself, loft multiple sizable satellites at once, and also execute complex human spaceflight & planetary missions which require heavy spacecraft and modules to be increasingly meaningful.
2. Increased launch cadence, the other side of the coin to greater lift capacity. A high launch frequency is a core requirement to sustain crewed space habitats, build and maintain constellations, and—crucially—execute multiple projects in parallel. Having more number of launchpads is necessary to enable high launch frequency, especially to avoid single points of failure or choke points.
3. Have dissimilar design redundancy in launch vehicles so that failure of one rocket doesn’t stall launches of others, like the case of the recent PSLV failure due to its modules and component designs also being utilized by other ISRO rockets. Versatile launch vehicles also automatically imply having more and flexible launchpads.

It may be tempting to point to the US and its fleet of medium-lift and heavy-lift rockets as the embodiment of this launch capacity trifecta. But when you consider the last 10 years of global spaceflight, the Falcon 9’s exceptional performance has been an anomaly. More so when you remove the fact that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are what self-generate high demand for the company’s rockets. Without the Falcon 9 and its relatively sparsely used derivative Falcon Heavy, the rest of the US rocket fleet has not been a spectacle. Certainly not a sustained one. Either way, India simply has neither the sheer funds nor the aerospace industrial strength of America to model the country’s launch capacity on the US rocket portfolio and program management style.

However, China’s multi-faceted approach of prioritizing multi-launcher availability over per-rocket efficiency comes close enough to meeting the three conditions of ideal launch prowess. China’s wide range of national rockets spawned from internal competition and spread across multiple launch sites have allowed it to innovate from Earth orbit to the Moon & beyond in parallel. In the last few years, state-catalyzed operational commercial launchers have also entered the turf, successfully supplementing the country’s launch capacity and frequency. In fact, space launch statistics from 2024 and 2025 show that these non-national Sino orbital rockets alone have launched more times than India could manage across its entire ISRO and private fleet during that period. If we include China’s more frequent & capable national launches of its Long March rockets which support a diversity of national projects, India’s output pales in comparison.

Put another way, China is already doing what India wants and needs: simultaneously maintain strategic space assets, undertake ambitious civil human and planetary exploration missions, and launch commercial & private rockets. Furthermore, just last month China successfully demonstrated an emergency launch to ensure astronaut safety at its space station. It was a grateful verification of working redundancy measures. To reduce the con of cost in its current approach, the country is also on the cusp of achieving reusability within a year with not just one but multiple rocket boosters. Instead of relying on a single flagship rocket like the Falcon 9, China’s resilient orbit access approach is more suitable and desirable for India to draw from.

A shortfall of performance and timing

In October when India indigenously launched its heaviest single satellite yet, it was celebrated as an “efficient” implementation which “tricked” the LVM3 rocket into carrying more weight on its shoulders to GTO than it could otherwise. Of course, the laws of physics haven’t changed. The reality is that said communications satellite, CMS-03, was dropped into a sub-GTO orbit. And so it had to raise its orbit to achieve the desired altitude, a forced maneuver inevitably reducing the satellite’s would-be lifespan.

Had the long-promised upgrade of the LVM3 with a semi-cryogenic core stage engine been realized on time, or even a few years late, it would have unequivocally increased CMS-03’s lifespan. More broadly and importantly, the upgraded vehicle would help India achieve its civil space goals in human spaceflight and lunar exploration faster since both the Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return mission and India’s first space station module explicitly rely on this yet-to-be-upgraded LVM3 to be available. Now a new report by Sidharth MP claims that India might buy semi-cryogenic engines from Russia for the LVM3 core stage upgrade, suggesting a possible change from the country’s ongoing efforts consistently projected to be achieving “breakthroughs”. However, ISRO is yet to officially comment on this matter. Either way, a semi-cryogenic LVM3 core stage is not sitting on the near-term horizon.

Since 2017, when it first launched as a complete vehicle, LVM3 has lifted off Earth only seven times. Its low production capacity and launch readiness—though acknowledged and stated to be increased—has already led to the delayed launch of Chandrayaan 3 as well as the postponing of India’s upcoming, scientifically important Venus orbiter mission by five years.

A small but important aspect the LVM3 did demonstrate during the CMS-03 mission post-satellite-deployment was to reignite the thrust chamber of the upper stage—but the engine did not restart. This is part of ISRO’s ongoing effort to have multiple engine restarts of the upper stage for future missions. It will be a useful capability for complex orbital deployments of satellites as well as for de-orbiting the rocket stage to ensure space sustainability. But this capability too is coming later than expected, and only gradually so.

Small yet not nimble

Even ISRO’s new SSLV rocket dedicated to launching small satellites has taken more time to be operationalized commercially than projected while its direct global competitors like Rocket Lab and Firefly moved ahead. ISRO through its commercial arm NSIL had said it would launch at least five SSLVs this year. It launched none.

To improve the SSLV’s launch rate and lift capacity, ISRO is making a dedicated launchpad optimized for polar orbits and is also aiming to production-ize the SSLV through a technology transfer contract with Indian aerospace industry giant HAL. But the fruits of these efforts are not expected until at least 2028, which is when the new launchpad is supposed to host its first orbital launch. And that’s assuming no further delays for the pad that’s already slipped past an originally intended 2025 debut. By 2028, the small satellite launch market will also evolve to have fiercer competition.

A similar intent of industry-driven production for ISRO’s workhorse PSLV rocket too hasn’t manifested yet, with the first demonstration flight slipping by at least two years after initially targeting 2024. There has also been no official clarity for years on the realization timeline of the upcoming reusable spaceplane called Pushpak, specifically as to when it will move beyond its current terrestrial subscale landing tests by launching to orbit and subsequently becoming operational. Even though India’s workhorse PSLV rocket failed in May, triggering multiple mission delays since the launch vehicle’s modules and component designs are also utilized by other ISRO rockets, the agency did not share any specific findings of the PSLV’s failure analysis through the remainder year.

Claims by private rockets companies in India like from Skyroot and Agnikul about their orbital launch readiness have sadly been in Elon Musk times. Both companies missed the year 2025 as well for their first orbital launch attempts against their own revised projections. Now, one does need to account for the fact that India’s private orbital launch companies are fighting an uphill battle in a constrained financial environment. These companies are not state-catalyzed technologically either like the Chinese launchers are, thus taking time to gestate. Skyroot finally seems set to attempt its first orbital launch in Q1 2026. Even though maiden orbital launches of new rockets globally have a poor track record, I hope it achieves a successful trajectory.

Even when India’s private companies eventually launch successfully and then hopefully operationalize soon, it’s doubtful if small lift launchers have a sizable market to serve to begin with in order to be revenue positive. Instead of supplementing national capacity in the vein of Sino commercial rockets and turning Indian launches into a good export business, these might end up directly battling against ISRO’s own SSLV rocket for the small number of small launch customers. In the meanwhile, claims about demand and expected profits from these companies have kept soaring but the reality is most of them might not make it in their current forms. It would be better if ISRO instead technologically catalyzed these rocket companies to let them innovate faster and thus expand national launch offerings instead of the companies being left to reinvent wheels that may not even be round.

The next decade and NGLV

As is evident by the trajectories of India’s rockets in the last 10 years, even though a trickle of efficiencies have come in here and there, the overall launch output has grown far slower than projected, expected, and necessary. Especially when not isolated from the global context. Mukunth captured this well when he said in his own piece on the trajectory of India’s rockets:

The fact is the Indian space programme can take great strides and still remain uncompetitive with the other countries belonging to the same elite club to which it has repeatedly claimed to belong. While the U.S. and Russia (including the erstwhile USSR) had a head start of many decades, China, Japan, and Europe for a long time enjoyed more funding, technological sophistication or both [than India].

To work towards a change of scale, last year the Indian Government Union Cabinet did approve ISRO’s proposal to develop a partially reusable heavy-lift rocket for $982 million. Called the Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), the cryogenic rocket will be capable of lofting up to 30,000 kilograms to Low Earth Orbit in expendable mode, and 10,000 to 12,000 kilograms to GTO. That’s about thrice the oomph of the LVM3. The NGLV will also have engine restart capabilities; the booster will leverage that to return to Earth for launch reuse, and the upper stage will relight to perform complex orbital maneuvers and deployments. There are tentative plans for a version of the NGLV with powerful strap-on boosters, called NGLV-H, to further improve lift mass.

The Indian Government has also approved the building of a third launch pad at Sriharikota for $460 million, which will be used for NGLV launches. It will also provide LVM3 with a second launchpad. Combined, the NGLV and the upgraded LVM3 have the potential to approach the ideal trifecta of launch characteristics and thus meet India’s needs and ambitions in space.

However, ISRO is targeting the first half of the next decade to realize the NGLV and make it operational. A major part of it has to do with India’s long-constraining yearly space budget. The NGLV project’s budget allocations are distributed across many years, stretching the realization timeline beyond the fastest viable technical path. In other words, ISRO’s engineering talent will not be utilized efficiently due to fundamental budget constraints that have no viable technological design alternatives. Despite the recent government approvals of multiple ambitious national space projects, India’s space budget for FY 2025-26 essentially remains flat at about $1.5 billion. That’s less than a tenth of the funding enjoyed by both CNSA and NASA respectively.

To the Moon?

The budgetary reality hasn’t stopped India from becoming the third nation this century to announce the goal of sending humans to the Moon by itself. The official timeframe is 2040. Realizing monetary constraints, ISRO’s Moonshot approach is to explicitly not make an ultra expensive, single purpose Saturn V class mega rocket. Instead, ISRO will utilize docking of multiple spacecraft elements that are launched separately on maxed-out heavy-lift rockets to then achieve the same goal. This is a scaled up version of the docking-based architecture that Chandrayaan 4 will employ to fetch lunar samples later this decade. With this approach, the same rocket that launches humans to the Moon can also serve other projects in India’s space program, saving costs and ensuring efficient use of taxpayer money.

However, getting to repeatedly and reliably launching India’s largest rockets will still cost substantially more money by itself than is available to ISRO. Per the current but morphing plan, Moonbound Indian astronauts will blast off from Earth on a maxed out NGLV rocket variant. As will their lander in another such launch. Developing this central crewed Moon rocket in itself relies on the baseline NGLV launch vehicle coming online and becoming operational faster than its current official projections. Moreover, using a scaled up Chandrayaan 4 architecture implies having reliable back-to-back launches of the largest rocket India will have ever flown. And, redundancy for astronaut safety necessitates ensuring that an alternate launchpad is available for emergency launches and crew-cargo-supplies to Luna instead of just the one pad planned at the moment. The recent Soyuz rocket launch which damaged Russia’s singular launchpad for human spaceflight and associated cargo supplies reinforces the importance of this aspect.

As such, even without a super heavy-lift rocket to blow money onto, the minimum viable cadence and scale of heavy-lift launches necessary for sending crew safely to the Moon and back can neither come for cheap in itself nor can it be achieved with any amount of pure efficiency attained with subpar hardware. Let’s not forget that the small robotic Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft alone filled LVM3’s payload capacity to the brim. For a crewed Moon rocket, a giant leap is an immutable requirement.

Just like India bagged Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon by cutting through the cloud of Chandrayaan 2’s failure with an approach of expansive testing coupled with uncompromising performance, the time is here again to reinforce and scale that philosophy to the largest playground in space this century.

Make no mistake, it will be the pinnacle of India’s space program if it launches humans to the Moon circa 2040. Imagine that future for a moment. The only country in the world after the US and China to achieve the immense feat, and one bagged within 100 years of independence from colonial claws. Had ISRO’s founder Vikram Sarabhai been alive, he’d probably tear up at the sight of this feat. He’d also know that a scalable heavy-lift rocket investment was indispensable so that India could orchestrate the increasingly complex sprawls of its space program.

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Check my coverage of the volcano of new science results presented at the University of Hong Kong last weekend about what we’ve unlocked by studying such Chang’e lunar samples. And, my idea pitch there for India and China to exchange future Chandrayaan 4 lunar polar samples with Chang’e ones has garnered some interest at CAS. Here’s hoping something comes out of it if ISRO and CNSA decide to engage. 🚀

Mission updates

• NASA states that it has completed critical communications tests between the SLS rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and between them and the agency’s Deep Space Network ground stations in the lead up to preparations for launching four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back next year.
• SpaceX’s first Starship v3 booster stage got damaged during early testing on November 21, leading to yet another delay in SpaceX’s slow progress in working towards landing humans on the Moon for NASA.
• New datasets are available from NASA’s ultra-sensitive ShadowCam imager aboard South Korea’s first lunar orbiter KPLO. ShadowCam has been capturing unique observations of permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s poles to help scientists & engineers plan future surface resource prospecting missions.
• The lifespans of the upcoming Chang’e 7 orbiter and lander is designed to be at least eight years each! Thanks to Jack Congram for noting that in his coverage.

• ESA’s critical Ministerial Council meeting held last week to decide the space agency’s budget for the next three years went well as two dozen members (including Canada’s increased investment by 400%) cumulatively committed a record budget of €22.25 billion, a 17% increase over the previous 3-year budget for 2022-2025 when adjusted for inflation. However, the human and robotic exploration component of the budget is receiving only €2.98 billion, about €800 million less than was requested. As such, this will likely affect ESA’s robotic plans for lunar exploration such as Argonaut and Moonlight. In the best case, it will stretch their already delayed timelines further.
• In related and unsurprising news, ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher announced that the three ESA astronauts that will fly on future crewed Artemis missions will come from three biggest ESA contributors: Germany, France, and Italy. These three seats from NASA are in return for ESA’s contributions to the Artemis Orion spacecraft’s critical service module and for providing major parts of the upcoming NASA-led Gateway orbital habitat like the Lunar I-Hab, the Lunar Link communications module, and the Lunar View refueling and cargo module.

More Moon

• ESA tested use of multiple instruments to map water ice in a mock layered lunar simulant soil setup at the agency’s LUNA facility so as to optimize the detection and mapping approach of future missions going to the Moon’s poles.
• NASA is hosting a public challenge with prizes for solutions which will improve optical recognition of lunar craters, a technology employed by lunar landers to navigate with respect to identified terrain, avoid landing on hazardous craters and other such features, and land with precision.
• If you too want to change the frustrating misconception about people at large calling our Moon’s farside as its “dark side”, send them this rebuttal article by Ethan Siegel and blame Pink Floyd and the Transformers.

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To set the stage, here is a look at Moon samples from China’s Chang’e 5 nearside landing mission as well as the Chang’e 6 farside one. 🌙

The right intent

The ILSRS conference organizers were the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGG CAS). They made efforts to reach out to many scientists and people in lunar communities internationally to attend the symposium as the stated intent was to exchange lunar science findings with the global community and enhance international coordination mechanisms for planetary exploration in China. It’s precisely why the symposium was held in Hong Kong, which allows visa-free access for 170 countries worldwide (including India where I come from) as opposed to hosting one in mainland China for which a roundtrip might be more difficult, especially for US researchers. Even the symposium’s abstract submission format was identical to the popular US-based Lunar and Planetary Science Conference to make it easy for international as well as Chinese researchers to propose their findings to be evaluated for ILSRS talks and posters.

Fuyuan Wu, a leading organizer of ILSRS and a professor at IGG CAS, stressed when he said the following in his opening remarks:

There is a need for more international collaboration and information exchange in lunar exploration.

Guochun Zhao, a professor at HKU and a co-organizer of ILSRS, followed up with similar introductory remarks and noted the following:

No single nation can tackle the complexity of planetary exploration alone.

A volcano of lunar sample science findings

A study at the heart of ILSRS concerns Chang’e 6 samples helping determine the age of the massive South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin—within which the spacecraft landed—as 4.25 billion years. Spanning 2500 kilometers, the SPA basin is the Moon’s largest, deepest, and oldest impact crater. Researchers analyzed 1600 fragments from five grams of Chang’e 6 samples and found 20 relevant pieces to determine this truest age yet of the massive basin. SPA’s exact age and nature of formation has huge implications for understanding how our Moon evolved, and our Solar System too. Many implications were debated at the symposium to work towards a consensus on the next set of measurements we should make globally on future missions to advance this frontier. A presentation by Huijuan Zhang et al (abstract link) discussed one such aspect of structural and chemical differences between the interiors of farside and nearside lunar regions.

The impact that created the SPA was so colossal that scientists think it changed the physical and chemical makeup of the Moon’s mantle down to hundreds of kilometers. And that’s exactly what Chang’e 6 sample studies presented at ILSRS have found, such as a morphed mantle source for volcanism on the Moon’s farside. The dominant Chang’e 6 samples are lava bits which erupted ~1.4 billion years after the SPA event, which morphed the mantle. The Chang’e 6 volcanic materials thus exhibit a unique makeup compared to other volcanic lunar samples. A study of 16 fragments scooped up by Chang’e 6 found them severely lacking elements such as titanium and thorium.

James Head of Brown University presented puzzling findings and observations about young volcanic features on the Moon which are potentially only a few hundred million years old. Chang’e 5 samples have confirmed 2-billion-year old lunar volcanism on the Moon while also finding what seem like 120-million-year young volcanic beads. Collectively, these studies have opened up more enigmas about the Moon’s interior and its evolution. Head noted that combined with new observations from orbiters around the world—including Chandrayaan 2 and KPLO—these studies are helping set the stage for specific measurements to be made by a future NASA CLPS mission which will land in the unique volcanic place of Ina later this decade to help resolve some fundamental mysteries.

Quentin Parker of HKU presented about their upcoming 12U-CubeSat based Lunar Flash orbiter being built in collaboration with Chinese-mainland-based ASES. Largely funded by the Hong Kong government at almost $100 million HKD, the 100-kilometer altitude polar-orbiting satellite will monitor flashes of meteorite impacts on the Moon’s farside to determine its poorly constrained sizes, rate and potential impact (pun intended) on long-term robotic and crewed exploration. Combined with more such data from other missions, it will help us understand risk from micrometeorites to better plan future humans, habitats, and hardware on the Moon’s south pole. Relatedly, last year ESA approved the LUnar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) CubeSat mission with a similar purpose. ESA aims to launch LUMIO in 2027 to the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian point (EM-L2) from where it can continuously observe the Moon’s farside. The CubeSat also aims to demonstrate autonomously determining its position in space and navigating accordingly, independent of communications with Earth, something China pioneered with its DRO lunar craft recently.

Sen Hu of IGG CAS spoke about how the Moon’s farside mantle contains less water than within the nearside as measured by Chang’e 6 and 5 samples respectively. These new measurements have added to the debate on the topic by lending tactile credence to the hypothesis that our Moon indeed lost most of its water during its fiery formation. CASC’s previous news release on the Chang’e 6 study had noted how Francis McCubbin, NASA’s Astromaterials Curator and a peer reviewer of the paper, called the work “a landmark study on the water abundance of the lunar farside.”

Qi Zhao of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University presented how China is making the largest 3D image dataset of lunar regolith particles to date. Relatedly, Ke Xu of Peking University spoke about the importance of better modeling how volatiles diffuse in lunar soil and rock structures to efficiently study and utilize water ice on the Moon on future missions. This work also allows for more efficient studies of the same sample grains across multiple institutions, using what Ke Xu called the “facial recognition system for regolith particles”.

Alsabti Athem of the University College of London proposed studying supernovae remnants embedded in lunar soil. This is the context of the Moon’s regolith being a layered record of the interstellar medium and galactic environments our Solar System passed through and has been amid over time.

Sonia Tikoo of the Stanford University presented how soon after the Moon’s formation its global magnetic field deteriorated over time and how our understanding of the same has changed too with new evidence, including from Chang’e samples. Tikoo noted how combined with sample studies, targeted surface-based observations from the upcoming rover on China’s Chang’e 7 mission as well as the Lunar Vertex lander-rover instrument suite flying to the swirl of Reiner Gamma aboard Intuitive Machines’ third Moon mission will help resolve key mysteries related to the Moon’s magnetic evolution, which in itself it tied to that of the Moon’s evolution.

A related study result mentioned by Tikoo is about how micrometer-sized iron grains embedded in Chang’e 6 volcanic fragments have revealed a surprising increase in the global magnetic field strength of the Moon around 2.8 billion years ago, providing the first ground truth constraints for farside lunar magnetism. From the paper:

These results record a rebound of the field strength after its previous sharp decline of around 3.1 Ga [billion years ago], which attests to an active lunar dynamo at about 2.8 Ga in the mid-early stage and argues against the suggestion that the lunar dynamo may have remained in a low-energy state after 3 Ga until its demise.

Researchers analyzing Chang’e 6 samples have also found the first hematite crystals (rust) on the Moon. The samples also contain the iron oxide of maghemite. The CNSA release captures the importance of the discovery as follows:

This discovery reveals a previously unknown oxidation reaction mechanism on the moon. It provides direct sample evidence supporting the origin of magnetic anomalies around the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin. [...] The study proposes that hematite formation may be closely related to significant impact events in lunar history.

Lastly, Jatan Mehta (aka me) delivered a talk on India’s upcoming Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission and made the case for India and China to exchange lunar samples. 🌜...<>...🌛

The lunar sample science symposium concluded with the organizers explicitly seeking feedback from international attendees, a good show of intent and effort. Wei Yang, a professor at IGG CAS and a symposium co-organizer, expressed a forward looking sentiment on behalf of the feedback received from the attendees:

I hope [that] in the future China and [the] US can exchange Moon samples.

This was in the context of China’s announcement earlier this year of the first set of international organizations whose proposals were selected to study Chang’e 5 samples. International researchers, including many who attended the symposium, are already analyzing the samples and expect to publish their findings soon whereas US researchers are facing access issues from the American side itself.

Note: There were even more notable results presented at the symposium but which I’m not including here because these works are yet to be published.

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Dear readers, thank you so much for your personal & wondrous responses to my globally published space poetry in celebration of Moon Monday completing 5 years & 250 editions while crossing 10,000 subscribers. Hearing early readers express curiosity and awe has meant more than questionable labels and checkmarks on social media ever will. 💛

Figuring out how to independently publish my poetry on platforms globally with non-exclusive open access in multiple formats has laid a solid logistical foundation for me to publish future booklets & books for public good. I’m very excited for this next phase of my writing: Merge the worlds of blogs & books to bring affordable and accessible booklets on important but undercovered space exploration themes to people all around the world. I’m so excited that I’ve captured it in a meme.

Astronauts prep to live on the Moon via analogs on Earth

The harsh and frigid lunar night lasting 14 Earth days is a fundamental blocker in our ability to sustain robotic hardware as well as astronauts long term on the Moon. Recent landers like India’s Chandrayaan 3 and Firefly’s Blue Ghost both ended their missions at the end of their respective lunar day. Even larger scale Apollo astronauts over five decades ago returned before the onset of lunar nights. Among many challenges imposed by the lunar night, such as technical ones like keeping spacecraft electronics warm, is also a psychological one of astronauts surviving the frigid darkness in a heavily constrained environment of a small habitat while ensuring its continued operations.

To help develop effective operational procedures for prolonged living off-Earth, a multi-site analog habitat mission part of the World’s Biggest Analog project took place around the world this past October. One of these organized by ICEE.Space in Australia specifically mimicked astronauts surviving the lunar night in an intentionally constrained habitat. [A dear Moon Monday reader and supporter, Louis-Jérôme Burtz, participated in it.]

This is the latest in a series of expansive global efforts to use analog missions and adjacent research styles on Earth to iteratively tackle the herculean task of living and exploring the Moon and objects beyond for months, not days. Below is a non-exhaustive but representative summary of other such recent developments worldwide.

• ESA’s Pangaea project trains future astronauts from multiple space agencies in lunar geology and related new tools, such as an assistant tablet, to efficiently explore the Moon like never before.

• For Artemis III and beyond, NASA is making astronauts conduct high fidelity Moonwalk simulation exercises with simulated lunar south pole lighting, such as in last year’s analog mission in a lunar-esque volcanic field in Arizona. Science writer Alexandra Witze covered the activities, their rationale, and importance right from the mission’s backroom.

To mimic the lighting conditions at the lunar south pole, JETT5 organizers built a ‘Sun cart’ — essentially a giant spotlight wheeled onto the landscape. To Rubins and Douglas, the light looked like the distant Sun hovering just above the horizon. The astronauts carefully navigated their way across the dim landscape, relying on a few personal lights to aid their work. [...] The point of JETT5 was to develop tools and procedures that will work for Artemis III astronauts on the lunar surface.

[...]

Not everything went smoothly during the night-time EVA. The flight-operations team deliberately built in some challenges, including dropping video communications with the astronauts any time they travelled too far from the lander. An artificial, 20-minute delay on downloading imagery meant that the science team often couldn’t see real-time photos of the rocks the astronauts were picking up.

• In parallel, ESA is training astronauts at its versatile Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany, with tests of instruments, mission concepts, modern astronaut tools. There’s even use of virtual reality. A simulated habitat module adjoining LUNA will soon be used to better test complex mission scenarios where humans and robots interact in varied ways for long periods.
• The Russian Academy of Sciences completed a year-long analog on Earth late last year to study isolation effects on humans who will live for extended periods on the Moon in the future.
• Chinese taikonauts (astronauts) have begun initial training for lunar missions since late last year across lunar transit and surface operations as part of the country’s preparations to land humans on the Moon.
• Since last year, ISRO, in collaboration with organizations like Protoplanet, formally started terrestrial testing of what living and conducting research on the Moon and Mars could be like for its astronauts via baseline analog missions at dry and mountainous Ladakh.

• NASA, ESA, and Nikon are collaborating on an ergonomic handheld camera for Artemis III astronauts to capture good low light images in the dark environment of the Moon’s south pole. Called the Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC), its prototypes have been tested and refined by ESA and NASA in several analog missions. One scenario included using the camera with a telephoto lens because new research based on the Apollo missions shows that astronauts’ perception of distances and slopes gets altered on the Moon’s surface. A telephoto lens would thus better guide Moonwalks. A radiation-hardened and thermally protected HULC camera is supposed to be tested on the International Space Station before using it on Artemis missions.
• South Korea is transforming its former mining site of Taebaek into a testing ground for advanced mobile lunar exploration technologies, owing to the mine’s environmental resemblance to the darkness, coldness, and ruggedness of the Moon’s south pole.

Having multi-site as well as concurrent analog missions worldwide also provides researchers an opportunity to conduct similar experiments in high volumes so as to gather statistically useful data about their scientific effectiveness and operating procedures.

Related tangent: Past mistakes to avoid in our grand return to the Moon this decade

Mission updates

• On November 13, Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket successfully launched NASA’s ESCAPADE spacecraft pair on a trajectory ultimately headed for Mars. Crucially, Blue Origin successfully landed the rocket’s first stage booster on a sea landing platform, allowing its potential reuse to launch the company’s first robotic Moon lander called the Mark I by early next year; hopefully in January. This company’s first Moon mission in itself is crucial for Blue’s bet to carry NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon on the second Mark I lander in 2027. And, Mark I’s hoped for success is in turn what Blue wants to leverage to land humans on the Moon for the US.
• A few months after the Chandrayaan 3 lander touched down on the Moon in August 2023, ISRO had pulled the mission’s propulsion module (PM) from lunar orbit to Earth orbit against the nominal plan. At the time, ISRO stated the move’s purpose being space debris management by “avoiding uncontrolled crashing of the PM on the Moon’s surface at the end of life of PM thus meeting the requirements of no debris creation.” Two years later, the spacecraft’s high Earth orbit has not been stable and instead expanded due to the dynamic gravitational environment it’s amid. ISRO says the PM craft made two lunar flybys on November 6 and 11 respectively. It appears from ISRO’s release that while it was able to monitor the spacecraft’s trajectory, it did not fire any engines on the spacecraft to control or direct its trajectory. This suggests that either the craft has run out of fuel or its engines may not be performing nominally. Enthusiastic spacecraft tracker Scott Tiley surmises that because of this dynamic gravitational environment, the Chandrayaan 3 propulsion module could later in the decade either end up in solar orbit or crash with the Moon.
• After three years of work, ESA has completed the fourth European Service Module which will take astronauts on the attached Artemis IV Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit and back. It will also provide them with power and life support systems.

More Moon

• Marcia Smith reports that the US Congress finally managed to end the 43-day government shutdown. However, it currently only funds NASA until January 30, 2026, and so bills for its FY 2026 budget need to pass before that.
• US-based Star Catcher wants to deliver power wirelessly & optically from orbit to hardware on the Moon. Intuitive Machines is interested to tap into it for its upcoming rover.
• Thanks to fresh lunar samples brought to Earth by Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 missions, there has been a new influx of sample science results which have transformed our understanding of lunar volcanism and the Moon’s farside. Scientists from around the world will share more such results from studying little bits of Luna at the International Lunar Sample Research Symposium hosted later this week by the University of Hong Kong. I’ll eagerly attend the symposium in person, and will deliver a talk on India’s Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission. 🌕

Bonus memes for those of you who read till the end:

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About two months ago, my Moon Monday blog+newsletter crossed 10,000 subscribers. I did not announce it until now because I wanted to celebrate it in some way. Having readers and supporters be truly spread around the world in various space communities is something I’m not just proud of but very grateful to be able to serve. Today, as Moon Monday also completes a unique 5-year archive of 250 editions covering & contextualizing humanity’s global lunar exploration missions, I’m elated to release & share my poetry pamphlet on space worldwide in multiple formats. Presenting Seven uni-verses, poetry on all that space evokes. 🌙

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

Read for Free →

Seven uni-verses is a pamphlet of poems dedicated to humanity’s exploration of the universe. There’s nothing quite as bold and beautiful as committing to venturing the brutal colossal desolation that is space. Every (civil) space launch carries not just hardware but hope. The act of exploring the void makes humans special.

As someone who has dedicated his work life to space, I’ve written these verses over the years to attempt and capture the sheer intensity of emotions and intellectual ambition the cosmos and its exploration evokes. I love poetry, and have an innate desire to merge it with my first love—space. While my poems are intended to be read by everyone, many lines allude to technical concepts for those in the know to savor. A few key references as well as backstories are mentioned in the endnotes.

Get your copy for free

Seven uni-verses is available worldwide in multiple formats to support enhanced accessibility, which is important to make reading equitable. To that end, I’m also providing the booklet officially for free digitally and at minimal cost in print. :)

Bookmark & Review

• Goodreads | Open Library
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• Search for ISBN number 9789334418880 in book tracking apps

Merging the worlds of blogs and books

Publishing Seven uni-verses is also a foundational step for the next phase of my space writing: Merge the worlds of blogs and books. The last three months have been a sprawling journey of discovery and knowledge about how to publish a book worldwide across ebook, print, and audio formats and have it also be available in libraries and public archives—all while not granting exclusivity to any platform or distributor, especially not to Amazon.

Getting my poetry pamphlet out in the world in an independent and open access manner has helped me lay the foundation to publish my writing as books and booklets in a streamlined way in the future. Ditching traditional book publishing norms, I’m instead following the same philosophy here that has worked well for my blog so as to bring the benefits of independent web publishing to books:

• Enable free access to my writing worldwide, with zero ads, as opposed to the inaccessibility of expensive books
• Avoid publisher whims like retrospective paywalls and abrupt price increases
• Have extensive links for citations plus easy discovery in the Ebook format alongside good search
• Build a highly reference-able archive like Moon Monday
• Continue sustaining independent writing with community support, enabled by a transparently run sponsorships program whose terms are public

I’m excited about this next phase of my space writing. I’ll be aiming to publish a couple of books or booklets next year on important but undercovered global space developments. Subscribe to be notified of new books & articles I publish for free:

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One small step: About two months ago, Moon Monday crossed 10,000 subscribers. I did not announce it until now because I wanted to celebrate it in some way. Having readers and supporters be truly spread around the world in various space communities is something I’m not just proud of but very grateful to be able to serve. Today, as Moon Monday also completes a unique 5-year archive of 250 editions covering & contextualizing humanity’s global lunar exploration missions, I’m elated to release & share my poetry pamphlet on space worldwide in multiple formats. Presenting Seven uni-verses, poetry on all that space evokes. 🌙

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

About & Read →

Mission updates

ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter continues characterizing the lunar poles using its advanced dual frequency radar by mapping potential water ice deposits and gauging surface roughness, densities, and porosities. With the agency’s new announcement of processed Level 3C data products from the instrument now being available, ISRO noted the following:

The Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR) is the first instrument that has mapped the Moon using L-band in full-polarimetric mode and in highest resolution (25m/pixel). This advanced radar mode sends and receives signals in both vertical and horizontal directions, making it ideal for studying surface properties.

Studies of DFSAR’s enhanced datasets can add to the ISRO orbiter’s ongoing trickle of lunar water results while also furthering NASA’s collaboration with ISRO to have the orbiter aid Artemis landing site selections by prospecting for lunar polar water, classifying hazards, and gaining better topographic data about polar sites.

Eric Berger interviewed the NASA Artemis II astronauts that are preparing to fly around the Moon and back next year. The piece provides a good rundown of the mission’s timeline and key checkpoints & fallbacks post launch. The Mission Pilot Victor Glover shared an interesting detail to that end:

The first workout [for astronauts] is a checkout of that exercise hardware, but it's also a checkout of the environmental control system. Because I'm going to be breathing, I'm going to be sweating, making more humidity and more CO2 for the life support system to scrub out. And then if that's good, that's another check that means we can go to the Moon.

NASA wants to target February 2026 for Artemis II’s launch although quite a few pre-launch preparations remain for this year and next. The ongoing US government shutdown is also likely to impact the schedule at some point as contractors are not getting paid—even though efforts are on to resume nominal country operations.

US President Donald Trump has renominated Jared Isaacman for the NASA Administrator position, after abruptly withdrawing his first nomination earlier this year just as the US Congress was about to confirm the position. The re-nomination now has to go through the US Senate again. With the ongoing US government shutdown, there’s lack of clarity on if Isaacman will be required to pass another confirmation hearing like the last time. Marcia Smith captures the overall situation well:

The [US] House has not met since September 19. The Senate is still working with hearings taking place, nominations being approved, and votes on whether to reopen the government [sic] rejected 14 times. Eventually it will reopen—what it will take is being vigorously debated at the White House and on Capitol Hill—but the FY2026 appropriations bills still need to pass both chambers and be signed into law. None have so far.

Eric Berger notes in his report on the news that “if Isaacman is not confirmed before the end of this calendar year, he must resubmit conflict-of-interest paperwork, and the process could be drawn out into next spring.”

A giant leap in orbital imagery is what we need to realize advanced Moon missions

At over 1.6 petabytes, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission hosts by far the largest dataset from any planetary science spacecraft ever launched. LRO’s high-resolution lunar imagery and topographic data has been the bedrock for selecting landing sites of most Moon missions launched this century from around the world. But the 2009-launched LRO has gracefully aged now, with limited capabilities left for its latest mission extension compared to before. LRO’s inertial measurement unit has degraded, and it can no longer maintain an orbit that can study the lunar poles from directly above them; its orbit is now inclined. NASA has not approved any LRO successor like LExSO nor does the agency’s FY2026 Presidential budget request ask for any such funding.

India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, touting a better radar and 2x the imaging resolution of LRO, has fulfilled a few advanced needs such as helping JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft achieve a precision Moon landing and aiding NASA with Artemis landing site selections. But leveraging of the orbiter’s capabilities has been limited in scope. Moreover, the orbiter is likely to end its nominal operations by the end of the decade, with no immediate replacement planned or announced by ISRO.

Commercial companies are entering the landscape to fill some gaps in orbital imagery and mapping, like the upcoming US-based services of Firefly’s Ocula and Blue Origin’s Oasis. While welcome, these are specialized and have relatively limited use cases. The expansive scope of future missions leading up to Moonbases requires having the whole spectrum of orbital datasets, especially for unravelling unknown ground truths about water ice on lunar poles—something the US has been failing at despite it being central to Artemis.

Recognizing existing constraints and anticipating future needs, a specialized team of US scientists released a report in 2022 formally recommending NASA to plan replacing the LRO with a cooperative multi-orbiter, commercial-international approach so as to support the increasingly complex and diverse upcoming robotic CLPS and crewed Artemis missions.

The Lunar Ledger project by the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) aims to help catalyze acting on this advice by allowing more mission operators to reliably share technical data at mutual discretion. Six companies have signed up for the Ledger at launch: ispace, Firefly, Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), JAOPS, Dymon, and SpaceData. Similar to how NASA, ESA, and ISRO have been planning coordinated imaging and scientific observations of Venus with their respective upcoming missions, lunar orbiters from around the world could do the same to accelerate progress and improve output while saving costs. Christine Tiballi, the Lunar Ledger’s Lead, is particularly excited about the possibilities. Orbital data from one entity could enable better rover missions for others, which in turn enhance the quality of orbital datasets themselves that later missions by others still can leverage. “Suddenly competition can become very lucrative cooperation,” says Tiballi.

This section was originally published by me on the newsletter of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead. The article is republished here because of its relevance to my Moon Monday readers.

More Moon

• ESA has started conducting virtual reality training for astronauts at its versatile Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany, adding to prior tests of instruments, mission concepts, and modern astronaut tools. A simulated habitat module also adjoins LUNA to soon better test complex mission scenarios where humans and robots interact in varied ways for long periods.
• The South East Asian countries of Malaysia and Philippines have signed the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. The European country of Latvia also signed, making the total number of Accords signees 60. Payload Space has neat charts and graphs.

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At over 1.6 petabytes, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission hosts by far the largest dataset from any planetary science spacecraft ever launched. LRO’s high-resolution lunar imagery and topographic data has been the bedrock for selecting landing sites of most Moon missions launched this century from around the world. Many of these landers though were planned as short or mid duration missions at best, whereas the next generation of landers and rovers will explore unknown ground truths about water ice and other resources amid unfavorable lighting conditions at the Moon’s south pole. These will not only need more granular orbital imagery to plan precision landings but comprehensive environmental datasets that allow missions to last long enough.

But NASA’s 2009-launched LRO has gracefully aged now. While it still has utility which led to its latest mission extension evaluation, the orbiter has limited capabilities left. LRO’s inertial measurement unit has degraded, and it can no longer maintain an orbit that can study the lunar poles from directly above them; its orbit is now inclined. Recognizing these constraints, a specialized team of US scientists released a report called CLOC-SAT in 2022 urging NASA to plan replacing the LRO with an enhanced approach so as to support the increasingly complex and diverse upcoming robotic CLPS and crewed Artemis Moon missions.

Three years since, NASA has not approved any LRO successor despite the LExSO mission being proposed by members from the LRO team itself. NASA’s FY2026 Presidential budget request does not ask for any funding for the same.

What will stand on the shoulders of the giant?

On the US’ side, there is NASA’s ShadowCam imager, which launched aboard South Korea’s KPLO lunar orbiter in 2022. It images polar craters that are permanently shadowed. However, it has found no reflectance differences that can be uniquely attributed to surface water ice in most of the areas it has mapped so far. To be clear, this isn’t a failure of ShadowCam, the instrument. But given that KPLO’s mission will likely end this year, the dull outcome highlights the pressing need for higher-resolution studies from orbit and the surface, neither of which are taking place substantially.

India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, a full-fledged reconnaissance spacecraft like LRO, has fulfilled a few advanced needs. Having launched a decade later, it’s also more capable in certain areas, such as having a better radar as well as a better imaging resolution of up to 0.25 meters/pixel—twice LRO’s finest. Scientists who authored the aforementioned report for NASA recognized the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s capability in mission planning:

Additional imaging of the lunar surface at sub-meter scales (e.g., 30 cm) is highly desirable to facilitate identification of roughly m-scale hazards that are often relevant to finding safe landing sites. As an example, the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) has a nominal pixel scale of 30 cm from a 62 km altitude orbit.

Through its instruments, the ISRO orbiter has been producing a trickle of this next layer of lunar water results. The orbiter also helped JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft achieve the most precise Moon landing ever for a robotic vehicle, touching down only 55 meters from its targeted point. ISRO shared Chandrayaan 2 data with JAXA for final landing site selection as well as for SLIM’s onboard last-mile navigation maps. Without the world’s sharpest lunar imager, it wouldn’t be possible for SLIM to spot and navigate to a safe touchdown point without compromising on the landing accuracy—the primary mission goal. The two agencies are now collaborating on the joint LUPEX rover mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole.

Similarly, NASA has been collaborating with ISRO to have the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter aid Artemis landing site selections by prospecting for lunar polar water, classifying hazards, and gaining better topographic data about polar sites. But NASA’s leveraging and ISRO’s promoting of the orbiter’s optical and radar capabilities have been limited in scope. Moreover, the orbiter is likely to end its nominal operations by the end of the decade if not before that with no immediate replacement planned or announced by ISRO.

Commercial services coming up

Seeing the opportunity to fill gaps in the apt planning of future, more complex Moon missions, especially in the case of NASA, commercial companies are entering the landscape of orbital imagery and mapping.

US-based Firefly announced a commercial lunar imaging and mineral detection service called Ocula to hope to carry forward a part of LRO’s foundational role. The service will commence with the first Elytra Dark orbiter next year from low lunar orbit. The orbiter will do so after completing its services for Firefly’s upcoming second Moon lander mission part of NASA’s CLPS program. Firefly says Ocula’s best case optical imagery will tout a then-best resolution of 20 cm/pixel.

Blue Origin has announced that it will send an “ultra-low” polar orbiter called Oasis-1 to the Moon to “create the most detailed high-resolution maps to date of lunar water ice, Helium-3, radionuclides, rare earth elements, precious metals, and other materials”. The mission will be in partnership with the Luxembourg Space Agency, ESA’s space-resources-focused ESRIC institute, and GOMspace. The company has not yet specified when Oasis-1 will launch or what its altitude range will be to enable the required outcomes.

On the other side of the world, ispace has been selected as part of Japan’s 1-trillion yen “Space Strategy Fund” initiative to develop, launch, and operate a lunar orbiter which will use a terahertz wave sensor system to locate and map water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. Data from this orbiter will be analyzed in tandem with direct surface and subsurface measurements made by the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover mission.

Coordinate to catalyze

All of these commercially driven orbiters, while welcome, are specialized and have relatively limited use cases. The expansive scope of future missions leading up to Moonbases still requires having the whole spectrum of orbital datasets, especially for helping locate and explore swaths of water ice and permanently shadowed regions on lunar poles—something the US has been failing at despite it being central to Artemis.

To that end, scientists have formally recommended NASA through the aforementioned CLOC-SAT report as well as other means to coordinate future lunar orbital measurements and capabilities. This, the report has argued, necessitates having a slew of interconnected lunar orbiters—both long-lived ones like LRO & Chandrayaan 2 as well as specialized ones—instead of a single successor.

Meeting these [future mission] goals will require multiple approaches involving several orbits and/or orbiters, but there are a large number of stakeholders in our return to the Moon, including commercial and international partners, whose resources can be shared and leveraged to meet diverse goals while minimizing cost.
[…]
NASA should establish a single office tasked with coordinating across space agencies and within NASA for sharing resources, such as communications networks and orbital strategies. For example, a spacecraft’s orbit altitude and orbit plane could be chosen partially based on the requirements of other orbiters.

The Lunar Ledger project by the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) aims to help catalyze acting on this advice by allowing more commercial and national mission operators to reliably share technical data at mutual discretion. Six companies have signed up for the Ledger at launch with an eye towards mission data sharing: ispace, Firefly, Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), JAOPS, Dymon, and SpaceData. Similar to how NASA, ESA, and ISRO have been planning to perform coordinated imaging and scientific observations of Venus with their respective upcoming missions, lunar orbiters from across the world could coordinate and build atop their respective observations to accelerate progress and improve output for all while saving costs. Christine Tiballi, the Lunar Ledger’s Lead, is particularly excited about the possibilities of orbital data enabling better rover missions, which in turn enhance quality of orbital datasets that later missions can leverage:

We've included market signals like data sharing and available payload space, so that any mission can communicate their interest as a provider or a consumer of these assets. So say an upcoming rover is to traverse projected operational coordinates of another future mission, capturing data at unprecedented resolutions. Tapping into it will not only improve calibration of public orbital datasets and significantly increase the chances of future mission successes but also signal operational orbiters to enable planning for that rover traverse in the first place.

This way you have the opportunity to be the supplier and enabler as well as the customer while reducing building costs. “Suddenly competition can become very lucrative cooperation,” adds Tiballi.

Originally published by me on the blog of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead. The article is republished here on my blog because of its relevance to my Moon Monday readers as well as for archival.

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China and Luna

• Following on this year’s announcement by CNSA of the first set of international organizations whose proposals it selected to study unique lunar samples fetched to Earth by the Chang’e 5 mission in 2020, China has now opened up applications for the second round of international research proposals. Applications can be submitted through China’s Lunar Sample Release System until November 30.
• Following on the recent string of successful tests of elements part of China’s architecture for landing humans on the Moon, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) has outlined the next set of tests to be accomplished in the near future:

A series of crucial upcoming tests include – integrated testing for the Lanyue lunar lander, thermal tests and maximum dynamic pressure escape tests for the Mengzhou manned spacecraft, and low-altitude and technology verification flights for the Long March-10 carrier rocket.

The release goes on to note that:

Payload designs for scientific research and applications have been finalized, and ground-based infrastructure, such as the launch site, tracking network and landing site on Earth, is under accelerated development.

Artemis III updates

After NASA reopened the contract for Artemis III’s crewed Moon landing aspect, the agency now says they have received the accelerated lander development plans from SpaceX as well as Blue Origin, which involve simplified mission architectures and streamlined concept of operations. Marcia Smith reports NASA’s official statement in response to a query on the next steps:

NASA has received and is evaluating plans from both SpaceX and Blue Origin for acceleration of HLS production. Following the shutdown, the agency will issue an RFI to the broader aerospace industry for their proposals. A committee of NASA subject matter experts will be assembled to evaluate each proposal and determine the best path forward to win the second space race given the urgency of adversarial threats to peace and transparency on the Moon.

It would seem that reopening the Artemis III landing contract originally assigned to SpaceX has compelled the company to share the progress on Lunar Starship in public with more detail and context than ever before, including the following:

While many of SpaceX’s remaining HLS contract milestones are tied to flight tests, such as a ship-to-ship propellant transfer demonstration, SpaceX has started fabricating a flight-article Starship HLS cabin that will include functional avionics and power systems, crew systems and mechanisms, environmental control and life support systems, cabin and crew communications systems, and a cabin thermal control system. This flight-capable cabin will enable engineers to demonstrate high design maturity of the various systems required to support a human landing on the Moon, enable integrated system-level hardware testing, and provide a highly realistic training experience for future lunar explorers.

SpaceX also notes that Artemis III requirements have been changing over time (presumably from NASA’s side too), and separately points out that former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who made statements against the company’s slow progress on Starship in a US Congressional hearing, is a lobbyist.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index, Parvathy Prem and Planetary scientist David Blewett for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

More Moon

• On October 29, Japan successfully demonstrated a cargo delivery to the International Space Station using its next-generation HTV-X spacecraft. A variant of this craft called HTV-X(G) will deliver astronaut supplied to the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat starting 2030. Between this and building an advanced crewed, pressurized lunar rover for Artemis astronauts, Japan’s strategic collaborative approach for the Moon is to be a critical logistical supplier for NASA’s Artemis program. Previously, Japan got an astronaut seat aboard the Gateway in return for JAXA providing critical life support systems and infrastructure components for the station’s Lunar I-Hab crew habitat module. The HTV-X(G)’s cargo deliveries to the Gateway will allow the lunar orbital habitat to sustain crewed and uncrewed operations for long periods. In February 2023, JAXA recruited two new astronaut candidates, one of which could fly to the Gateway.
• Intuitive Machines has received a $8.2 million contract from the US Air Force to develop low-power, compact nuclear fission systems that can power lunar infrastructure elements such as beacons that provide navigation services to hardware at the Moon.
• Related developments:
  • ESA moonlit their lunar navcom constellation ambitions
  • NASA un-nukes its decision to steer away from using nuclear power on the Moon
• Last month, Hungary became the 57th country and 23rd European nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration.
• A great photo essay: How Lunar Photography Brought the Heavens Down to Earth

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China is progressing well in preparations towards the launch of its Chang’e 7 mission to the Moon’s south pole in the second half of next year. The complex multi-month mission primarily aiming to study lunar water ice spans several elements: a lander, an orbiter, a rover, a hopper, and an existing lunar satellite Queqiao 2 whose previous mission was to relay communications between Earth and Chang’e 6 spacecraft modules so as to fetch farside lunar samples.

Each element of Chang’e 7 has scientific instruments and goals of its own.

• The Chang’e 7 orbiter will sport a high-resolution stereo mapping camera, a miniature synthetic aperture radar, an infrared spectrometer, a set of high-resolution neutron and gamma ray spectrometers, and a magnetometer.
• The lander will operate two cameras, a seismometer, a lunar dust & plasma analyzer, and a telescope. It will also host a retroreflector. The seismometer in particular will help scientists better understand the lunar interior as well as constrain the rate of moonquakes and amount of micrometeorite impacts on the lunar south pole, which will help safely plan long duration crewed missions to the region in the future.
• The rover will tout a panoramic camera, a Raman spectrometer, a ground penetrating radar, a mass spectrometer, and a magnetometer.
• The hopper, also referred to as a mini flying probe, will have a water analyzer.
• The relay satellite will conduct a radio experiment using one of its payloads, and will continue studying uncharged energetic particles and the extreme ultraviolet environment around Earth with two instruments for those tasks respectively.

A taste of lunar water

After a two month survey of key lunar south polar locations using the orbiter’s instruments, the Chang’e 7 lander aims to perform a precision landing at the finally selected location by mission operators. Post touchdown, the lander will deploy the rover and activate the hopper to explore around. The surface mission’s primary goal across its three elements is to locate and study water deposits frozen inside cold traps within permanently shadowed regions on the lunar south pole. Many of the instruments listed above, like the infrared & mass spectrometers and the ground penetrating radar, will directly help scientists get a tactile understanding of lunar water ice. The Chang’e 7 hopper, with its shock absorbing legs, will jump into nearby permanently shadowed areas for its onboard Lunar Water Molecular Analyzer (LWMA) to detect water ice and other volatile resources like ammonia.

The paper on Chang’e 7 science by Chi Wang, et al. captures the mission’s approach to studying lunar water and its importance as follows:

Previous studies of water and volatiles were mainly based on orbital remote sensing neutron spectrometers, synthetic aperture radars, spectrometers and other methods; only indirect evidence of the existence of water ice in the shadowed area was obtained, and it is difficult to judge its depth, abundance and forms, etc. By using more advanced high-precision neutron gamma spectrometers and synthetic aperture radars, and by conducting direct in-situ measurements of H2O molecules and their H isotopes in PSRs at the same time, we can not only confirm the existence of water ice and reveal its origin, but also obtain the distribution and content of water ice in the PSRs through a comparative analysis of in-situ measurement results with the remote sensing detection results of PSRs on the entire lunar surface. Combined with laboratory test analysis and research on water and volatile components in lunar samples, we may address fundamental questions on the origin and distribution of lunar water ice and volatile components.

Chang’e 7 will be China’s first attempt to gain such a ground truth understanding of the accessibility, movement, and storage of surface and near-surface water ice on the Moon’s poles, which is crucial to appropriately plan long-term lunar exploration and sustained off-Earth living. Virtually all recent missions funded by NASA have failed to advance on the same despite it being the foundational goal of the US Artemis program. Given China’s exceptional track record of virtually no major failure despite undertaking increasingly complex lunar missions, there’s little reason to doubt that Chang’e 7 and its successor Chang’e 8 will not be successes. China is poised to prepare well for an eventual Moonbase with crew and robots under the Sino-led project called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

There’s another mission aspect that’s interesting that’s mentioned in the same paper. Chinese researchers have suggested that when coupled with Earth-based ground stations, China’s in-progress network of lunar navigation and communications satellites can help CNSA track its deep space missions with sub-kilometer accuracy all the way to Jupiter and even beyond. As noted by Chi Wang, et al., the Queqiao 2 relay satellite will use its radio payload to test an element of this during Chang’e 7’s mission:

The LOVEX [payload] on the relay satellite is used to construct a 400000-km baseline Moon–Earth VLBI measurement and observation experiment system to improve the accuracy of orbit determination in deep space and to carry out astrometry and astrophysics observation and study.

International instruments onboard

Of all the Chang’e 7 instruments, seven are international contributions, a welcome move as China seeks to increase global participation in its Moon missions in the lead up to its ILRS Moonbase plans. Ling Xin recently reported that according to Chang’e 7’s deputy chief designer Tang Yuhua, the international instruments that will be aboard the mission’s various elements have all been delivered to CNSA.

The orbiter’s hyperspectral mineral mapping camera is made by Egypt and Bahrain, a space radiation measuring instrument duo is from Thailand, and a monitor which will measure incoming and outgoing radiation to and from Earth got aid from Switzerland. For Egypt, Bahrain, and Thailand, this mission represents their first study of our Moon. On the lander end, the lunar dust & plasma analyzer is from Russia, the ILO-C telescope from the US-based International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), and the retroreflector is from Italy-based SCF Lab just like Chang’e 6.

In July, ILOA’s telescope passed payload acceptance tests. Developed through collaboration with China’s NAOC and the University of Hong Kong, ILO-C is a wide-field optical telescope which aims to capture inspiring images of our galactic center from the Moon. In August, Thailand’s National Astronomical Research Institute (NARIT) delivered its ~5-kilogram radiation monitoring MATCH payload to CAS and CNSA. It will study solar storms and cosmic rays respectively with two instruments. MATCH was developed by over a dozen Thai researchers in collaboration with seven professors across Chinese scientific institutions. Thailand was the first country to sign on to the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project as well as the US-led Artemis Accords. Senegal is the only other country to sign both. I hope many more join.

Upcoming missions globally this decade which are similar to Chang’e 7’s surface mission of aiming to find and characterize lunar water include the joint Indo-Japanese Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission and NASA’s VIPER rover which might fly on a Blue Origin lander. All of these missions will provide enhanced context for analyzing ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 samples, which aims to bring lunar polar material to Earth in 2028.

Related: Western media narratives misrepresent Chinese space, which reduces trust and deters cooperation and collaboration.

Many thanks to Space Age Publishing, Astrolab and Mahesh Anand for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

NASA reopens Artemis III human landing contract

A year later than expected, SpaceX finally hit all suborbital testing milestones it needed from the second version (v2) of its Starship Super Heavy rocket thanks to October 13’s eleventh integrated test flight IFT-11. Like IFT-10’s August flight, IFT-11 achieved its primary goals, from a demonstration of deploying simulated Starlink satellites to heat shield tests as well as precise core & upper stage return and splashdowns. SpaceX will next test an upgraded v3 Starship early next year from a new launchpad, only after the success of which can the many remaining milestones leading up to a lunar landing be checked off one after another—slowly but hopefully surely.

Between those still pending milestones, the three back-to-back failures of Starship this year, and an explosion of a test pad, the slow progress of SpaceX in building its contracted crewed lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis III mission has shook the US in finally realizing that it will likely not meet its self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon. To that end, NASA’s Trump-appointed Acting Administrator Sean Duffy has acknowledged that Starship’s crewed landing will be delayed by at least two years from 2027, and has thus gone ahead and reopened the Artemis III contract to all entities who can propose a faster turnaround. SpaceX is allowed to put in an accelerated timeline proposal as well.

I’m not interested in covering man child like tantrums in reaction to this development as news. Between that and sticking to Moon Monday’s approach of avoiding (Artemis) hot takes and speculative coverage, it’s better to wait for all bidders to send in their accelerated Artemis III crewed landing proposals to NASA. These proposals are due by October 29, and we’ll see where things are headed once more formal information about them is out. In the meanwhile, Marcia Smith has covered well how Artemis III’s timeline has kept moving to the right.

Note that this whole development was not announced on NASA’s website; the US government shutdown is not supposed to affect Artemis II and III related activities and yet here we are. If NASA can announce this change on social media, and undertake its logistics, it can also put out said announcement on its website as its canonical presence on the web.

More Moon

• Also without an announcement on NASA’s website, we got to know through Duffy’s X account instead that the integration of the Orion spacecraft onto the SLS rocket for the upcoming crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission is now complete. The four astronauts flying around the Moon and back for the mission have named their Orion craft “Integrity”. NASA wants to target February 2026 for Artemis II’s launch although quite a few pre-launch preparations remain for this year and next.
• Astrobotic announced that the launch of the company’s Griffin lander to the Moon’s south pole as part of NASA’s CLPS program is now postponed from this year to no earlier than July 2026. The large lander’s primary payload will be the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested earlier this year after NASA decided not to fly the VIPER rover aboard Griffin.
• The Rice University in Texas, USA is hiring a postdoctoral associate for a NASA-funded project dedicated to developing next-generation radiometric dating methods specifically to analyze samples from Apollo and future Artemis missions.

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Theoretical and computational models of highly energetic solar storms have predicted for more than a decade that the density of the Moon’s nearside exosphere increases by at least ten times during such events. Between our Moon having no global magnetic field to shield its surface and the charged, energetic solar wind particles bombarding the ground like a machine gun, solar storms release a greater number of atoms to the exosphere than during normal solar activity. But until now there have been no confirmed measurements to know the real rate increase.

Last year’s heightened solar activity which caused widespread auroras on Earth provided an opportunity to Indian researchers for utilizing the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to confirm or deny these predictions as well as refine them. A newly published paper based on data from the orbiter’s neutral gas mass spectrometer (named CHACE-2) taken during the time of the heightened solar activity now confirm that the nearside lunar exosphere became at least tenfold denser. Said solar storms were also observed by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s X-ray solar monitor.

You probably wouldn’t get a clear enough picture of this if you read ISRO’s only-jargon-filled release about the discovery on its website, which also needs multiple typo fixes. The release meant for science popularization does not even attempt to capture the unique importance of studying our Sun from the vantage point of our Moon as opposed to elsewhere. That ISRO does not even consider leveraging any of the fairly large number of science writers in the country for such releases, much less think about actively supporting the growing talent, is inefficient. In any case, with the aforementioned discovery explained in brief above, here’s my attempt at capturing its broader picture: why the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter studies the Sun from the Moon, what scientists have found through it, and why the endeavor is unique and relevant to future exploration.

Sponsored job listings: PierSight Space is hiring for 11 roles—and particularly a senior Embedded Software developer, a lead for Antenna Design, and AIT Mechanical & Electrical engineering leads—to join their teams in Ahmedabad and Bangalore who are building a constellation of SAR-AIS satellites for persistent, all-weather ocean monitoring.

The Sun watcher

By now it’s clear that the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter doesn’t just study the Moon’s surface and aid its exploration but observes the Sun too. Specifically, scientists use the orbiter’s high-resolution Solar X-ray Monitor (XSM) to study solar flares. In turn, XSM provides a reference for the orbiter’s Chandrayaan-2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS) instrument so it can map elements on the lunar surface. Scientists have published multiple results in international journals based on XSM’s unique observations of the Sun’s surface and atmospheric activities. These include results from statistical measurements of micro-flares and nano-flares crucial to understanding our Sun’s dynamic nature.

XSM studies of micro-flares and nano-flares are especially important because scientists think they’re relevant to unlocking a fundamental mystery about our Sun: why is its extended atmosphere, the corona, much hotter than its surface? Scientists have been debating since the 1940s how the Sun’s atmosphere is heated to a million degrees Celsius while the surface barely crosses 6,000. Recent close-up observations of many tiny eruptions across the Sun’s surface by ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission coupled with coronal measurements made by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have helped scientists almost solve the coronal heating mystery.

In that context, having abundant micro-flare and nano-flare observations over time from other spacecraft at different vantage points, like the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, has helped scientists contextualize and refine these results to improve our understanding of the Sun. Furthermore, through high-resolution measurements of the Sun’s background X-ray emissions, the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s XSM data has provided the first elemental abundances of magnesium, aluminum, and silicon in the Sun’s corona during quiet times, refining our understanding.

Protecting future lunar explorers

Other than XSM, the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s aforementioned CLASS instrument can detect some solar events too. In January 2022, CLASS detected two highly energetic proton emission events in the solar wind. NASA’s GOES-16 satellite couldn’t detect one of these two events because Earth’s magnetic field shielded it from said particles. The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter being at the Moon though could detect them, as could other Sun-studying spacecraft lying outside Earth’s magnetic field.

During August 4-7 in 1972, the Sun released several bursts of flares and associated energetic particles. This places its time between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the Moon in the same year. Had any of the astronauts been in lunar orbit or on the surface during the solar event, they could’ve faced damaging levels of radiation with the potential to cause cancer. As we prepare to send astronauts on much longer Moon missions and beyond, we’ll need to protect our explorers from such solar storms whose particles reach the Earth-Moon space in a matter of hours.

NASA’s Artemis I mission in 2022 studied solar radiation effects inside the Orion spacecraft that will host crew on future missions. The agency’s upcoming Artemis II flight will advance these studies further. India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is aiding these safety efforts by improving our understanding of solar flares themselves as well as by helping scientists model how solar events affect the Moon, its exosphere, and the surrounding radiation environment as an overall place which will host future astronauts. Dedicated efforts from India for studying solar weather itself obviously include data from the recently launched Aditya-L1 solar observatory and its ongoing contributions but also specific institutional research such as the CESSI lab in IISER Kolkata, which focuses on the fundamental physics of stellar dynamics and modeling solar weather.

Chandrayaan’s Moon-based solar observations are helping extend all solar weather studies to an environment that future astronauts will be exposed to during long-duration missions as well as at Moonbases.

Many thanks to Takshashila Institution, PierSight, GalaxEye Space, Gurbir Singh and Catalyx Space for sponsoring this week’s special combined edition of Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress.

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Lunar water and exosphere

With the above context, let’s come back to the discovery we started with up top about the Sun’s wind affecting the lunar ionosphere. It affects water on the Moon too.

The Sun’s wind of charged particles is one of the key sources of lunar water, and so understanding how the solar wind shapes the lunar exosphere simultaneously helps us understand processes fundamental to it, which includes mechanisms of how water is altered and moves across the Moon, and how it’s lost. Lunar missions wanting to map and analyze surface water, like the upcoming joint ISRO-JAXA LUPEX rover, will be best served when accounting for all of these factors. The overall work also enables planetary scientists to make better water cycle models on other airless bodies across the Solar System like Mercury, gas giant moons, Ceres, etc.

Instead of explaining such interconnected aspects of the solar wind, the lunar exosphere, and human lunar exploration, ISRO’s aforementioned jargon-filled release about the importance of the discovery only states the following with no specifics or elaboration:

Apart from pushing the edge of our scientific understanding about the Moon and the lunar space weather (effect of the Sun’s emissions on the Moon), this observation also indicates the challenges of building scientific bases on the Moon. Lunar base architects need to account for such extreme events, which would temporarily alter the lunar environment, before the effects subside.

More lunar exosphere studies by Chandrayaan 2

• Indian researchers finally recently made ground-based telescopic observations of sodium in the lunar exosphere, building up on the first ever global-scale sodium maps of the Moon as seen by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter.
• Indian scientists analyzed how two-way radio signals between the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and an Indian Deep Space Network antenna were affected, and used that to infer the first electron density profile of the Moon’s ionosphere for when the Moon passes through Earth’s geomagnetic tail. They found the density to be substantially higher than expected.
• In a related study, a probe on the Chandrayaan 3 lander has taken the first in-situ plasma environment measurements from near the Moon’s south polar surface. The study also begins the long process of characterizing the lunar polar environment for planning long-duration human and robotic missions as well as at Moonbases.

Read previous editions on Indian space

• Indian Space Progress #31: Chandrayaan 4 will bring unique Moon materials—and maybe a giant scientific leap for India
• Indian Space Progress #30: Notable nuances about NISAR and how it flows into planetary science for NASA and ISRO
• Indian Space Progress #29: Was Shubhanshu Shukla’s Axiom-4 flight to the International Space Station worth it for ISRO?

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• A study of lunar soil simulants on biological cells conducted by Australian researchers suggests that inadvertent inhaling of lunar dust by future astronauts during missions might be less toxic than our current relationship with air pollution in terrestrial cities. – Paper | Article

• More comprehensive impact simulations conducted by US researchers suggest that at least 22.6% of all material ejected from the Moon by crater impacts and more such mechanisms end up hitting Earth over time. – Paper | Article

The team were able to conclude that, following lunar impacts, Earth collects about 22.6% of the ejected material over 100,000 years, with half of these collisions occurring within the first 10,000 years. The collision rate follows a power-law distribution over time (a relationship where a change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in another) independent of the initial size of those quantities. Material launched from the Moon's trailing side has the highest Earth collision probability, while the leading side produces the lowest. When hitting Earth, lunar ejecta travel at 11.0-13.1 km/s and predominantly strike near the equator (with 24% fewer impacts at the poles). These impacts are nearly symmetrically distributed between morning and evening hours, peaking around 6 AM/PM.

Watch out for meteor showers caused by the 60-meter-wide asteroid 2024 YR4, which is currently estimated to have a 4% chance of hitting the Moon in 2032.

🪨 ... 🌒 ... 💥 ... 🌍 ... ☄️

• A collaboration between Chinese and US researchers have found that oxygen particles blown from Earth’s atmosphere to the Moon can react with lunar minerals to form hematite (rust). – Paper | Article

• US researchers combining and analyzing gravity, topography, and elemental abundance data under a NASA Lunar Data Analysis grant found that Artemis astronauts might pick up rocks from the Thorium-rich ejecta blanket deposited during the formation of the massive 2500-kilometer South Pole-Aitken basin—the largest, deepest, and oldest lunar crater. These samples will help further constrain the basin’s age, building upon its age finally determined by Chang’e 6, and likewise further enrich our understanding of the Moon’s farside-nearside dichotomy by better sampling the early lunar crust and possible mantle materials. – Paper | Article

• The first detailed examination of sintered Apollo lunar samples by a team of scientists & engineers at ESA has found sufficient similarities in desired quality to sintering of simulated lunar-like soil. This means a diverse set of the latter can be a good proxy to test future lunar construction technologies especially since real samples are expensive and difficult to obtain in bulk. – Paper | Article

• Chinese researchers opportunistically studied water-hosting near-surface lunar soil fragments, which got exposed to the surface by the engine plumes of the Chang’e 6 lander when it touched down on the Moon’s farside last year. The study helps us better understand the Sun’s wind of charged particles as one of the key sources of lunar water. It also allows planetary scientists to make better models of the same for other airless bodies across the Solar System like Mercury, gas giant moons, Ceres, etc. – Paper | Article

• By studying Apollo-sampled boulders, accounting for seismic measurements, and analyzing imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, US researchers have predicted the frequency and magnitudes of moonquakes at the Apollo 17 landing site. They now aim to do the same for active faults on the Moon’s south pole to protect future astronauts and hardware on long-term missions especially since unlike Earthquakes, moonquakes can last for hours, thereby posing a stability risk to structures and vehicles operating nearby. – Paper | Article

Related: Not the fault in our stars but certainly stressful faults on our Moon

• Indian researchers have finally made ground-based telescopic observations of sodium in the lunar exosphere, building up on the first ever global-scale sodium maps of the Moon as seen by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. – Paper 1 | Paper 2 | Article

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Mahesh Anand for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

More paper briefings

More Moon

Editorial disclaimer: The next bit is about an announcement from the Open Lunar Foundation, which is one of the Moon Monday sponsors. I’m also Open Lunar’s Science Communications Lead. As such, to cover the following news on Moon Monday while ensuring editorial independence and transparency, I did not communicate with Open Lunar about if I’ll write on this topic or even mention it, much less how so.

• After three collaborative years of research, development, and community consultations, the Open Lunar Foundation has launched the Lunar Ledger (Registry) project. The Ledger aims to be a database of global lunar objects and activities which hopes to improve mission operator transparency by enhancing information sharing wherever possible. Information sharing is known to enable cutting-edge space missions. Unfortunately though, there are currently no institutionalized mechanisms that do so while also scaling with the increasing pace of Moon missions worldwide. Different states share different & limited information at different times, in disparate formats, dispersed through different channels at varying levels. Amid competition, companies remain tightfisted about sharing information even on mission aspects that aren’t sensitive to intellectual property. The current state of lunar information sharing and coordination is thus neither safe nor efficient for abundant progress. The Lunar Ledger aims to improve this situation by accommodating more actors to reliably share technical data with mutual discretion. And that’s why it’s notable that five companies have signed up for the Ledger at launch and agreed to share mission information to some as-yet-unspecified level through the project. The companies are ispace, Firefly, Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), JAOPS, and Dymon.
• Thanks to fresh lunar samples brought to Earth by Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 missions, there has been a new influx of sample science results which have transformed our understanding of lunar volcanism and the Moon’s farside. For scientists globally to share more such results, the University of Hong Kong is hosting the International Lunar Sample Research Symposium this November 21-24. I plan on being there to cover the event, and eager to learn more about the process of drawing fundamental planetary science insights from little bits of Luna. 🌕

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Blue Origin announced that it will send an “ultra-low” polar orbiter called Oasis-1 to the Moon to “create the most detailed high-resolution maps to date of lunar water ice, Helium-3, radionuclides, rare earth elements, precious metals, and other materials”. The mission will be in partnership with the Luxembourg Space Agency, ESA’s space-resources-focused ESRIC institute, and GOMspace.

Blue Origin noted in its blog post that the orbiter will use “neutron spectroscopy to quantify subsurface water ice concentrations to one-meter depths”. That’s a reasonable yet indirect method to detect lunar water ice as what it really does is detect hydrogen as a presumed sign of water molecules. There will be more instruments aboard Oasis-1:

Additional instruments include magnetometers for metal detection and multispectral imaging for Helium-3 and geological mapping, with controlled impact sequences maximizing data collection for precise extraction site selection.

When asked what is the planned altitude range for the “ultra-low” lunar polar orbiter, Blue Origin responded with the following:

Nothing further to share than what was in the blog post.

The company did not specify when Oasis-1 is supposed to launch either. As such, the project can be assumed to be in early stages, with the announcement being a starting point for more to come.

Upcoming missions globally aiming to find and characterize the nature of lunar polar water include China’s Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 spacecraft, NASA’s VIPER rover, and the joint Indo-Japanese Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission. These missions will also provide context for analyzing ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 samples, which aims to bring lunar polar material to Earth in 2028. Considering that the US has been failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis, Blue’s announcement of Oasis-1 is welcome despite the fuzziness on details.

Oasis-1 is the opening part of Blue’s multi-phase initiative to locate, map, characterize, and utilize lunar resources. And the closing end is Blue’s Alchemist project, which recently passed Critical Design Review (CDR). The project currently involves making solar cells using silicon and metals extracted from lunar soil simulants. This milestone is part of a broader goal set in 2023, when the company received $34.7 million from NASA as part of public-private Tipping Point contracts to build advanced lunar technologies. Said broader goal is to demonstrate the autonomous operation of Blue Alchemist solar cells in a “simulated lunar environment” by 2026. The latest CDR milestone clears the way for trying to achieve that goal.

While Blue Alchemist is an undeniably intriguing project, the sheer complexity and scale of producing infrastructure on the Moon to power habitats means that at least for a decade from now, NASA’s plans for getting power—solar and nuclear—for surface activities continues to be through the annoying tradition of pulling material out of Earth’s gruesome gravitational well. It should be noted though that Blue Alchemist includes systems for extracting oxygen from lunar soil while getting metal byproducts so that will be useful in the meanwhile when it comes.

Between Project Oasis, the company’s bet to carry NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon, and using in-space refueling as a central architectural component for aiming to land humans on Luna, Blue Origin is positioning itself as an end-to-end lunar transportation and resource company.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

More Moon

• NASA completed integrating all hardware modules of the SLS rocket for the upcoming crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission with the latest addition of the stage adaptor. The adaptor sits atop the rocket’s upper stage, and is upon which the crew’s Orion spacecraft will come next. NASA says a composite diaphragm in the adaptor protects the Orion spacecraft from hazardous gases generated during launch. The four astronauts flying around the Moon and back on the mission have named their Orion craft “Integrity”. NASA continues to target April 2026 as the official date for Artemis II’s launch although quite a few pre-launch preparations remain for this year and next.
• ispace has been selected as part of Japan’s 1-trillion yen “Space Strategy Fund” initiative to develop, launch, and operate a lunar orbiter which will use a terahertz wave sensor system to locate and map water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. Data from this orbiter will be analyzed in tandem with direct surface and subsurface measurements made by the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover mission.
• ispace Europe has bagged a $22 million contract from Magna Petra to carry a NASA-developed mass spectrometer on its second lunar micro-rover. [The first rover was aboard the parent company ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE, which crashed on the Moon due to performance issues of the laser rangefinder.] The second rover will be aboard ispace Japan’s US subsidiary’s first lander part of the NASA-funded CLPS program through Draper. It is targeting a landing on the Moon’s farside in 2027.
• Relatedly, a South Korean company called Unmanned Exploration Laboratory (UEL) is building two micro rovers and intends to send them on future Moon landing missions by ispace.
• Last year we learnt that the launch of Australia’s first lunar rover called Roo-ver has been delayed to 2028—two years later than originally intended. Roo-ver is to launch on an as-yet-unidentified NASA CLPS lander to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice. Now it seems that the launch year is pushed further, with a NASA release on the partnership stating “by the end of this decade” as the timeframe. Even the instrument being contributed by NASA is talked about murkily:

Australia is developing a semi-autonomous lunar rover, which will carry a NASA analysis instrument intended to demonstrate technology for scientific and exploration purposes.

A NASA analysis instrument intended to demonstrate technology for scientific and exploration purposes? To borrow a phrase I’ve picked up from a friend: “I understood all the words but not the sentence.”

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Space agencies and companies worldwide hope to build infrastructure on the Moon from lunar soil, including by heating it into compressed & reinforced structural material. The first detailed examination of sintering Apollo lunar samples by a team of scientists & engineers at ESA has found sufficient similarities in desired quality to sintering simulated lunar-like soil. This means a diverse set of the latter can be a good proxy to test future lunar construction technologies especially since real samples are expensive and difficult to obtain in bulk. The study did find though that the process is sensitive to surface weathering maturity of the lunar soil and particle sizes as well so real lunar soil can always surprise you. From the paper:

The mare samples from Apollo 11 and Apollo 15 exhibited a rapid onset of sintering, indicating it would be easier to accidentally over-sinter or melt mare soil. The sintering temperature of all Apollo samples fell within the range of temperatures required to sinter regolith simulant using the same experimental set-up. Regolith maturity appeared to lower the sintering temperature relative to what would be predicted by composition alone. Sintering simulant regolith with added agglutinates and dust indicated that the smaller average particle size contributed more to the sintering temperature of mature regolith than the higher glass and nanophase iron content.

Work globally towards lunar landing pads

Future infrastructure on the Moon part of long-term robotic or human bases will need protection against lunar sandblasting by incoming landers. For that, ESA has the aptly named PAVER project. It uses powerful lasers to melt simulated lunar soil into glassy solid surfaces, which can then be used to create blocks of landing pads and roads. On the Moon, ESA plans to use a Fresnel lens to focus sunlight instead of using lasers. Landing on the pads instead of loose regolith will drastically reduce sandblasting.

Relatedly, as part of project MOONRISE, which was funded by Germany at €4.74 million, research teams at LZH and TU Berlin have been developing an ML-supported compact laser system to build pads with 3D-printing. The team says they’ve had successful basic terrestrial demonstrations, including under simulated lunar gravity in an Einstein-Elevator. A space-grade MOONRISE hopes to fly on an Astrobotic Griffin lander in late 2026 for a lunar demonstration.

In the meanwhile, a group of researchers at the Indian Institute of Science have been progressing slowly on bacteria-based lunar simulant bricks that are repairable.

NASA is funding the development of entire lunar landing pads.

• In 2023, as part of multiple public-private Tipping Point contracts, NASA funded a Redwire-led project with $12.9 million to develop microwave heating technologies that could solidify and strengthen lunar soil for building infrastructure such as roads, foundations for habitats, and landing pads. The funding hasn’t included a lunar surface demonstration though.
• As part of a Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) solicitation in 2022, NASA awarded ~$2 million to the Colorado School of Mines who in partnership with Lunar Outpost and others were to develop a rover-enabled lunar landing pad construction system for a demonstration on Earth.
• NASA has also awarded a small contract to Astroport to prototype parts of the technology that can melt lunar regolith, convert it to manufacturing feedstock, and use that to robotically assemble landing pads.
• As part of DARPA LunA-10’s selection of 14 companies in 2023 to conduct lunar infrastructure studies on how best to build key pieces for long-term human presence, ICON was to advance its work on building structures using lunar soil. In 2022, NASA awarded a $57 million contract to ICON for continuing to develop said technologies, with a test structure build targeted as early as 2026. A demonstration on the Moon is not in sight for at least two more years.

Furthermore, Jack Kuhr reported last year about the new startup Ethos Space Resources, which has melted lunar soil simulants on Earth and demonstrated the resulting material’s ability to withstand rocket plumes. Ethos plans to build large landing pads for future Lunar Starships with the help of the FLEX rover from Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor) in the future. Ethos plans for its landing pads to have embedded navigational beacons, which would aid precision landing—because otherwise a lander touching down anywhere besides the pad would defeat the purpose of it all.

China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 mission, targeted for launch in 2028, aims to not only melt lunar soil but also transform it via 3D printing into bricks and assemble basic structures out of them. With Chang’e 8, China aims to test techniques for constructing future lunar infrastructure like habitats and landing pads in the build up to the ambitious Sino-led Moonbase called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

Related article: We’re building future technologies for the Moon without closing missed milestones 🕳️

Many thanks to Astrolab, Marc Rayman and Pint of View for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Mission updates

• The four astronauts flying around the Moon and back next year on the Artemis II mission have named their Orion spacecraft “Integrity”. NASA continues to target April 2026 as the official date for Artemis II’s launch although quite a few pre-launch preparations remain for this year and next.
• US-based Firefly’s first Moon landing mission was so productive that NASA has awarded a $10 million data buy contract to the company over and above its base CLPS contract of $101 million for the mission. Looking ahead, Firefly is gearing up for its second, third, and fourth Moon missions this decade. From Firefly’s announcement of NASA’s extended data purchase:

The scope of this data buy encompasses images captured by Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander during its 45-day transit to the Moon and more than 14 days of surface operations. This includes the first high-definition images of a solar eclipse and sunset captured from the Moon’s surface, that could provide insight into outstanding questions regarding lunar dust levitation and the horizon glow phenomenon.

The data buy also includes communications data and transmit speeds from Blue Ghost’s S-band and X-band antennas, propulsion data from Firefly’s Spectre thrusters during critical burns and the final lunar descent, and other lander performance data. Firefly will also provide NASA with additional payload science data as well as lander and payload temperature data captured during a 500°F [260°C] temperature delta on the Moon.

More Moon

• NASA has launched the Lunar Melt citizen science project for enthusiasts to help it map flows of now-cooled melt deposits formed by asteroidal/cometary impacts using data gathered by the agency’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
• Erika Nesvold makes the case of the US not having presented a clear and coherent argument for the country’s self-imposed claim of defeating China in the new “Space Race” to the Moon.
• Related: How Western media narratives of Chinese lunar activities misjudge capabilities and intent and China is not racing to the Moon

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NASA’s planned lunar-water-studying VIPER rover mission, whose launch fate has been uncertain for over a year now, has gotten a new hope to cling to with the agency’s latest announcement of awarding a potential contract to Blue Origin for delivering the rover to the Moon’s south pole in late 2027. The Jeff Bezos owned Blue Origin is preparing two of its “Mark I” robotic lunar landers for launch, with the first one targeted to fly later this year. If this first flight goes well, and if Blue Origin can separately demonstrate to NASA how the lander’s mechanisms should safely deploy the 450-kilogram VIPER rover onto the lunar surface post landing, NASA will award Blue a $190 million contract for delivering VIPER to the Moon on the second Mark I lander. The contract will be part of NASA’s CLPS program.

Notably, the announcement also states that NASA will itself conduct operations and science planning of the VIPER rover as opposed to the agency’s prior considerations when it tried finding a private company to both fly and operate the rover at the latter’s own cost—an approach many argued decidedly failed at VIPER’s original goal. It’s good of NASA to not have followed that path and instead retain VIPER science execution with itself.

The Mark I landers are large in size, on the same scale as the Apollo landers, and yet the first one is carrying only two small NASA payloads, representing a low value bet for the agency despite the higher risk postures that CLPS orders are supposed to accept. I elaborated on this aspect earlier in Moon Monday #226 (May 2025):

Note that the Mark I lander has a large payload capacity of 3,000 kilograms. That’s more than the entire fueled mass of smaller landers like Firefly’s Blue Ghost and India’s Chandrayaan 3! And yet NASA hasn’t stated any plans to fly any other scientific instruments on either of the two Mark I flights. Considering that the US has been failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis, and that the Mark I’s landing site is the lunar south pole, it would be remiss for NASA to skip flying any lunar water related payloads on the Mark Is as a bare minimum. Whether that be through Artemis, CLPS, or other funding sources does not ultimately matter.

And thus I’m glad that at least for the second Mark I flight, NASA has gone ahead with the intention of flying VIPER onboard, with what is perhaps the most apt payload for Blue and the US at this juncture. Let’s hope VIPER’s resource prospecting mission finally actually happens.

Upcoming missions globally which are similar to VIPER—also aiming to find and characterize the nature of lunar water at the lunar south pole—include China’s Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 spacecraft as well as the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission. These missions will also provide context for analyzing ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 samples, which aims to bring lunar polar material to Earth in 2028.

Related: Hope in desolation (verses) 🌙

Chandrayaan 3 research updates

ISRO is seeking competitive proposals from the national scientific community to study Chandrayaan 3 lander, rover, and orbiter data with support in the form of partial funding, infrastructure access, data analysis help, and conference attendance aid. It was a year after the landing in August 2023 that ISRO finally made available an initial set of peer-reviewed Chandrayaan 3 payload data online, accessible by anyone after free registration. ISRO’s data portal, called Pradan ISSDC, is compliant with NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS). And so just as with the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, Chandrayaan 3 data is available in the latest PDS4 format for international researchers to easily utilize it. The latest announcement is specifically for Indian researchers nationwide who may have good ideas but would benefit from ISRO’s institutional support. It’s a good step in growing India’s nascent planetary science community.

Relatedly, I’ve compiled below notable research outcomes from Chandrayaan 3.

• Results from the thermal probe experiment on the Chandrayaan 3 lander have expanded the possible locations for finding water ice beyond the Moon’s poles, thereby benefiting future scouting missions.
• The Chandrayaan 3 rover lunar soil composition measurements contributed to knowledge of our Moon’s origin, and it may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material when analyzing local lunar soil using its X-ray spectrometer.
• Researchers have been using the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s high-resolution camera, which is the world’s sharpest lunar imager, to identify sub-resolution tracks of Chandrayaan 3’s rover based on illumination changes. Scientists are also using the imager to study interactions between the lander’s engine plumes and lunar regolith during when Chandrayaan 3’s lander hopped towards the end of its surface mission.
• The Chandrayaan 3 propulsion module (orbiter) observed Earth as an exoplanet.
• The first geological map of Chandrayaan 3’s landing region reveals it to be 3.7 billion years old. The region has been significantly altered since its formation by subsequent crater impacts and their material ejections.
• The composition of high-latitude lunar soil measured by the Chandrayaan 3 rover is being used to create lunar soil simulants from Moon-like anorthositic rocks in the UAE—whose second lunar rover is flying on Firefly’s second lander with a targeted launch next year.
• A probe on Chandrayaan 3 has taken the first in-situ plasma environment measurements from near the Moon’s south polar surface which revealed the ground truth about the nature of ions in the region.

Many thanks to Astrolab and Marc Rayman for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

More Moon

• NASA has made notable safety improvements to the next SLS rocket which will launch the Orion spacecraft hosting four astronauts towards the Moon for the Artemis II mission:

The Artemis II rocket includes an improved navigation system compared to Artemis I.  Its communications capability also has been improved by repositioning antennas on the rocket to ensure continuous communications with NASA ground stations and the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 which controls launches along the Eastern Range. An emergency detection system on the ICPS [upper stage] allows the rocket to sense and respond to problems and notify the crew. The flight safety system adds a time delay to the self-destruct system to allow time for Orion’s escape system to pull the capsule to safety in event of an abort.

• NASA is preparing to demonstrate 4G/LTE on the Moon during the Artemis III crewed lunar surface exploration mission with the aim of streaming high-definition video and audio from astronauts as they explore first hand the strange new world that is the lunar polar terrain.
• The Orbital Index (a Moon Monday sponsor) highlighted an interesting paper recently related to lunar rover testing:

Explaining why rovers get stuck in sand in low-gravity environments, like the Moon and Mars, requires understanding how sand grains themselves interact in low gravity. “On Earth, sand is more rigid and supportive—reducing the likelihood it will shift under a vehicle’s wheels. But the moon’s surface is “fluffier” and therefore shifts more easily—meaning rovers have less traction, which can hinder their mobility.” Computational models of sand in lower gravity (using the open source Project Chrono simulation engine) show that gravitational offsets (suspension systems) or light-weighted rover models during terrestrial testing are insufficient to predict how wheels will actually behave on arrival (paper).

Fly me to the Moon!

I’m giving a talk with Q&A on the history and future of lunar exploration this Sunday, September 28, in Bangalore. Bring all your questions about the Moon and how we’re exploring it worldwide! You can book tickets online. The event is offline-only to make the audience comfortable in engaging freely with their curiosities. (Note: My honorarium for the talk is fixed regardless of the tickets sold so there are no commission incentives for sharing this.)

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On our Moon
from where the Sun never shines,
a new era will dawn.

Poem notes:

1. There’s nothing quite as bold and beautiful as committing to venturing the brutal colossal desolation that is space. Every (civil) space launch carries not just hardware but hope. The act of exploring the void makes humans special.
2. From “where the sun never shines” is a reference to permanently shadowed regions on our Moon’s poles which were discovered to host water ice deposits. These could be crucial for sustained exploration of our Moon as well as the Solar System.

Both the haiku and the verse are part of Seven uni-verses, my globally published poetry pamphlet.

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

About & Read →

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NASA’s crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission targeting launch in early 2026 will see astronauts participate in multiple advanced health monitoring experiments. Given the scarcity of data on human health in deep space environments, the aim with the experiments is to collectively understand how the four astronauts are physiologically affected by their 10-day deep space transit and its radiation influx. The Orion capsule hosting the astronauts will carry even more radiation sensors than in Artemis I, with a notable upgrade coming from a partnership with the German Space Agency (DLR):

NASA has again partnered the German Space Agency DLR for an updated model of their M-42 sensor—an M-42 EXT—for Artemis II. The new version offers six times more resolution to distinguish between different types of energy, compared to the Artemis I version. This will allow it to accurately measure the radiation exposure from heavy ions which are thought to be particularly hazardous for radiation risk. Artemis II will carry four of the monitors, affixed at points around the cabin by the crew.

This collaboration builds on results from Artemis I whose radiation data was evaluated by NASA, ESA, and DLR scientists last year. They found that radiation exposure to future astronauts will vary not only based on time spent at locations within the capsule but also on Orion’s orientation in space. For example, the paper says when Orion’s orientation was altered during an engine burn, exposure levels dropped nearly in half due to the highly directional nature of the radiation in the Van Allen belt. These results are supporting understanding and preparedness for radiation exposure for Artemis II crew and beyond.

More Artemis II progress

On other fronts of Artemis II, NASA recently completed the new “Mission Evaluation Room” to complement flight control. Said team will consist of about 48 engineers from across NASA, ESA, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus with deep knowledge of Orion’s subsystems. They will analyze technical data as the mission unfolds, assisting flight control with optimizations as well as during any anomalies.

In August, the crew put on their spacesuits and headed to the launchpad to simulate a possible nighttime launch. They also practiced an emergency escape scenario should something go wrong in the launch complex. And in July, the crew entered the fuel-loaded Orion to practice activities and operations they’d have to perform before launch and during the transit to Luna. This excercise had high fidelity since the crew not only used the original capsule but also put on their spacesuits and tested Orion’s interfaces while the capsule operated on full power with its communications and life control systems turned on.

Next up, Orion will be integrated with its emergency escape system. In the lead up to the eventual second SLS rocket launch for Artemis II, NASA will conduct a series of 10 integrated tests over the remainder year.

While Artemis III lags..

In the meanwhile, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy named Amit Kshatriya as the agency’s new Associate Administrator with the hope of accelerating the slow progress of the Artemis III crewed Moon landing mission. Kshatriya previously led NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office for planning and implementing Artemis missions. The slow progress of SpaceX’s human lunar landing system for Artemis III, Lunar Starship, has implied that the US will likely not meet its self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon, leading to continued chatter in the US Congress. The only exceptions to mere fear-mongering are seen in an op-ed by three former Artemis leaders and notably what former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine—under whom Artemis was conceived—spoke at a US Senate meeting on September 3. From Jeff Foust’s apt summary on The Space Review:

Bridenstine, in his opening remarks, criticized that need for in-space refueling of a propellant depot. “We’ll need to launch—nobody really knows, nobody knows—but it could be up to dozens of additional Starships to refuel the first Starship,” he said. “By the way, that whole in-space refueling thing has never been tested, either.” He added that, once that depot Starship fuels the lunar lander Starship, it’s unclear how long the lander version can then loiter in lunar orbit, waiting for the crew to arrive on an SLS-launched Orion.

The Acting NASA Administrator responded in anger:

That was shade thrown on all of NASA. I was angry about it. [...] I’ll be damned if that is the story that we write. [...] We are going to beat the Chinese to the Moon.

Given China’s bagging of a quicker succession of milestones in 2025 than expected, this story may not be for the Americans to write.

Related: We’re building future technologies for the Moon without closing missed milestones 🕳️

The article linked above takes the longer view of sustaining exploration of our Moon through robustness of approach and collaboration. No matter who lands humans on the Moon first in this century, it’s important that we take a global view if, after all, we really are going to Luna for “humanity” as is often proclaimed. As I noted in the article on Starship being slow to ship:

It’ll be great to have a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna. We should be happy that we now have two distinct efforts to sustain crewed and robotic exploration of our Moon. It gives humanity a better chance to do so since a dichotomic political system can apparently only do better under a competitive mindset and internal fear-mongering.

A Long March 10 booster roars thrice with Luna in sight

On September 12, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) and the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) conducted multiple test fires for the upcoming Long March 10 series of crew-capable rockets using a high fidelity first stage structure. This follows the first test in August when they simultaneously fired the seven YF-100K high-thrust kerolox engines for 30 seconds to validate the design system, components, and materials which will power Long March 10A rockets. These will launch China’s next-generation human spacecraft named Mengzhou to Earth orbit for Tiangong space station visits. To launch humans to the Moon, China will combine three Long March 10A first stages to form the core stage of the Long March 10. This rocket—as China’s most capable—will loft a lunar Mengzhou Y capsule with humans and, in a separate launch, the Lanyue lander towards lunar orbit.

The second Long March 10A booster test fire involved simultaneous roaring of the engines for longer than the first time, engine gimbaling, restarting of four engines, and then of one. The latter two modes were to test engine performance for China’s plan to recover Long March 10A boosters post launch with reentry and landing burns. The cumulative firing time in the second test was 320 seconds, an order of magnitude more than the first. CMSA noted the importance of the milestone in its release:

The move marks a breakthrough in developing the initial prototype of the Long March-10 series of carrier rockets. [...] This test focused on evaluating the capabilities of the seven clustered engines of the rocket's first stage for low-thrust operating condition and secondary restart condition, obtaining complete test data.

To see all recent milestones hit by China in the lead up to its first crewed Moon landing aimed to be accomplished by 2030, read my review article linked below:

Many thanks to Catalyx Space, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

More mission updates

• In August, Thailand’s National Astronomical Research Institute (NARIT) delivered its ~5-kilogram MATCH payload to CAS and CNSA. The country’s first to the Moon, MATCH will fly aboard China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 orbiter. It will study solar storms and cosmic rays respectively with two instruments. CNSA aims to launch the Chang’e 7 lander-orbiter stack in late 2026. MATCH was developed by over a dozen Thai researchers in collaboration with seven professors across Chinese scientific institutions. Thailand was the first country to sign and participate in both the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project and the US-led Artemis Accords [announcements one and two]. Senegal is the only other country to sign both. I hope many more join.
• Related: The case for India to study and exchange Chang’e lunar samples
• ispace Europe announced that is has passed the milestone of “Mission Design Review” (MDR) for the MAGPIE rover mission its leading to study lunar polar water ice and other such volatiles. The launch target is 2028. The mission team involving European universities won a ~€2.7 million ESA contract earlier this year to collaborate with the agency for achieving the scientific goals. ispace Europe says the MDR went free of any critical blockers, allowing the project to proceed to the next phase of funding and development which will involve maturing payload designs and building prototypes. Similar to the upcoming joint ISRO-JAXA LUPEX rover mission, MAGPIE will also feature a drill, a ground penetrating radar, and a neutron spectrometer to map and analyze lunar polar soil.

More Moon

• Riccardo Pozzobon, an instructor on ESA’s Pangaea analog lunar campaign to train future astronauts, unfortunately passed away in an accident during a recent excursion. 😔
• Blue Origin announced that it has passed Critical Design Review (CDR) for its Blue Alchemist project, which involves making solar cells using silicon and metals extracted from lunar soil simulants. This milestone is part of a broader goal set in 2023, when the company received $34.7 million from NASA as part of public-private Tipping Point contracts to build advanced lunar technologies. That broader goal is to demonstrate the autonomous operation of Blue Alchemist solar cells in a “simulated lunar environment” by 2026. The latest CDR milestone clears the way towards achieving that goal. While Blue Alchemist is an undeniably intriguing project, the sheer complexity and scale of producing infrastructure on the Moon to power habitats means that at least for a decade from now, NASA’s plans for getting power—solar and nuclear—for surface activities continues to be through the annoying tradition of pulling material out of Earth’s gruesome gravitational well. It should be noted though that Blue Alchemist also includes systems for extracting oxygen from lunar soil while getting metal byproducts so that’s valuable in itself.

• Chandrayaan 4 will bring unique Moon materials—and maybe a giant scientific leap for India 🌓🪨

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This century has seen countries worldwide explore our Moon with new and varied technological capabilities. In recent years, Japan’s SLIM spacecraft achieved the world’s most precise robotic lunar landing while China demonstrated the first remote docking and undocking of spacecraft in lunar orbit with the Chang’e 5 sample return mission. This year Firefly’s Blue Ghost Moon lander, part of NASA’s CLPS program, received the first terrestrial navigation signal fixes all the way at the Moon. More such capabilities that have been demonstrated, and those which aren’t yet, need to come together for humans to build and sustain permanent outposts on our Moon for the exploration of itself and worlds beyond.

Below is a review of advanced capabilities that Moon missions aim to demonstrate through the remainder of this decade, achieving which can—collectively—power the foundational elements of Moonbases.

Upcoming lunar milestones

• Rover autonomy: Safely operating most robotic rovers in the harsh environment of our Moon currently involves accepting the necessary lag of two-way Earth-Moon communications and human-in-loop decision making. But a bevy of upcoming rovers from organizations worldwide aim to demonstrate a variety of autonomous surface operations spanning navigation, exploration, and mapping to enable the next generation of expansive missions. These rovers will come from the UAE, US-based Astrobotic, NASA’s CADRE group, Australia, and Canada respectively.
• Polar solar and nuclear power: To maximize endurance, operations time, and its effectiveness during frigid lunar nights and in harsh permanently shadowed regions at the Moon’s poles, NASA is investing in multiple companies to have large & tall vertical solar panels suited for the poles as well as nuclear power in the 100-kilowatt range.
• Oxygen extraction: Both ESA and NASA are aiming to demonstrate the ability to extract oxygen from lunar soil with the upcoming missions called PROPSECT and LIFT-1 respectively. Future astronauts will benefit from such oxygen for breathable air, and eventually even use it as rocket fuel too. With this ability, we will no longer need to carry and drag ample oxygen out of Earth’s gruesome gravity well.
• Resource utilization: China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 mission aims to go one step further. It would not only melt lunar soil but also transform it via 3D printing into bricks and assemble basic structures out of them. Chang’e 8 aims to test techniques for construction of future lunar infrastructure like habitats and landing pads in the build up to the Sino-led Moonbase called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

• Navigation and communications: With recent demonstrations of automated navigation, accurate distance measurements, and low-energy orbital transfers, China is gearing up to create the Queqiao network of lunar satellites that enable Mooncraft to navigate autonomously and provide them with high-bandwidth communications independently of Earth.
• Advanced mobility: Upcoming large rovers in the class of the Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle will be able to explore our Moon longer, farther, and across more terrains than any rover before. It will also host astronauts during their lunar visits.
• In-space refueling: Both SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon spacecraft aim to refuel in Earth orbit to enable their respective plans & contracts of landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon for NASA by the end of the decade. In-space refueling would unlock large payload capacities and better spacecraft maneuverability across the Solar System. Combined with several capabilities above, it also lays the pathway for using the Moon as a future launch base to other places in our Solar System.

Gaining these capabilities would represent a huge feasibility leap in having permanent human or robotic outposts across the Solar System. However, these technological milestones, while necessary, are insufficient in themselves to achieve the goal. They need to work in tandem with several other technologies which have all gone unachieved in past Moon missions as listed below.

Missing the mark

• Water ice: Virtually all recent lunar surface and orbital missions funded by NASA have failed to explore lunar water as the foundational goal of the US’ Artemis program. China’s Chang’e 7 lander and rover, targeting launch next year, will be the first attempt by the Chinese to advance on the same.
• Safer landings: NASA flew an advanced LiDAR-based sensor on Intuitive Machines’ first CLPS Moon lander in 2024. The mission was supposed to validate the sensor’s use in enabling autonomously safe and precise landings. But issues with retrieving sensor data during the lander’s descent coupled with the hard landing did not allow said technology’s validation.
• Lunar sample ownership transfer: In 2020, NASA contracted three companies to each collect lunar soil after their respective landings and then virtually transfer its ownership to NASA. It aimed to set precedence for legal frameworks that would enable extracting and utilizing resources on the Moon and in space in the future. But the flown missions, one by Lunar Outpost and two by ispace, failed to operate on the Moon. The only other award was to Masten Space, who filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and its CLPS mission contract became void.
• Smart lunar night survival: NASA’s VIPER rover, whose fate is now uncertain, was supposed to test a technique on the Moon’s south pole of intermittently parking at pre-identified high-altitude spots where nights are shorter due to the local topography, thereby enabling the mission to last six months or more. This would allow future autonomous rovers to efficiently explore the lunar poles and its water ice. Now the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover hopes to demonstrate and utilize this technique during its mission to study water ice.

A pattern for lunar landing failures

Those key technological milestones that we wished for have been missed because reliably landing and operating on the Moon remains hard. About half the world’s lunar landing attempts still fail. And most missions get delayed. As the following recent Moon landing attempts illustrate, a truly comprehensive testing regime for landers during their development is non-optional for success.

• ISRO attributes Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon principally to the emphasis on demonstrating the lander system’s performance down to its specifics post Chandrayaan 2’s failure.
• Both of Intuitive Machines’ CLPS landers hard-landed on the Moon due to inadequate testing and checkouts of their laser rangefinders. ispace Japan’s second Moon landing attempt shared a similar fate this year due to performance issues with its laser rangefinder.
• Astrobotic’s first CLPS lander Peregrine failed because of skipping comprehensive launch environmental testing of its propulsion system.
• In contrast, Firefly proactively kept ample safety margins through terrestrial testing as well as for spaceflight deviances and anomalies to achieve the first true soft landing for NASA CLPS earlier this year.

As indispensable as comprehensive testing is, another hard fact is that private companies and emerging space nations don’t have the kind of large budgets or time afforded by advanced government space agencies. This necessarily implies lesser overall redundancy in their lander designs as well as a testing regime that’s always battling cost and schedule—all leading to greater risks. Even fuel margins on privately built landers tend to be on the lower side because every kilogram of added fuel reserve would take away at least several hundred thousand dollars worth of commercial payload capacity. But alas, the closer a lander is to the surface during lunar descent, the lesser its ability to self-correct amid depleting fuel reserves. Based on these observations, the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) notes a fundamental issue with this approach:

Rather than one agency attempting seven landings, a growing number of new actors are launching their first or second attempts. Instead of hard won lessons flowing freely into the next mission, knowledge is often siloed, treated as proprietary by agencies and companies, and so potentially avoidable mistakes can resurface. [...] Collaboration becomes critical to ensure that tens of millions of dollars of investment and years of work aren’t lost in the final seconds of flight. The more we can share data from these attempts, the more return humanity as a whole makes on these investments. The Moon is hard, but there is no reason to make it harder.

Information sharing is known to enable cutting-edge space missions. Unfortunately though, there are currently no institutionalized mechanisms that do so while also scaling with the increasing pace of Moon missions worldwide. Different states share different information at different times, in different formats, and through different channels at varying levels. Amid competition, companies remain tightfisted about sharing information even on mission aspects that aren’t sensitive to intellectual property. Information sharing and coordination is thus dispersed and limited, and not efficient for safety, sustainability, or abundant progress. If we improve it to accommodate more actors, we can compound perks for all. It’s to this end that Open Lunar has embarked upon the Lunar Ledger project for companies and organizations to reliably share technical data for the safety and success of all.

In parallel, the non-profit Lunar Policy Platform (LPP), with funding from Open Lunar and in synergy with multilateral initiatives within UN COPUOS, started the “Lunar Information Sharing 101” initiative. It has consulted over 70 representatives from 35 governments, space agencies, companies, and experts to understand converging and diverging views on when, where, and how to share lunar mission information. Open Lunar has also submitted a formal Conference Room paper to COPUOS, which outlines how the Lunar Ledger complements the UN’s efforts by enabling rapid, transparent data sharing among multiple types of lunar actors.

Core challenges still remain in harmonizing humanity’s technological abilities through effective collaboration. Only then do we gain more than the sum of our parts. Christine Tiballi, the Lunar Ledger Lead and a researcher with Open Lunar, highlights one such challenge in the Lunar Compass:

Over the next decade and beyond, the Moon will bear witness to increasing levels of activity: the most significant and perhaps consequential loci are the Artemis Base (US-led coalition) and the China and Russia led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Both align signatories along mission milestones with increasing cadence and complexity, married to technological and scientific advancement, In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), and strategies of incremental autonomy. But despite the parallel focus on standards, cooperation, and interoperability, neither explicitly states its objectives in relation to non-appropriation (permanence), nor its willingness to cooperate (beyond due regard) with the other, setting the stage for terrestrial geopolitical conflict to remain tethered to us.

Originally published by me on the blog of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead. The article is republished here on my blog because of its relevance to my Moon Monday readers as well as for archival.

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It’s been a year since the approval of ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 mission, and ISRO has not yet provided an update on if the preliminary design review (PDR) to finalize the mission design has been completed—especially when considering that the original announcement stated 2027 as the target launch year. The word on the street from multiple sources is that Chandrayaan 4’s PDR is done or near complete but multiple media queries and follow-ups sent to ISRO continue to not be answered.

That it’s the tax season in India is reminding space industry observers and participants here that ISRO doesn’t consistently share about key milestones associated with the publicly funded civil space exploration missions. The limited official information on Chandrayaan 4 remains scattered online and offline, and is even inconsistent with each other at times. As a result, it’s frequently taken and presented out of context by the media and the space industry at large, causing more misunderstandings of the mission’s goals and potential.

Based on confirmed but scattered public sources, I want my readers and people worldwide to know about India’s fascinating Chandrayaan 4 mission in one convenient place. This article is thus my attempt to collate, clarify, and adequately contextualize everything we know about ISRO’s actual plans for Chandrayaan 4. I also explain the mission’s immense scientific potential in the global context, and propose the idea of India doing a sample exchange with China and the US for the benefit of both nations and their researchers. ISRO responding to media queries would’ve helped put together a better article but here goes all that I could assemble anyway.

The mission

Chandrayaan 4 will fetch samples from the Moon’s south pole for researchers worldwide. Now launching by 2028, the mission was approved with a budget of ₹2104 crores ($252 million) last September by the Indian Government Union Cabinet following Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon in August 2023. Chandrayaan 4 currently aims to bring two kilograms of scooped plus drilled samples for scientific studies to enrich our understanding of the Moon. Using combined imagery and topographic data from the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the mission’s landing site being evaluated is between 84-85° on the lunar south pole, which has the potential for hosting buried water ice deposits.

The Chandrayaan 4 mission comprises five spacecraft modules:

• the lander (descender module)
• the propulsion module
• the ascender module
• the sample transfer module
• and the Earth reentry capsule module.

ISRO will launch these modules in two stacks, each currently weighing about 4600 kilograms. However, each stack’s mass still lies beyond the reach of India’s current most powerful rocket, the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), which launched Chandrayaan 3. That’s why ISRO’s launch vehicle of choice for Chandrayaan 4 is an upgraded version of LVM3 whose core stage will be powered by the upcoming SE2000 semi-cryogenic kerolox engine. The LVM3’s lift capacity to GTO orbit would then be increased from about 4200 kilograms to roughly 5000, allowing an LVM3 each to launch a Chandrayaan 4 stack while also allowing some margin for mass changes during development. ISRO has said this maxed out LVM3 rocket will be ready to fly in 2027.

During the Chandrayaan 4 mission, each spacecraft stack will be deployed in an elliptical Earth orbit. The two launches will be within a month of each other. The stacks then rendezvous and dock with each other in Earth orbit to form a full, integrated stack. The large propulsion module then raises the stack’s Earth orbit, approaching closer to the Moon and jettisoning itself post that. The remainder stack then enters lunar orbit, where the lander plus ascender module separate out for descent and land on the Moon’s south pole. A robotic arm will collect and transfer scooped plus drilled samples into a sealed container. Only the ascender module carrying these samples then lift off to lunar orbit. After docking with the stack that stayed back in lunar orbit, the samples will be transferred to the reentry capsule module to get them to Earth with a tactful reentry and oceanic splash. Having a successful mission would also mean ISRO can then leverage this docking based mission architecture for its eventual goal of sending humans to the Moon.

Pre-Chandrayaan 4 preparations

With Chandrayaan 3, one of the extended goals ISRO achieved was pulling the mission’s propulsion module from lunar orbit back to Earth orbit, thereby demonstrating a small but key capability that will be required to pull off a robotic sample return with Chandrayaan 4. One of the most complex parts of Chandrayaan 4 would be to remotely dock large robotic modules in Earth and lunar orbit. The latter is a feat only China has achieved so far with their Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 sample return missions respectively.

Because Chandrayaan 4 is a huge technological leap for India, ISRO is taking the approach of demonstrating and practicing docking satellites in Earth orbit first to reduce risks. Earlier this year, the first such milestone was accomplished when India’s $14 million SPADEX satellites successfully docked and then later undocked in circular Earth orbit. ISRO continues testing dual-satellite operations and precision approaches with the satellites.

M. Sankaran, the Director of ISRO’s key URSC center in Bangalore—which was involved in Chandrayaan 3’s design, assembly, and testing—has told asianetnews that the upcoming SPADEX 2 mission will demonstrate docking in elliptical orbit, the same kind that the two Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stacks will also need to execute. To further mimic a Chandrayaan 4 like mission scenario, the SPADEX 2 satellites and their docking ring sizes will be bigger than the first pair. SPADEX 2 has gotten mission approval from the Indian government, and is now awaiting a financial sanction.

The scientific value of Chandrayaan 4 samples

NASA’s Apollo missions helped scientists confirm that our celestial companion had a fiery origin tied to Earth. On the other hand, the Soviet Luna missions were the world’s first robotic sample return missions, establishing the modern approach that fetching planetary material to Earth generates scientific results for decades. Samples fetched by China’s robotic Chang’e 5 mission confirmed that the Moon was volcanically active and thermally complex geologically recently. And Chang’e 6 transformed our understanding of how our Moon evolved thanks to the first ever samples from the mysterious lunar farside.

As I wrote in my article ‘Why explore our Moon’, for us to continue piecing together the complex and nuanced origin and evolution of the Earth-Moon system, we need to continue fetching distinct geological material so that our world’s lunar samples represent more of the Moon—a trend started by Chang’e missions. We currently don’t have any samples from the lunar poles, including potential water ice or water-mixed regolith from there. It’s important to understand this water’s sources, its abundance, and how it is related or unrelated to Earth’s water. Said knowledge is equally crucial in helping us plan sustained lunar exploration and build future Moonbases. As such, when Chandrayaan 4 brings unique lunar polar samples to Earth, it will help humanity make its first tactile advances into these fundamental open questions about our Moon, Earth, Solar System, and future in space.

Related tangent: I’m pleased that ISRO’s webpage on Chandrayaan 4 cites my blog as a reference for the mission’s scientific context! 🚀

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Takshashila Institution, PierSight and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s special combined edition of Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress!

If you too appreciate my efforts of putting together this curated & unique resource on Chandrayaan 4 for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Prepping for Chandrayaan 4 science

For a nation that began planetary exploration only this century starting with Chandrayaan 1, a sample return mission will be a giant leap in scientific output. To ensure tapping into its potential though, ISRO has recognized that early preparations would be needed across the board. Some representative developments to that end are listed below.

• In April, ISRO gathered about 50 scientists from across India to deliberate on and help determine next steps for storage and scientific studies of lunar samples Chandrayaan 4 will fetch.
• The ISRO-affiliated PRL institute conducted an in-person inaugural workshop for students last November to teach them via lab visits and hands-on sessions how to handle and analyze space and planetary samples. More such workshops are planned not just for students but for professional scientists across the country since realizing Chandrayaan 4 necessitates building national capacity to thoroughly prepare, store, curate, characterize, and analyze the first set of space samples fetched by India. The second such workshop is yet to take place.
• An official response this past August to a query put forth in the Rajya Sabha—loosely, the Indian equivalent to the US Senate—provides us some details on how ISRO is planning the handling and storage of Chandrayaan 4 samples:

Chandrayaan-4 mission will ensure the safe handling and storage of lunar sample to prevent contamination by transferring the leak proof sample canisters to sample curation facility with contamination control features. Establishment of Curation Facility (Class 100 & 1000 clean room environment as per ISO standard) is planned with advanced instrument[s] to preserve the integrity of the sample for scientific analysis. As per COSPAR (Committee on Space Research) Planetary Protection policy, lunar missions fall under the category where it does not demand stringent requirement for biological contamination.

The case for India to study and exchange Chang’e lunar samples

In April, China announced the first set of international researchers whose proposals were selected to study unique lunar samples brought to Earth by Chang’e 5 in 2020. The researchers now analyzing said samples are from universities or institutes in the UK, Japan, France, Germany, Pakistan, and even the US (through efforts outside of NASA). Unfortunately, ISRO or its affiliated institutions did not participate in these sample research proposals. In fact, no non-ISRO or non-government funded Indian institute proposed Chang’e 5 sample studies either in this round.

Sure, India and China aren’t on friendly terms but so aren’t US and China, and yet recognizing the scientific value of Chang’e 5 samples, NASA did secure a remarkable exception to the Wolf Amendment from the US Congress for the country’s researchers to be able to apply for federally funded Chang’e sample research proposals. While the latter outcome remains blocked from the US’ own side, getting the Congressional exception was the first big step in the right direction. India doesn’t have a Wolf Amendment of its own, and so no major legal blockers exist for national research institutes or otherwise to study Chang’e samples. Besides, India and China do have relations & interactions for trade, economic growth, infrastructure contracts, and several technologies out of necessity for both nations. So why should science be the one excluded of all things?

Several Indian scientists, like those at the ISRO-affiliated PRL institute, have already studied Apollo and Luna samples. They have analyzed asteroid samples too. As such, Indian researchers stand to benefit from studying the geologically young and unique Chang’e 5 samples as well by publishing varied and more current work. Notably, doing so would also naturally open windows for the national scientific community to access Chang’e 6 samples in the future, which are even more diverse and valuable.

Even more crucially perhaps, going through the logistical process of proposing Chang’e sample studies and then getting & storing them would provide India with a good programmatic sense of the kinds of things that it would also need to do to share Chandrayaan 4 samples when our time comes. This experience would span an obviously indirect yet nuanced sense of China’s storage facilities, initial characterization and cataloging of samples, their transport systems, and so on. Sure, India could also pick up things from how NASA manages Apollo samples but that system is utterly expensive, having been made in a different era of budgetary freedom during the Cold War. In contrast, the scale and scope of China’s lunar sample facilities are more in reach for India to replicate. And they are modern too. There’s no harm in seeking inspiration from the only other facility on Earth that concerns the same celestial body and is also closest in scope to what India desires for Chandrayaan 4. I hope Indian research proposals make their way into the second round of international Chang’e 5 sample studies.

While geopolitical hesitation may keep this prospect a dream, it’s worth noting that in the meanwhile China did formally welcome India to cooperate on Moon missions and the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project this past May. The invitation came from none other than Wu Weiren, the Chief Designer of China’s extremely successful lunar program.

In fact, Indian scientists applying for Chang’e sample studies can be an enabler of even more valuable scientific exchanges with the Chinese. One of these could be a literal sample exchange, a mechanism known to work very well in the past and present worldwide—such as the recent asteroid sample swap between the US and Japan. With Chandrayaan 4 lunar samples in hand, ISRO should initiate a sample exchange program with China and the US, swapping Chang’e and Artemis samples respectively for the also uniquely valuable Chandrayaan 4 Moon materials. With this program, all three nations will benefit in terms of their scientific outputs while India also gets better geopolitical leverage and China further improves its international relations. A win-win for all, and for humanity.

Indian and Chinese space researchers have an opportunity to interact, exchange ideas, and consider future collaborations at the International Lunar Sample Research Symposium being hosted by the University of Hong Kong this November. I sincerely hope that ISRO is sending, or is at least considering sending, some of its researchers to this science-focused symposium for mutual benefit.

In turn, realizing such proposed collaborations and building trust in the process could be the start of many more synergies between India and China at the Moon.

On our Moon
from where the Sun never shines,
a new era will dawn.
– Jatan

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Following three back-to-back failures this year and an explosion of a test pad, SpaceX finally had a largely successful integrated test flight (IFT) of Starship on August 26. Called IFT-10, the flight achieved all of its primary goals across deployment of simulated Starlink satellites, heat shield tests, and precise core & upper stage splashdowns.

In 2021, NASA selected Starship’s lunar variant for landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon in 2024. Over and above previous delays, this year’s failures of Starship have significantly slowed down progress along the long road ahead for NASA to put humans on the Moon on Artemis III. But now the success of IFT-10 has somehow led many in the US space industry to hope that said Moon moment will take place before China lands crew as its own goal by 2030. In fact, Stephen Clark reports NASA’s Acting Administrator Sean Duffy confidently noting SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell as saying that Starship won’t be the holdup for Artemis III.

However, the fact is no other system involved in either Artemis or China’s architecture is nearly as complex as Starship. While the Artemis Moonsuits from Axiom Space have been facing its own delays, the technological advances needed there over existing spacesuits aren’t as wide as Starship’s would be compared to traditional rockets. It’s only now that SpaceX has managed to get the upper stage heat shield to perform well enough. It’s no doubt a challenging task but nevertheless only one of the many key milestones needed to achieve the goal of landing humans on the Moon. Next up, SpaceX also needs to be able to:

• have lofted Starships return to launchpads by default
• refurbish Starships fast enough
• consistently deploy payloads in Earth orbit
• perform cryogenic fuel transfers between upper stages in Earth orbit
• and, later during Moon missions, avoid having that cryogenic fuel boil off in lunar orbit and on the Moon’s surface while waiting for and hosting astronauts.

That’s why Lunar Starship needs a high launch cadence for adequate in-orbit refueling. But it will take several more Starship test launches before we can even get a baseline demonstration of in-orbit fuel transfer, a milestone already delayed by a year since its previously intended target. In July 2024, Jeff Foust had reported that an internal confirmation review conducted by NASA on Lunar Starship’s readiness gave Artemis III a 70% chance of launch by February 2028. It’s been over a year since, and with the earlier failures of Starship this year, the launch target has already moved to the right even if NASA may stick to calling 2027 as the official year. In fact, we don’t even have a firm launch target for the uncrewed Starship lunar landing demonstration, which needs to be successful before SpaceX is allowed to carry Artemis astronauts. Simply put, NASA’s road to the Moon has been inching through Starship.

In the meanwhile, China has bagged a quicker succession of milestones in 2025 than expected across its Moon rocket, the crew capsule, the lander, and supporting navigation and communications infrastructure. China’s track record this century of nearly no failures despite undertaking increasingly complex lunar missions has been exceptional. Barring a major failure or technical holdup in any of China’s crewed lunar landing components, there’s little reason to doubt a Sino success.

Given the numerous milestones left for Starship to land humans on the Moon compared to the relatively fewer gaps for China to fill, the US will likely not meet its self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon. Either way, it’ll be great to have a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna. We should be happy that we now have two distinct efforts to sustain crewed and robotic exploration of our Moon. It gives humanity a better chance to do so since a dichotomic political system can apparently only do better under a competitive mindset and internal fear-mongering.

Related articles:

• How China has an edge over the US in sustaining future crewed Moon missions
• How Western media narratives of Chinese lunar activities misjudge capabilities and intent

More Artemis updates

• NASA continues preparations to launch the crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission in early 2026, with the latest update being the completion of the new “Mission Evaluation Room” to complement flight control. Said team will consist of about 48 engineers from across NASA, ESA, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus with deep knowledge of subsystems comprising the crew’s Orion spacecraft. They will analyze technical data from the 10-day mission as it unfolds, assisting flight control with optimizations as well as during any anomalies. In the lead up to the Artemis II launch, NASA will conduct a series of 10 integrated tests over the remainder year.
• NASA has built a new system to test hardware components in a simulated environment which replicates the frigid vacuum conditions of the harsh lunar night and many permanently shadowed regions. Uniquely combining cryocoolers and vacuum setups, the system called the Lunar Environment Structural Test Rig (LESTR) allows testing components—like small rover wheels—at temperatures as low as -233° C amid a dry vacuum similar to what hardware will experience on the Moon. NASA says LESTR’s architecture is scalable, meaning it lays the groundwork for advancing testing of technologies for future, increasingly complex Artemis missions.
• Related articles:
  • How engineers test Moon landers on Earth
  • Europe’s LUNA test facility brings Moon vibes on Earth

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Matt Ryall for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

More Moon

• On August 29, teams led by the Prime Ministers of India and Japan respectively signed the implementing arrangement for the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX Moon mission intended to launch by the end of the decade. This phase follows the mission’s financial approval by India in March [Japan approved years ago] and the third in-person technical interface meeting between mission members from the two agencies in May. The Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission will drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole and be a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA. It can also provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions.
• The NASA-supporting-and-enabled Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) is looking for volunteers for multiple positions in its Executive Committee and related roles.

Even more Moon!

Last week I published a linked list of unique ways in which our Moon is valuable even beyond itself. In there, I also asked if any aspect is missing, and that was indeed the case. I’ve updated the post with two more points:

• The lunar regolith has a layered record of our dynamic Sun over the last 2+ billion years, and the interstellar mediums and environments our Solar System passed through in that time
• Studying moonquakes and the lunar interior helps us understand the origin and evolution of solid surface planets & moons across our Solar System and beyond

Many thanks to planetary scientists Ian Crawford and Clive Neal for these suggestions. 🌙

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Very few people know that our serene, silvery cosmic companion’s value lies even beyond the exploration of itself. That’s why I’ve been sharing and writing about various such aspects too and their relevance on my blog and beyond. However, I realized I never brought it all together in one place. Today I’m fixing that. Take a look at these fantastic propositions our Moon offers. Who knows it might be useful during some policy debrief when people want to choose between the Moon and Mars based on logical fallacies tied to mutual exclusions? Our Moon is valuable even beyond itself:

• As a unique platform for radio cosmology to study the Cosmological Dark Ages from the Moon’s farside
• To repurpose Moon missions for enabling deep space exploration
• For leveraging Luna’s unique vantage point to monitor our Sun and its wind
• As a geological time capsule and an age reference for Earth and events across the Solar System
• By studying moonquakes and the lunar interior to understand the origin and evolution of solid surface planets & moons across our Solar System and beyond
• As a well known, nearby reference body to calibrate imagers and radar systems for Earth observation as well as planetary exploration
• For performing some of the most stringent tests of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity using deployed retroreflectors
• As a good proxy of unprotected solar and radiation in deep space environments to enable future human exploration of our Solar System
• Its regolith being a layered record of our dynamic Sun over the last 2+ billion years, and the interstellar mediums and environments our Solar System passed through in that time
• Enabling an exclusive set of gravitational wave studies of highly energetic cosmic body collisions not possible to conduct from Earth or elsewhere in our Solar System
• As a unique astronomy platform to study magnetospheres associated with exoplanets that are galactically-nearby and potentially habitable
• Perhaps, as a future launch base to other places in our Solar System

Related book recommendation:

There might be a few more aspects that I’m missing and would love to know about it from you! Edit: Many thanks to planetary scientists Ian Crawford and Clive Neal for two suggestions which I’ve incorporated. 🌙

Taken together, the above aspects in themselves constitute a clear rationale not just for exploring our Moon but also standing up for its preservation against pure commercialization and national or private claims of ownership—especially so when it’s the same kinds of exploratory technologies that both enable many of these observations and can eventually destroy them.

Science does not exist in a (lunar) vacuum

NASA’s Apollo missions helped us confirm that our celestial companion had a fiery origin tied to Earth. Soviet Luna missions were the world’s first robotic sample return missions, establishing the modern approach that fetching planetary material to Earth generates scientific results for decades. India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter discovered water on the Moon, revealing a dynamic lunar environment and catalyzing global interest in lunar exploration. Japan’s SELENE orbiter extensively mapped the Moon and found openings to long underground lava tubes. Samples fetched by China’s Chang’e 5 mission confirmed that the Moon was volcanically active and thermally complex geologically recently. And Chang’e 6 transformed our understanding of how our Moon evolved thanks to the first ever farside lunar samples.

These are profound discoveries that tie back to the history of Earth and potentially its water. The scientific exploration of our Moon has been a microcosm of what humans globally are cumulatively capable of. And it promises more still as a unique platform for radio cosmology, solar sciences, unraveling the complex history of our Solar System, and more.

But with increasing Moon missions, harsh lunar dust that can go orbital, congestion and lack of regulation in lunar orbit, the lunar south pole becoming a region of convergence and potential contest for technology, mining, infrastructure, and habitat development, and the changing geopolitical environment on Earth, our Moon’s scientific value as an extraordinarily unique time capsule could become increasingly inaccessible and gated.

That’s why the non-profit Lunar Policy Platform (LPP), with support from the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor), consulted key scientific organizations like COSPAR and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) as well as universities and research centers worldwide to understand nuances of the situation. In the ensuing guide, LPP finds that because science doesn’t exist in a vacuum, the intersection of national, commercial, technological, and strategic objectives means there’s no single way forward to accommodate the scientific pursuits of all. In the project’s key takeaways shared before the guide’s impending public availability, LPP noted a concluding remark pertinent to preserving lunar science for all:

As lunar development accelerates, it’s tempting to fall back on familiar scripts: that science is neutral, that preservation requires exclusion, and that responsible actors will defer to experts. But the Moon is not just a research site. It’s a commons. [...] We can design governance tools that protect fragile sites without prioritising any one specific activity. Shared-use protocols, adaptive zoning, and rotational access are all terrestrially tested mechanisms that could allow multiple actors to coexist. [...] The challenge is to find that shared margin, ensure that protection does not entrench inequality, and that managed access does not become a proxy for power plays.

This section was originally published by me on the blog & newsletter of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead.

Key mission updates

• Ling Xin reports that due to the Philippines government voicing issues against China’s rocket stages entering their sovereign territories at sea, CNSA had to redesign the launch and flight trajectories of the Chang’e 6 mission which successfully fetched samples from the Moon’s farside last year. The report is based on the technical paper published in the Journal of Astronautics by the mission designers themselves, which provides interesting graphs as well. In particular, the mission profile modifications stretched Chang’e 6’s Moonward journey from 23 days to 53 days while narrowing the window for touching down within the primary landing region on the Moon’s farside. The landing region was not to be changed owing to its immense scientific value. At the end, everything has gladly worked out.
• Astrobotic announced that its “LunaGrid-Lite” lunar surface power transfer demonstration mission targeting a 2026 launch has passed the Critical Design Review phase ahead of flight model build and assembly. As part of public-private Tipping Point contracts in 2023, NASA awarded Astrobotic $34.6 million for this mission. After landing, the company’s tethered CubeRover—itself supported by a $5.8 million Tipping Point contract—will unreel about 500 meters of high-voltage, 1 kilowatt power line across the surface. The demonstration will be a test for LunaGrid, wherein Astrobotic aims to commercially deliver power to enable hardware and rovers on the Moon’s poles to survive the poorly lit terrain and frigid nights. Concerning another piece that would be part of LunaGrid, Astrobotic said in May that it has completed the standard but critical set of space environmental tests for its wireless charging system for hardware operating on the Moon. Also related is the company’s development of the also NASA-funded 20-meter tall, retractable polar solar arrays and its newly picked up larger cousin. These are aimed to be deployed on maximally sunlit sites at the Moon’s south pole.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space, Alexandra Witze and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

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On August 15, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) and the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) conducted a 30-second static fire test for the upcoming Long March 10 series of crew-capable rockets using a high fidelity first stage structure. China has thus now successfully simultaneously fired the seven YF-100K high-thrust kerolox engines to validate the design system, components, and materials which will power Long March 10A rockets to launch its next-generation human spacecraft named Mengzhou to Earth orbit. China will combine three such first stages to form the core stage of the Long March 10, which will launch humans to the Moon. Notably, the test was conducted at the same launch complex in Wenchang which China will use for said crewed Moon missions.

Unlike the US Artemis efforts, the Chinese have been consistently hitting milestones in the lead up to its first crewed Moon landing aimed to be accomplished by 2030. The article linked below provides a review of all such recent milestones.

On our Moon
from where the Sun doesn’t shine,
a new era will dawn.
– Jatan

NASA un-nukes its decision to steer away from using nuclear power on the Moon

Right after the US Presidential NASA budget request for FY2026 noted that the agency will focus on “advanced non-nuclear power in support of lunar and Mars missions”, NASA through its new Acting Administrator Sean Duffy has now announced a Request for Information asking the industry to design a 100-kilowatt-plus nuclear fission power system with a mass less than 15,000 kilograms that can be ready to launch by 2030 to use on the Moon’s surface for a decade. NASA’s previous $15 million award in 2022 distributed equally to three companies was for such systems with ~40 kilowatts of electrical power. The agency’s driving rationale is that nuclear systems enable missions to operate continually through the long and frigid lunar nights, and in permanently shadowed regions on the poles where the water ice is.

Missing from NASA’s latest announcement is any mention of Zeno Power, which raised $50 million earlier this year, a major chunk of which is going towards developing and demonstrating the company’s nuclear electric power system on the Moon for NASA by 2027. NASA’s now-former Chief Technologist A. C. Charania recently joined Zeno as Senior Vice President of Space Business Development. As part of public-private Tipping Point contracts in 2023, NASA awarded $15 million to Project Harmonia, a team led by Zeno Power which includes two lunar surface delivery vendors from the agency’s CLPS program: Blue Origin and Intuitive Machines. Project Harmonia aims to demonstrate a radioisotope generator using a Stirling engine instead of traditional thermocouples to convert radioactive heat into electrical power. The system will use the Americium-241 isotope, which is more readily available than the conventionally used Plutonium-238. As such, Zeno would very likely participate in this old-not-new initiative from NASA.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Vinayak Vadlamani for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Artemis updates

• NASA continues preparations to launch the Artemis II Moon mission in 2026. The latest test involved its crew putting on their spacesuits and heading to the launchpad to simulate a possible nighttime launch. They also practiced an emergency escape scenario should something go wrong in the launch complex. In the meanwhile, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida completed fueling the crew’s Orion spacecraft. Next up, Orion will be integrated with its emergency escape system. In the lead up to the Artemis II launch, NASA will conduct a series of 10 integrated tests over the remainder year.

• As Firefly continues building its second, third, and fourth CLPS Moon landing missions as well as an orbital imaging service, the company is hiring a Deputy Chief Engineer.
• Leonard David reports that as part of NASA’s Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) program, the Colorado School of Mines has built a large simulated lunar surface facility to enable testing of rovers and other lunar hardware designs. The testbed contains over 100,000 kilograms of lunar soil simulant.

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The July 30 launch of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) spacecraft has put the first dual frequency radar system on a free-flying Earth observation satellite, with the longer wavelength L-band SAR coming from NASA and the complementary shorter S-band system from ISRO. Much has been covered about how over the next three years, these all-weather radar systems will repeatedly observe physical changes on Earth from a polar orbit at the finest scales while also touting the broadest, most time-consistent, and fully free global coverage so far. And so I won’t get into those same details in this article and instead let you look at some notable nuances about NISAR, and how it makes its way into planetary exploration as well.

At the heart of NISAR

Let’s start with the origin story of NISAR. Over a decade ago, NASA was formulating the L-band based DESDynI mission based on the US scientific community’s 2007 Decadal recommendation. ISRO’s S-band radar contribution to NISAR, which was formalized in 2014, came in to meet the specific goals of India. From the NISAR press kit:

In addition to using L-band data to meet the mission’s global science objectives, ISRO will leverage it to address a series of India’s Earth science priorities, including coastal wind velocity, seafloor topography near Indian coasts, the shape and position of the country’s coastlines, biomass measurements, geological features in the Himalayas and on the Deccan Plateau, and sea ice features in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Thus NISAR was born. These goals turned out to be complementary to ones NASA had while enhancing coverage and visibility for regions with extensive forest cover. If you probe deeper and look at the mission’s specific Level 1 (L1) requirements, you see two notable bits about how the mission objectives have been formalized:

The Level 1 Science Requirements define the specific science measurements that NISAR must perform to satisfy NASA's and most of ISRO's science goals. In addition to these joint requirements, ISRO has identified a number of additional Level 1 science requirements that are to be satisfied by the L-band radar instrument. These requirements then flow down to lower-level science and mission requirements that define the scope of the mission development and operations.

Two of these formal L1 requirements of ISRO are to specifically understand the nature of India’s landmass and its shorelines so to better plan agricultural and civilian development:

The NISAR mission will measure coastal wind velocity on a 1 km grid with an average sampling capability of 6 days, with an accuracy goal of 2 m/s over at least 80% of oceans within 200 km of India's coast.

The NISAR mission will image geological features over selected regions of India at 10 m resolution at an average sampling interval of 90 days with at least two viewing geometries. The regions include paleochannels in Rajasthan, linear features, and structural studies in the Himalayas and on the Deccan plateau.

To meet the whole set of L1 requirements and mission objectives, the finer requirements of L2, L3, and so on continue top down with increasing specificity of the engineering of the satellite and its subsystems. As such, NISAR’s ambitious scientific goals are ingrained into the very design of the satellite, and not something added up top as convenient. With its integral involvement in NISAR, ISRO is demonstrating a commendable commitment to understanding India’s natural ecosystems and their implications for responsible and more efficient national development. It harkens back to Vikram Sarabhai’s summary from 1969 of his efforts that decade to convince the Indian government to start a national space program in earnest:

There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.

NISAR thus embodies the very spirit of using cutting-edge space technologies to solve humanity’s fundamental problems. The NISAR press kit highlights another such goal:

NISAR will study the planet’s ice-covered surfaces as they melt, move, and deform. The melting of the massive ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland has contributed about a third of global sea level rise, while the disintegration of mountain glaciers has added about the same share, in addition to affecting water supplies for billions of people. Meanwhile, the melting of polar sea ice can affect ocean circulation on a global scale.

NASA and ISRO have also baked in joint L1 requirements for NISAR, such as for the emergency observations the satellite will conduct post natural—or even human—disasters in any part of the world:

In support of responses to major natural or anthropogenic disasters, the mission system shall be capable of providing revised scheduling for new acquisitions within 36 hours of an event or an event forecast notification and delivering data within 9 hours of being collected, and shall exercise this capability on a best efforts basis.

Direct collaboration on NISAR extends beyond the two agencies, in fact. The specific SweepSAR radar mapping technique NISAR will use, which allows it to capture wide swaths of hundreds of kilometers without compromising on resolution, was developed and refined by NASA in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). SAR company PierSight Space (a sponsor of Indian Space Progress) has noted in a blog post that Anthony Freeman, who led the NISAR program during its formulation phase, spearheaded the decision of NISAR to use SweepSAR. That’s because to meet NISAR’s objectives, having centimeter level of detail is as essential as gaining vast, global coverage.

NASA and ISRO have explicitly designed NISAR’s instrumentation such that both the L-band and S-band can work simultaneously as well where apt and necessary for achieving mission goals by combining the strengths of each:

The feed apertures at L- and S- band are built by JPL and ISRO, respectively, as well phase-matched to their respective electronics and cabling. In this sense, each radar is a self-contained instrument up to the radiated energy from the feed aperture. Thereafter, both will share the same reflector, with a nearly identical optical prescription (F/D=0.75). Because a distributed feed on a reflector-feed antenna has a single focus, much of the radiated and received energy is not at the focus. Since S-band wavelength is 2.5 times shorter than L-band, yet the feed is the same length to achieve identical swath coverage, the S-band system has greater deviations from the focus. Thus, the design has been iterated to derive the best offset, tilt and phasing of each radar to balance the performance across the two systems. This analysis has been done independently by the JPL and ISRO teams, then cross-compared to validate.

Like in a democracy, such a heavily integrated collaboration between different entities and their cultures is not easy to pull off and can certainly be time consuming. And yet the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in its 2018 assessment during NISAR’s development that the satellite was progressing despite risks stemming from procedural differences between the two agencies. In fact, the assessment noted effective collaboration thanks to NASA and ISRO having iteratively updated their cooperative project plan. Some GAO reports can be quite scathing, and so for NISAR to have had a favorable assessment is worth noting.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight, GalaxEye and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this month’s edition of Indian Space Progress. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture nuanced trajectories of India in space, support my independent writing.

Flowing into planetary science and back

The NASA-ISRO collaboration has since expanded to the Moon as well. Over the last few years, ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has been aiding NASA in selecting and filtering candidate landing sites for the crewed Artemis III Moon mission, which aims to put US astronauts back on the Moon later this decade.

This collaboration between researchers on both sides specifically involves the use of radar data from the ISRO orbiter’s Dual-Frequency SAR (DFSAR) instrument to uniquely characterize the Artemis III candidate landing zones. DFSAR has enabled NASA to sense valuable information on the physical state and structure of those regions, including mapping landing hazards for future landers to avoid. DFSAR has also been used to help reduce false positives where certain terrain on the Moon’s poles with rough textures seem like desirable water ice pockets but may not be.

And so, it’s interesting that while NISAR is the first free-flying Earth observation satellite to use dual-frequency SAR, we already did that at the Moon first through the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter DFSAR. For ISRO, its radar technology has first flown on Earth observation satellites, evolving later for use on Chandrayaan 2, and has now been fed back into NISAR. JPL’s various radar systems have recently flown on NASA’s planetary missions across the Solar System, honing a plethora of techniques over time. With NISAR, the two approaches have converged.

In an interview with The Hindu, NASA’s Director of its Earth Sciences division Karen Germain affirmed the cross-pollination of the agency’s radar systems across planetary and Earth observation missions, and went on to note how NISAR itself will also help scientists better understand other planets.

One of the things that NISAR is going to tell us about is what’s going on underneath the crust of the surface because we’ll be able to see these very small motions that you and I don’t experience daily, right? We can’t sense these. But NISAR will, and it will allow us to advance our models about how the interior of planets work.

Venus comes to mind in particular. ISRO’s upcoming Shukrayaan Venus orbiter will fly the highest resolution radar to the searing planet thus far, taking cues from both the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and NISAR. It will pierce through the planet’s thick clouds and sense the crust to help planetary scientists unlock long-standing Venusian mysteries, including the critical question of how Earth has remained so habitable while its sister planet turned into a hellscape. Moreover, NASA, ESA, and ISRO hope to coordinate and complement observations from their respective Venus missions and share data with each other to enhance the scientific output from them all. NISAR sets precedence for such multi-organizational scientific use as well.

When seen in this holistic context, NISAR is demonstrating peak peaceful uses of cutting-edge space technologies to not only solve humanity’s fundamental problems but also laying the path for helping us answer fundamental questions about our Solar System.

Read previous editions on Indian space

• Indian Space Progress #29: Was Shubhanshu Shukla’s Axiom-4 flight to the International Space Station worth it for ISRO?
• Indian Space Progress #28: A pressing PSLV rocket failure and orbital congestion to brood over
• Indian Space Progress #27: Three months of mission updates, and fixing ISRO’s monthly summaries

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On August 6, China successfully conducted a terrestrially simulated lunar landing and takeoff test using a full-scale mockup of its upcoming ~26,000-kilogram crewed Moon lander named Lanyue—which roughly means ‘embracing the Moon’ in Chinese. For the control systems test, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) used the same exogravity simulation system in Huailai County outside Beijing as for previous tests part of past robotic Moon and Mars landing missions. The system involves giant tethered towers to simulate lunar gravity and an artificially cratered, rugged terrain on the ground to mimc the Moon’s surface. The test seemed to show apt coordination between the lander’s main engines and fine-control thrusters as orchestrated by Lanyue’s guidance, navigation, and control system by engaging all sensors and imagers.

As Ling Xin has noted, there are two more interesting aspects to the test:

Footage aired by state broadcaster CCTV showed a lunar rover mounted on the lander’s side, along with a ladder attached to one leg for astronauts to climb down to the surface. [...] Lanyue consists of the lander itself and a propulsion module, which carries most of the fuel and engines for the initial slowdown. A few kilometers above the surface, the propulsion module will separate from the lander and lighten the load for final landing. The propulsion module was not tested on Wednesday.

CMSA says the development “represents a breakthrough in research and development in terms of China’s manned lunar exploration program.” That’s true, especially since the Chinese have been consistently hitting milestones in the lead up to its first crewed Moon landing aimed to be accomplished by 2030. Below is a review of all such recent milestones.

Recent Sino milestones towards crewed Moon missions

• Two months ago, CMSA successfully tested the launchpad escape system of China’s next-generation Mengzhou spacecraft. A variant called ‘Mengzhou Y’ will carry astronauts for Moon missions to lunar orbit.

• With Chang’e 5, China demonstrated the world’s first remote docking and undocking of spacecraft in lunar orbit in 2020. It repeated the feat with Chang’e 6 last year, bringing lunar samples from the Moon’s farside and demonstrating flexibility in the core architecture. China will utilize the technology for crewed Moon landings, wherein a Mengzhou Y spacecraft will dock with the Lanyue lunar lander in lunar orbit. Two of three/four astronauts then transfer into the lander. After the two spacecraft separate, the Lanyue lander will touchdown on the Moon for the surface mission. It will then return to lunar orbit to re-dock with Mengzhou Y, which will subsequently bring the crew back home.
• Late last year, China created a test stand in the northwestern Shaanxi province, which can simulate the kind of high-altitude and vacuum conditions that the Lanyue lander will experience during its lunar descent and touchdown. The stand allows the lander’s main engine to be tested for its full burn duration of up to 20 minutes. Apparently the test system took only eight months to complete, according to Li Guanghui of CAST who was involved in the project.
• Edit: In August and September 2025, China conducted booster engine tests of its upcoming heavy-lift, crew-capable rocket called the Long March 10A. Three such boosters will make up the Long March 10 rocket’s core stage. Two Long March 10s will launch Mengzhou Y and Lanyue towards the Moon respectively for every Chinese crewed Moon mission.
• Andrew Jones reported in November 2024 that CALT successfully conducted a 5-meter-fairing separation test of Long March 10A. The Long March 10 will sport a larger fairing for crewed Moon missions, whose separation system should be tested soon too as per CASC.
• Jack Congram has reported that for launches of Long March 10 from the southern Hainan island, China is constructing a third launchpad at Wenchang called Launch Complex 301. The core launch support tower build has been completed. The development of associated infrastructure is now in full swing, including the vehicle assembly building, servicing platforms, and transport systems. Xinhua has reported CMSA saying that the development and construction of ground systems—including the launch site, the measurement and control communication system, and the landing site—are “advancing in order”.

• With the debut launch of the semi-cryogenic Long March 12 rocket last November, China successfully flew the YF-100K engine, the same kind that will power the first stage(s) of the Long March 10. And, as Ling Xin reported in July 2024, China successfully test fired the YF-75E high energy hydrolox engine as well, three of which will power the third stage of Long March 10.
• The upcoming Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 missions, targeted for launch next year and 2028 respectively, will demonstrate precision landings as well as the ability to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice and other resources. Both of these capabilities will be valuable for China’s plan to create the crew-plus-robotic ILRS Moonbase, which will follow the string of initial crewed lunar missions of the 2030s.
• Over the last couple of years, China has demonstrated world-leading lunar navigation and communications technologies in complex Earth-Moon orbital spaces. These abilities will substantially improve both the lunar surface coverage time and area as well as ground station availability for China’s future crewed Moon missions, and give it an edge over the US in sustaining the program.

• Chinese taikonauts (astronauts) have begun initial training for lunar missions since late last year across lunar transit and surface operations. Development has also progressed on the space suit and rover to be used by astronauts, with various prototypes built and tested. Edit: Jack Congram reported that China trained 28 taikonauts in cave exercises in Wulong, Chongqing in December 2025 to prepare them mentally for Moon missions.
• In 2023, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) solicited science payload proposals for the mission’s lander. Similar to the instruments NASA will deploy on Artemis III, CMSA wants these payloads to focus on lunar geology, physics, life sciences, and solar and astronomical observations. Unlike Artemis III though, CMSA is open to in-situ resource utilization demos being proposed too! The final selection of the instruments to fly is expected to be announced soon.
• In February, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced a call for Chinese organizations to bid for developing a lunar mapping satellite in support of crewed Moon missions. The satellite’s mandate is to obtain high-precision mineral, topographic, and geomorphic data of the Moon’s low-latitude regions to aid planning of surface missions. Xinhua reported CMSA stating in April that the project has completed its approval and competitive selection process.

So that was a review of all recent advances from China as it prepares to send humans to the Moon. China sure is giving it all the might it can muster, and it will be great to watch a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Ajay Kothari for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Artemis updates

• On July 31, the crew of Artemis II entered the fuel-loaded, original Orion capsule—which is targeted to take them around the Moon and back next year—to practice activities and operations they’d have to perform before launch and during the transit to Luna. This excercise had high fidelity since the crew not only used the original capsule but also put on their spacesuits and tested Orion’s interfaces while the capsule operated on full power with its communications and life control systems turned on. This latest update follows last month’s milestone of NASA completing a series of eight tests of ground systems and associated launch infrastructure ahead of the eventual second SLS rocket launch for Artemis II. Marcia Smith has recently reported that NASA is trying to launch Artemis II in February 2026.
• After nearly six months of trying to establish communications with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft post its February launch, NASA has declared an end to the rescue efforts and the mission. The agency-funded Trailblazer was supposed to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global orbital maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon. However, control over the spacecraft was lost shorty after launch, with subsequent revival efforts unsuccessful. Unfortunately, Trailblazer is the latest example of the US failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis. NASA says the same infrared spectrometer design from Trailblazer will fly on an unspecified mission end of decade to provide regional contextual observations for the instruments to be aboard the upcoming versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), which will be used across Artemis missions for years starting end of decade at best. This means the expected scientific output from Trailblazer will now have to wait at least five more years.

More Moon

• Orbital image processing enthusiast Chandra Tungathurthi has shared new imagery of the unsuccessful touchdown of Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 CLPS lander Athena this past March. The images clearly show engine plume and surface interactions during the lander’s final descent phase as well as the first surface contact of Athena’s landing legs. To appreciate the difference in detail between NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, and with ISRO itself not sharing enough imagery to make their orbiter’s potential clear, I had to compare the images of Athena from the two and adjust the scale and rotation to roughly match:

• The University of Hong Kong is hiring for two doctoral positions to analyze Chang’e 5 & 6 lunar samples and characterize human & robotic lunar landing sites respectively.
• Apollo 8 & 13 astronaut Jim Lovell passed away at 97.

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California-based Venturi Astrolab Inc. (Astrolab) is developing the large multi-purpose rovers of FLEX and FLIP for advanced exploration of our Moon this decade and next. Through FLEX, Astrolab leads one of the three teams NASA selected last year to mature their designs for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), which the agency hopes to use with and without crew across Artemis missions starting end of decade. 🌗

Note: All sponsorships abide by my public Editorial Independence Policy with zero exceptions.

A fourth Firefly

US-based Firefly Aerospace won its fourth Moon landing mission contract as part of NASA’s CLPS program. For $176.7 million, the company’s lander is to deliver three NASA-funded instruments to the Moon’s south pole in 2029 as well as two rovers: a versatile CubeRover from Astrobotic called Moonranger and Canada’s first lunar rover through CSA. The Canadian rover has an interesting profile:

The CSA Rover is designed to access and explore remote South Pole areas of interest, including permanently shadowed regions, and to survive at least one lunar night. The CSA rover has stereo cameras, a neutron spectrometer, two imagers (visible to near-infrared), a radiation micro-dosimeter, and a NASA-contributed thermal imaging radiometer developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory. These instruments will advance our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of the lunar surface, the geological history of the Moon, and potential resources such as water ice. It will also improve our understanding of the environmental challenges that await future astronauts and their life support systems.

The rover was originally intended to be launched on a CLPS lander in 2026 as part of a NASA-CSA deal, and it’s only now that we’ve learnt about its launch target being pushed to 2029. Coming back to the CLPS mission itself, Firefly says the mission’s orbiter element, Elytra Dark, will provide communications relay services for the lander. After the short surface mission is over, Elytra Dark will join its other two twin craft (assumed to be operational by then from prior missions) to offer commercial lunar imaging and mapping services.

Building on the success of its first Moon landing, Firefly is gearing up for its second, third, and now fourth Moon landing attempt this decade. While the company’s first lander did not carry a rover, all the next three are. The second Firefly lander will carry UAE’s Rashid 2 rover to the Moon’s farside whereas the third lander will deploy Honeybee Robotics’ first planetary rover on one of the two Gruithuisen Domes, a unique volcanic site on the Moon’s nearside.

More mission updates

• After Intuitive Machines faced a second unsuccessful CLPS landing with IM-2 this year, the lunar lander builder is diversifying its offerings with orbital lunar communications and cislunar deployment services, the latter being based on orbital vehicles derived from flown lander systems.
• CSA awarded initial study contracts totaling $10.6 million to three companies—Canadensys, MDA Space, and Mission Control—towards developing a “Lunar Utility Vehicle” (LUV). This follows Canada’s intent from 2023 to invest $1.2 billion over 13 years to develop an assistance rover for future Artemis astronauts. Canada hopes that just like how contributing their Canadarm3 robotics servicing system to the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat bagged seats for their astronauts on circumlunar Artemis missions, contributing a large, durable LUV rover for Artemis surface missions will enable a Canadian to walk on the Moon. There are three other rovers in this largest size category being planned to explore the Moon: the Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle, JAXA’s advanced pressurized rover, and China’s crewed rover.
• The Italian Space Agency (ASI) has awarded a preliminary design contract to a group led by Thales Alenia Space for a Multi-Purpose Habitat (MPH) astronaut module central to NASA’s planned Artemis Basecamp on the Moon. This follows last year’s milestone when a NASA review board approved the module’s development to commence. To be launched and placed on the Moon sometime in the 2030s, the MPH module can host two astronauts for up to 30 days nominally while a larger crew can stay for short periods during emergencies. The 15,000-kilogram module will have wheels so it can reposition itself as needed on the dynamically lit lunar polar surface. The flight model can be constructed only later once the development phase is complete.

More Moon

• A new document collated by US DARPA provides more details on the lunar infrastructure concepts by multiple companies which the former organization selected in 2023 for advanced studies. These are part of a 10-year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) on how to build key commercial infrastructure pieces for sustaining human presence on the Moon.
• Eric Jones, the lead creator of the meticulous Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, passed away last month.

Many thanks to Astrolab and Ajay Kothari for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

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Upcoming CLPS Moon landings

To date, NASA has funded several commercial companies for these CLPS Moon landing missions with the following contract values at the time of their selections:

• Mission 1, January 8, 2024: $79.5 million contract to Astrobotic
• Mission 2, February 12, 2024: $77 million contract to Intuitive Machines
• Mission 3, Late 2024: $47 million contract to Intuitive Machines
• Mission 4, 2024: $93.3 million contract to Firefly
• (Cancelled) Mission 5, November 2023: $75.9 million contract to Masten Space
• (Cancelled) Mission 6, November 2024: $226.5 million contract to Astrobotic (increased to $320.4 million for extra tests)
• Mission 7, 2025: $77.5 million contract to Intuitive Machines
• Mission 8, 2026: $73 million contract to Draper
• Mission 9, 2026: $112 million contract to Firefly
• Mission 10, 2025-26: $6.1 million to Blue Origin
• Mission 11, 2027: $116.9 million contract to Intuitive Machines
• Mission 12, 2028: $179 million contract to Firefly
• Mission 13, 2029: $176.7 million contract to Firefly

Unlike traditional missions, these CLPS missions are built, operated and managed by their companies, with lower oversight from NASA. The agency primarily dictates preferences for the landing sites, and the instruments it wants onboard.

These missions will also have non-NASA payloads from across the globe, something the agency encourages to spur a commercial lunar ecosystem. All landers on these missions will nominally last a maximum of one lunar day—that is, 14 Earth days—since frigid night time temperatures, well below -100 degrees Celsius, will render the solar- and battery-powered landers non-functional.

Astrobotic’s first CLPS mission

On January 8, 2024, Astrobotic’s lander launched with the aim of touching down in a lunar lava plain called Sinus Viscositatis just outside the Gruithuisen volcanic domes on February 23. The lander carried 15 payloads from 6 countries, including two micro-rovers. As part of NASA’s CLPS program, it was also supposed to carry 11 agency-funded instruments but flew only five of them. However, Astrobotic’s lunar lander failed before it could reach Luna, precluding a lunar descent attempt.

Intuitive Machines’ first CLPS mission

For its first CLPS mission named IM-1 which launched in February 2024, Intuitive Machines carried six NASA payloads to the Moon, attempting a soft landing in the polar Malapert A crater at 80°S. There was also a commercial telescope called ILO-X from Hawaii-based ILOA aboard. The company hit a hard-landing on the Moon instead but after which NASA and Intuitive Machines skewed the success criteria of the mission to claim is as successful.

Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS mission

March 2025 update: The spacecraft landed sideways and the mission failed

On its second Moon mission in Q1 2025, Intuitive Machines will deliver NASA’s PRIME-1 drill and a mass spectrometer at an optimum location on the Moon’s south pole where underground water ice is expected based on orbital data. The lander will drill up to 1 meter below the surface and analyze the soil for water ice, a first such study. The lander will also deploy Lunar Outpost’s MAPP rover on the surface to collect—but not bring back—lunar soil for NASA and also test Nokia’s 4G/LTE network on the Moon. Further, there’s the company’s own NASA-supported hopper onboard called Micro-Nova, which aims to hop five times to capture high-resolution imagery and other measurements of the surface under its flight path.

First CLPS mission by Masten

Masten Space’s lander aimed to touchdown on the Moon’s south pole in November 2023. It was to have at least eight instruments onboard, chiefly to detect water ice and other volatiles such as methane and carbon dioxide to help us understand the Moon’s resource potential. The lander was also supposed to deploy Astrobotic’s shoebox-sized autonomous rover called MoonRanger. NASA even planned to put a neutron spectrometer onboard the rover to detect signs of water ice below the surface.

But following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by Masten on September 13, 2022, the mission seems to have been rendered impossible. Astrobotic acquired Masten Space, including much of its space technology portfolio for $4.5 million. Debra Needham, Program Scientist at NASA’s Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office, said at the 2023 annual LEAG meeting in September that the agency plans to “strategically manifest payloads” from Masten’s mission onto other landers as feasible.

VIPER rover delivery by Astrobotic

Astrobotic planned to launch NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon’s south pole in November 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. VIPER was to explore areas in and around permanently shadowed regions for over 100 days, and use its drill and three instruments to unravel the nature of the Moon’s water ice deposits, assess their resource potential, and determine how accessible they are. This would’ve helped us plan future human missions to the Moon’s poles and eventually build sustainable habitats. On the same mission, ESA will fly a landing-precision-aiding camera, the first ever commercial delivery to the Moon contracted by the agency.

Given the mission’s criticality, NASA took a more conservative approach with VIPER compared to other CLPS contracts. The agency requested Astrobotic to delay VIPER’s delivery by a year, and contracted them $67.8 million to perform additional testing of the mission’s large, 5900-kilogram Griffin lander in order to reduce risk. At $320.4 million, VIPER was the most expensive CLPS delivery yet. Note that NASA separated its own costs to build and operate VIPER (currently at $433.5 million) from the payment to Astrobotic.

But in July 2024, NASA questionably cancelled the mission and has opted for a VIPER-less Artemis. The agency then tried finding a private company that will fly and operate the rover at its own cost, an approach many argued decidedly fails at VIPER’s original goal. After evaluating the proposals submitted by private companies, NASA has come to the same conclusion. The agency will restructure the solicitation to elicit stronger proposals that hopefully stay closer to VIPER’s original science goals. Edit: NASA has now tentatively chosen Blue Origin’s second Mark I lander to fly VIPER in 2027.

In the meanwhile, Astrobotic has completed testing their lunar navigation and guidance systems to be onboard Griffin. The large lander’s primary payload will be the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested recently after NASA decided not to fly VIPER aboard. Astrobotic also announced that its first CubeRover has successfully passed the standard suite of space environmental tests ahead of its flight on this Griffin lander.

Firefly’s first CLPS mission

March 2025 update: Firefly successfully landed and performed scientific experiments 🚀

On January 15, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched and deployed Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander in Earth orbit. It aims to descend in the lava plains of Mare Crisium at 18.56°N, 61.81°E in March 2025, carrying several NASA instruments to study the lunar environment.

One of the lander’s legs feature PlanetVac, a low-cost soil sampling technology partially funded by The Planetary Society to enable future sample return missions from the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies. This mission will also be NASA’s first attempt to get a GPS lock from the Moon. The mission also has two commercial payloads.

Related: On the same launch as Blue Ghost, the Falcon 9 upper stage also deployed ispace Japan’s Hakuto-R lander to space. The mission followed up on the company’s first failed landing attempt but also failed to touchdown due to performance issues of the laser rangefinder. The outcome underscored the need for resilience in private lunar landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing. One must note that ispace has continued its remarkable transparency from the first failed landing mission, sharing detailed findings of what went wrong in mere weeks.

Intuitive Machines’ third CLPS mission

Intuitive Machines’ third Moon landing will be in the swirl of Reiner Gamma in 2026. Reiner Gamma has a weak local magnetic field, possibly a remnant from the time the Moon had a global magnetic field. The mission’s primary payload suite Lunar Vertex is a collection of spectrometers and magnetometers on the lander and a rover to study the swirl’s composition, and map the strength and direction of magnetic fields on the surface. This will help us better understand the effects of solar wind and bombarding micrometeorites on planetary bodies across our Solar System, and also shape our understanding of the Moon’s magnetic evolution.

Relatedly, NASA has been testing variants of the three shoebox-sized CADRE rovers to be deployed at Reiner Gamma by the aforementioned lander. The rovers will autonomously navigate the landed region to demonstrate collectively better mapping it than a single rover would. The rovers will have multistatic ground penetrating radars to create 3D images of the subsurface structure up to 10 meters deep.

Draper’s farside CLPS mission

For its first CLPS mission in 2026, Draper will land a spacecraft made by ispace on the Moon’s farside, a feat only achieved by China’s Chang’e 4 mission so far. The landing region chosen by NASA for the mission is no less impressive—the 312 kilometers wide Schrödinger crater, the most pristine impact feature of its kind. The lander will carry 95 kilograms of NASA’s scientific instruments, which includes two highly sensitive seismometers, a drill, a probe, and a magnetic sounder, all to help us better understand the Moon’s internal structure and composition, and how our cosmic neighbor evolved. The lander will also carry LuSEE-Lite, which shielded from Earth’s radio noises on the farside makes it apt to study the solar wind’s interactions with the Moon’s surface.

Also see: How ispace, CLPS, funding, and science are interlocked

Firefly’s second CLPS mission

Firefly will deliver an orbiter and several surface payloads to the Moon in 2026. The company will use a similar lander design as its first CLPS mission but add a transfer stage to deliver the 280-kilogram Lunar Pathfinder orbiter for ESA in lunar orbit. Pathfinder is a stepping stone towards Moonlight, ESA’s upcoming commercial navigation and communications constellation. The Firefly lander itself will attempt a touchdown on the Moon’s farside carrying LuSEE-Night, a first of its kind instrument to measure faint but unique radio signals from our Universe’s ‘Dark Age’—a slice of time right before the first stars were born.

Firefly later won an extended $18 million contract from NASA to provide services for LuSEE-Night. The lander will host the “User Terminal” payload to enable LuSEE-Night to communicate to and fro Earth via the Elytra stage in lunar orbit. Elytra will also provide radio frequency calibrations for LuSEE-Night. In all, the two LuSEE payloads will help us characterize the Moon’s radio emissions for future farside radio telescopes.

The Firefly lander will also carry a commercial seismometer from Australia-based Fleet Space Technologies, which once deployed will operate by tapping into lander-provided power and communications services—much the same as how the seismometer deployed by ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 lander operated. SPIDER will offer scientists insights into the physical structure and nature of the local crust and subsurface, including hints of resources such as water ice. The lander will also deploy UAE’s Rashid 2 rover on the Moon.

Expanding scope

With the mission selection to Reiner Gamma and Schrödinger, NASA began an enhanced science phase of its CLPS program. The next missions in this phase will visit the volcanic domes of Gruithuisen with a rover from Honeybee Robotics, two to the south pole with Intuitive and Firefly respectively, and to Ina. NASA says future CLPS missions could also deliver more advanced rovers, technology demonstrations, standalone scientific payloads, and even infrastructure required by Artemis human landing missions.

A new commercial model for planetary missions

Landing on the Moon is hard. Only five countries have accomplished this feat so far—the Soviet Union, the US, China, India, and Japan. The fact that NASA is entrusting commercial companies with the agency’s crucial lunar scientific and technological objectives, many of which will directly affect their Artemis plans, shows their growing confidence in building a commercial ecosystem around lunar exploration. CLPS also inverts the tradition of having only custom-built planetary missions to meet specific scientific goals.

However, the CLPS program has been challenging, particularly with an immature supply chain and keeping costs in check. Ultimately, if enough of the CLPS missions stick the landing, it could open up frequent and periodic access to the Moon’s surface for diverse scientific investigations in ways never possible before for any planetary body.

Resources

A much earlier version of this article was originally published on The Planetary Society in 2022. Since then, the piece has been significantly rewritten, updated, and revised on here to provide the latest launch and mission information.

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I wrote it because the official guides on NASA HEASoft’s website were failing to let us correctly install the software, particularly in setting all parameters correctly. But I found some way to reliably get it done through trial and error in installing the software from source in different ways.

I never ended up pursuing a career in Astrophysics research, and pivoted to space writing instead, but to this day I get emails from students and researchers alike that they find it useful. That has given me more satisfaction than any of my Astrophysics research might have probably. Open knowledge dissemination is at the heart of the Web.

Years later I had removed the post, thinking it won’t be reliable for latest Linux releases—and which I hadn’t tested against. Then I started getting emails saying the guide still works, and that they need to refer it for every new install..

And so I restored the guide and continued my passive contribution to Astrophysics research. 😄

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• NASA has completed a series of eight tests of ground systems and associated launch infrastructure ahead of an eventual second SLS rocket launch which will push four astronauts in an Orion spacecraft towards the Moon for the Artemis II mission next year. The final prep test involved testing flowing of cryogenic liquid hydrogen from a new tank at the launch complex. For those who remember the pain of the big orange rocket crawling back and forth between the launchpad and its assembly building for Artemis I, this new tank should provide some relief as it will shave off some time between launch attempts of Artemis II.
• Efforts continue to reduce damage to NASA Science & Exploration against the deep effects of its proposed and initiated cuts and cancellations by the Trump administration—all of which affect Artemis too. The US House and Senate are proposing budget bills that would roughly maintain last year’s NASA funding if passed. Separately, the US Congress passed a supplementary $6.7 billion fund on July 3 as part of a megabill for NASA to continue all Artemis hardware projects regardless of what the agency’s FY2026 budget proceedings output. More than 60 US Congress members from both parties have written to the Trump-chosen Acting Administrator Sean Duffy to request stopping the preemptive cuts to NASA. Agency employees from every center and mission directorate have also written to the Administrator expressing concerns of scientific brain drain and mission & program cancellations. However, with more than 3,000 NASA employees having taken voluntary departure options last week, and more reductions expected still, NASA’s capacity to execute the US’ ambitions will reduce even if the budgets are somehow maintained.
• NASA is seeking proposals from US companies for high-bandwidth, high-reliability lunar communications and navigation services to support future Artemis missions. Relatedly, US-based Advanced Space (which leads the NASA-funded CAPSTONE lunar orbiter mission) has partnered with Firefly Aerospace (who is building orbiters and recently demonstrated a soft Moon landing) to study design reference missions for NASA for the same. This is an area of lunar infrastructure which China currently leads—as the country aims to meet its own ambition of sustained crewed missions and a lunar base.
• On July 24, Senegal became the 56th country and the fourth African nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. Notably, the continent’s nation of South Africa has not signed the Accords so far while it is participating in the China-led ILRS Moonbase project. CNSA recently announced that their upcoming Chang’e 8 mission to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice and other resources will carry a radio astronomy array from South Africa and Peru as one of many international payloads.

More mission updates

• JAXA-ISAS has a good article on some of the behind-the-scenes of Honeybee Robotics’ PlanetVac sample collection payload and its operation earlier this year during US-based Firefly’s first Moon landing mission:

Both the Blue Ghost PlanetVac and the MMX sampler have a pneumatic design, ejecting pure nitrogen to sweep surface material into a tiny tornado, with a second jet to guide that lifted material into the collection chamber. One additional requirement for MMX is that the sampler would be able to collect material even if the sampling head could not be positioned flush against the moon surface. Since PlanetVac was mounted close to the fourth Blue Ghost leg that was not firmly on the lunar soil, this requirement was about to get an unexpected test.
[...]
A boom arm lowered PlanetVac towards the Moon surface. The team sent the command to collect a lunar sample. It was over in one second. To discover if PlanetVac had successfully gathered material, the Honeybee Robotics team had mounted a camera inside the sample container. The pristine container had colored plates on the inside. But when Blue Ghost transmitted the newest image back to Earth, this pretty scene was coated in dust and dirt.

• The ILO-C telescope of the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA) has passed payload acceptance tests to be onboard China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 mission, which is targeting landing on the Moon’s south pole near the Shackleton crater in late 2026. Developed through collaboration with China’s NAOC and the University of Hong Kong, ILO-C is a wide-field optical telescope which aims to capture inspiring images of our galactic center from the Moon.

• ESA’s Pangaea campaign to train future lunar astronauts in geology continues with the latest batch exploring the Norwegian fjords of Lofoten and its well preserved anorthosite rocks—the same kind that make up bulk of our Moon’s light-colored crust. Such training will help astronauts pick better lunar samples on future missions and return more suitable crustal materials from its highlands, which includes the polar regions.
• Jack Congram has posted about China’s updated regulatory guidelines for its private and/or commercial companies. These also generally apply to companies sending things to the Moon, starting with the two five-kilogram mobile robots developed by ‘STAR.VISION’ in collaboration with universities from China and Turkey. The bots are targeted to fly to the Moon’s south pole aboard China’s Chang’e 8 national lander in 2028. It’s interesting how the steady cadence of China’s Moon landers could mean that Chinese firms can drop rovers and other infrastructure on the Moon regularly while skipping the most difficult part of landing by themselves for the time being. It would be an approach t0 commercialization that’s in stark contrast to NASA CLPS.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space, Gurbir Singh and Ajay Kothari for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

A Moon-catalyzed Jupiter update

Just like how Earth observation satellites image the Moon to calibrate the performance of their imagers, spacecraft on their way to explore other Solar System objects do so too at times. When ESA’s Jupiter-bound JUICE spacecraft flew past our Moon in August 2024, the mission operations team activated JUICE’s radar system to characterize its detections against a well known airless object—🌝—before it can study the Jovian icy moons. Lorenzo Bruzzone, principal investigator of JUICE’s radar instrument, said:

The measurements collected will also allow us to tune the processing algorithms to reduce the effects of radio frequency interference generated by the probe’s subsystems in the radar band.

Now ESA has provided an update that JUICE’s radar system has been algorithmically calibrated by engineers thanks to the lunar flyby. JUICE is now all set to map layers below the icy surfaces of Jovian moons.

Relatedly, when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft flew by the Moon in 1999, en route to Saturn, its infrared spectrometer detected water-bearing minerals at most lunar latitudes, with higher concentrations towards the poles. However, the team didn’t publish their findings until the US instruments on Chandrayaan 1 discovered water on the Moon a decade later.

Relatedly, here are more ways our Moon is valuable beyond itself:

• As a platform for radio cosmology
• To repurpose Moon missions for enabling deep space exploration
• To monitor the Sun and its wind from its unique vantage point
• As a geological time capsule and an age reference for events across the Solar System.

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We can’t all launch ourselves to Luna to admire its beauty and depth up close. But we can do it virtually. And so below is a set of curated galleries for you to visually explore our cosmic companion’s wild places and wonderful samples, with explainer links and resources. There’s even a video to see lunar places in 3D! Celebrate the International Moon Day from anywhere in the world—because we all see the same Moon.

Let us not just look up at our Moon but look up to it.

Note: You can click the images to explore each gallery or visual collection.
(Since this is visual browsing page, image credits are provided in the links.)

Wild geological places on our Moon

Watch and browse the Moon in 3D!

Explore Moon rocks!

Many thanks to Astrolab and Ajay Kothari for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to inform and educate people worldwide on lunar exploration, for free and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

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Sponsored job listings: PierSight Space is hiring for 15 roles—notably an embedded software developer and engineers for RF design and spacecraft electrical assembly & integration—to join their teams in Ahmedabad and Bangalore who are building a constellation of SAR-AIS satellites for persistent, all-weather ocean monitoring.

Before we dive into evaluating the Axiom-4 mission’s specifics as relevant to ISRO, here’s a mission brief:

On June 25, India’s test pilot & Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla launched in a Crew Dragon capsule atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Axiom Space Ax-4 mission crew. Said Axiom-4 crew comprises Mission Commander (and space veteran) Peggy Whitson, Mission Pilot Shubhanshu Shukla, and Mission Specialists Sławosz Uznański from Poland & Tibor Kapu from Hungary. The capsule, named “Grace” by the crew, docked with the ISS the next day. ISRO provided a timeline of activities until June 30. After a total of 19 days of stay and experiments at the ISS, the crew re-entered Grace and splashed down safely on Earth today, July 15.

Note: Shukla has become the first Indian national to have visited the ISS but is not the first Indian to do so, as numerous media reports have claimed, since Sunita Williams is of Indian origin too. Williams isn’t an Indian citizen but you don’t need to be one to be of Indian origin.

Shukla’s Ax-4 ISS flight is critiqued in India

Shukla’s flight to the ISS has spurred controversial opinions in Indian space communities. Between the influx of public posts online, conversations I tuned into in semi-private messenger groups, and many people I spoke to offline, this mission has been the most polarizing in recent times. Some say that as a commercial mission, it’s just a “joyride”. Others say the mission should be proudly celebrated as a national achievement. Others still consider the mission to be a waste of ~$70 million for Indian taxpayers. What is true?

The reason I’ve had to do this piece is because ISRO, or rather India’s Department of Space (DOS) as its overarching entity, did not provide a formal rationale for paying for an astronaut ride on the Ax-4 ISS mission. It’s only after the mission’s launch and repeated media inquiries that ISRO provided a few details on what’s in it for us as a country.

I reached out to ISRO, NASA, Axiom, and SpaceX to get more information other than assimilating what’s on the Web. I did not hear back from ISRO and SpaceX. Follow-ups were not responded to either. It remains frustrating that despite me being an Indian citizen, ISRO doesn’t formally respond to journalistic queries for contacts listed on its website. NASA and Axiom responded repeatedly. As an Indian citizen, how is it that I have easier formal access to NASA but not ISRO?

Anyway, between responses from NASA and Axiom, and some added context to consider, it’s possible to make a nuanced case in favor of the mission as explained and discussed below—albeit with some caveats.

Putting the cost in context

How much did Shukla’s Ax-4 ISS flight cost to ISRO? Chethan Kumar has reported at least $68 million sent in payments to Axiom and NASA. That’s almost the same amount as Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing. And that’s why many consider Shukla’s ISS flight to be a rather expensive joyride. But what most have missed is the backdrop of the ~$2.4 billion budget of the Gaganyaan program of which Ax-4 is part of. In other words, Shukla’s ISS flight has cost India only 3% of its sanctioned human spaceflight budget. It’s also about 4.5% of ISRO’s annual budget of $1.5 billion in recent years.

Assuming the flight’s stated—and unstated—benefits hold true to scrutiny and prove valuable over time as expected, the amount spent is not high. As an agency new to the niche pursuit of human spaceflight, ISRO leveraging of Ax-4 to gain insights into the complexities of real world astronaut missions and its international coordination mechanisms can be a worthwhile cause. Especially so before India mounts its own far-more-expensive astronaut expeditions. And that’s why the exact amount spent on Shukla’s flight within that order of magnitude does not really matter.

People have argued that ~$70 million could’ve been better spent on India’s more pressing space technology needs, including civil and defense ambitions. However, budget appropriations don’t work that way. Money assigned for use on Gaganyaan and its missions will not get automagically reassigned to India’s other space missions should Gaganyaan or aspects of it disappear. That money will instead simply be added to the country’s central funds.

And yet despite all of this, it can be perplexing to understand the ISRO Chief V. Narayanan’s statements to Times of India that the Ax-4 mission’s spending is justified in another way too:

The ₹548 crore spent on the mission is a fraction of what India would’ve otherwise needed to spend on replicating the same training, exposure and systems-level experience. [...] We’ve gained access to infrastructure and experience that would otherwise require thousands of crores.

Now, it’s possible that the context in which this was said is different and missing. Because otherwise Gaganyaan’s explicit goal is to indeed build the same kind of infrastructure and capabilities in India. For a country wanting its own human space station and to send Indians to space by ourselves, we would certainly need to spend those thousands and thousands of crores to possess the numerous functioning parts of an independent human spaceflight program. And so the assumption is that Shukla’s ISS flight will lend us practical and nuanced insights that help us accelerate progress on Gaganyaan. That brings us to the next contended question.

What all did Shukla and his backup Nair train for?

Critics argue that the commercial Ax-4 flight to the ISS is a fully automated one thanks to the sophistication of the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle. They add that that coupled with US safeguards like ITAR, the flight is nothing but an expensive joyride with nearly no technical returns for Gaganyaan. So let’s review several specific aspects of the mission and its preparations to see if there’s something unique for India to have learnt.

ISRO itself has mentioned the following in high-level specifics post-launch:

The [astronaut] training modules covered are advanced spacecraft systems, emergency protocols, scientific payload operations, microgravity adaptation, space medicine, and survival training. They also participated in NASA’s National Outdoor Leadership Program (NOLPS) in the wilderness of Mexico, where the focus was on team cohesion and resilience under stress.
[...]
The Ax-04 mission will provide valuable inputs for ISRO’s upcoming Gaganyaan mission. It offers hands-on experience in the nuances of international crew integration, medical and psychological preparation, real-time health telemetry, experiment execution, and crew-ground coordination. These insights will directly influence mission planning, safety validation, and astronaut readiness for India’s first indigenous human spaceflight mission.

This is a good start but does lack details so let’s get into some.

First and foremost, even for a commercial flight, it’s important to make the distinction between someone flying as a Mission Pilot versus other roles. Shukla is the former, as is his backup Prashanth Nair who was equally trained for the mission. Granted that Crew Dragon’s flight is practically fully automated, the Mission Pilot in particular is nevertheless taught to engage manual controls if and when necessary for contingency and emergency scenarios. When asked about distinguishing between mission training provided to Shukla & Nair versus that provided to the whole crew, Axiom Space responded with the following:

As the pilot, Shux [Shukla’s callsign] was trained to monitor Dragon’s systems during all critical phases—launch, docking with the ISS, and re-entry.
During launch, training focused on tracking system health, coordinating with mission control, and staying ready to troubleshoot anomalies.
For docking, he learned how to oversee the approach, ensuring correct alignment with the ISS docking port, and maintaining constant communication with both the station crew and ground mission controllers.
For re-entry, he was trained to monitor descent trajectory and key safety parameters—including parachute deployment and vehicle altitude—and he was trained to intervene manually if necessary.

That last bit in particular can be life saving, and so I wouldn’t characterize the mission as a purely paid passive ride to space and back. Note also that Shukla and Nair are test pilots on Earth. The intuition for air flight is of course completely different than for spaceflight but being pilots of the highest order lend the duo increased adaptability and responsiveness.

For emergency training that was applicable to the entire crew, Axiom Space stated the following. [Note that as a space veteran, Mission Commander Peggy Whitson didn’t need to go through all of these.]

The Ax-4 crew practiced responding to depressurization events, where they must quickly don emergency masks and seal off affected areas to manage a loss of cabin pressure.
They trained for medical emergencies, learning how to provide first aid and use onboard medical equipment to stabilize injured or ill crew members.
Fire response procedures were another focus, involving the location and extinguishing of fires, as well as managing smoke and toxic fumes.
These comprehensive drills equip the Ax-4 crew with the necessary skills and confidence to effectively manage emergencies in the challenging environment of space.
Their training took place across NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX facilities, and included integration with international partners to ensure readiness for ISS operations. Nair received similar training to ensure full mission capability as a backup.

The portion of the crew’s training via NASA at the agency’s Johnson Space Center also involved dealing with emergency situations at the ISS. Jimi Russell, the Public Affairs Officer for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said:

All private astronauts are trained to what is known as a minimum required level to ensure the safety of themselves and expedition astronauts aboard the ISS, as well as to ensure the safety of the station. At least two of the private astronauts also are trained to what is known as minimum escort level, which reduces the impact to ongoing station operations and improves overall mission safety and private astronaut crew autonomy.

When asked which two Ax-4 astronauts were trained at the “minimum escort level”, and if that involved Shukla, NASA did not respond back.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight, Catalyx Space, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s edition of Indian Space Progress. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture true trajectories of India in space, support my independent writing. 🇮🇳 🚀

Experience with microgravity experiments and its ISS modules

When aboard the ISS, ISRO through Shukla conducted seven out of sixty experiments. As part of a broader ISRO-ESA agreement, Indian institutes had two microgravity experiments jointly with ESA aboard as well. The Indian government’s public broadcast service Doordarshan created a video on the experiments (in Hindi). ISRO and the institutes involved will analyze the data and outcomes from the experiments soon and share the results later.

Note that it’s not the kinds of experiments Ax-4 crew performed that are as notable because, while good, they aren’t unique as the ISS hosts such research activities all the time. But the training for those experiments did give Shukla, Nair, and ISRO exposure to the European and Japanese modules on the ISS, which specialize in microgravity research. Here’s what Axiom has shared:

ESA and JAXA, along with the Japan Manned Space Systems Corporation (JAMSS), have provided astronaut training programs to ensure the assigned Ax-4 crew is adept at functioning within the space station's multinational environment.
[...]
At ESA’s European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany, the assigned Ax-4 crew completed comprehensive training covering communications systems, emergency response procedures, and conducting research activities inside the Columbus module. [...] Following ESA training, the crew underwent rigorous training sessions at JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center in Japan, concentrating on understanding the operation of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), known as Kibō. The training included gaining an in-depth understanding of the JEM module's capabilities.

Furthermore, ISRO has shared that it was the company Redwire that enabled the Indian experiments to logistically work at the ISS during Ax-4:

Redwire Space, USA, is coordinating the payload integration activities. Redwire facilitated key steps, including technical validation and compliance with ISS payload requirements. Each experiment is packaged into flight-ready payload containers. Redwire is also supporting the development of hardware handling protocols, ensuring that the Indian experiments could be safely deployed and operated onboard the ISS, thereby enabling meaningful scientific outcomes for India’s research community.

Considering that ISRO intends to have scientific experiments as part of its free-flying Gaganyaan capsule as well as space station missions, the ISS research training exposure and experience with ESA, JAXA, and Redwire will certainly come in handy for India as a new player to forge microgravity science modules that are flight feasible.

Could ISRO have achieved these goals another way?

Critics have also stated that ISRO could’ve achieved the goals discussed above via terrestrial means for far lower costs. Note that by this point in the piece, we’ve gone through the ISRO astronauts being involved in mission training and observations across NASA, SpaceX, Axiom, ESA, and JAXA facilities. Now if ISRO were to mount five such bilateral contracts for astronaut training, even if time consuming, it may or may not have provided the same insights with coherence. It certainly wouldn’t include the experience of being tuned into a human spaceflight itself, which I discuss in the next section.

A paid ticket to the ISS, even if commercial, was a single-window entry for ISRO to accelerate its own human spaceflight program. The inefficiency of arriving at a solution is a distinct problem from the outcomes being beneficial regardless. The desired outcome being fulfilled is more important than the pure efficiency of the solution—so long as the cost’s order of magnitude doesn’t rise from tens of millions to hundreds as discussed in this piece above.

Tuning into mission operations

Between the wide-ranging training provided to Shukla & Nair and the former’s flight experience now with its actual series of events in space, and the corresponding events at the mission control center, a valuable lesson for ISRO lies in something that seems simple but is nuanced: the ‘sequence of operations’ used throughout the mission for every system. Shukla knowing, practicing, and experiencing the specificities of this sequence will be valuable for ISRO to correctly or more quickly design human spaceflight systems and consoles. This is especially true for contingency scenarios and emergency situations, where the order of events matters most.

Furthermore, Chethan Kumar has reported that ISRO’s delegation of engineers and doctors supposedly had better access than what is possible through Axiom’s commercial flight alone, with India going through a NASA-ISRO agreement to that end. Kumar reports a “senior ISRO official” who is “closely involved with the mission” sharing the following—albeit all anonymously:

This is the first time we’re seeing these operations up close—till now, it was all just documentation. [...] We were on the audio loop, listening to mission control discussions. We saw what control operations did, how many docking attempts were made, what kind of error parameters were being monitored. These are not things you’ll find in any public webcast or document.

The official also said that the ISRO doctors were involved in the mission during Shukla’s Crew Dragon flight as well as the ISS stay via private medical conference links. They will also be involved in Shukla’s post-flight recovery and rehabilitation for a week or so. This experience with real data of its astronaut will help India plan its indigenous setup for Gaganyaan missions.

The ISRO Chief thus summed up the Ax-4 ISS flight’s advantage to India as follows:

From data handling to high-level system safety discussions, our understanding of the end-to-end process has grown. This cannot be acquired by simulation or literature review alone.

Note though that ESA and JAXA are long-time partners on the ISS. They don’t need Axiom flights for their astronauts to learn anything new. Their true ISS partnerships have provided Europe and Japan vastly superior experiences in human spaceflight than India. Even so, neither ESA nor JAXA have seriously aimed to have an independent human spaceflight program as an outcome [for various reasons including costs] but India is.

By this point in the piece, it appears that ISRO thought through the benefits of this mission as a key stepping stone in its ambition to indigenously send humans to space. But then you also have ISRO stating on its website that the mission took place “only because” of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

ISRO’s participation in Axiom-04 Mission happened only because of the visionary leadership of the Honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi ji. It was under his guidance that the foundation was laid for this joint collaboration between ISRO and the United States. The mission was envisaged during the Prime Minister’s historic visit to the U.S. in 2023 and his meeting with the then-President of the United States to send an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station as part of a broader partnership.

One would typically imagine that since ISRO as India’s premier space technology and research institution understands the nuances of what it stands to gain from the Axiom-4 ISS flight, it would therefore be the one originally proposing said mission. But since it’s the Indian Prime Minister that has both proposed the mission and orchestrated the deal with the US, one therefore asks if ISRO had alternate or even no plans to gain the same insights and experiences that they now have from Ax-4?

Advanced training for ISRO astronauts?

I asked NASA to share some specifics on the non-Ax-4 related training provided by NASA to Shukla & Nair as part of said ISRO-NASA agreement on human spaceflight cooperation. For context, Shukla & Nair, along with the other two ISRO astronaut candidates, completed their basic astronaut training in Russia at various Roscosmos centers. Shukla & Nair were to undergo “advanced training” at NASA. It turns out that it’s not done yet. Jimi Russell, the Public Affairs Officer for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said:

The two agencies also are discussing advanced ISRO astronaut training and will share more details as they are available.

Note that the US White House factsheet about the subject at the time of the agreement in 2023 stated the following:

NASA will provide advanced training to ISRO astronauts with the goal of launching a joint effort to the International Space Station in 2024.

Next steps

Looking ahead, the next major milestone in India’s human spaceflight journey is Gaganyaan G1. It’s the first of three uncrewed test flights which need to be successful before ISRO can deem all systems to be safe enough to launch its own astronauts from Indian soil. ISRO is targeting G1’s launch later this year although timelines have been uncertain until now. There will also be more abort tests of the Gaganyaan Crew Module to follow up on the previous in-flight abort test.

ISRO’s human spaceflight program has been facing recurring delays despite progress on parts. It’s a complex undertaking, and astronaut safety is paramount. It’s also important to get the essential pieces right when a country has ambitions to create a space station of its own. Shukla’s Ax-4 ISS flight and the Shukla-Nair duo’s training experience will definitely be fed into ISRO’s central planning of Gaganyaan at India’s Human Space Flight Center to accelerate the program—even if there may be caveats about the efficacy and extent of benefits of Shukla’s flight. As with most things, time will tell.

Read previous editions on Indian space

• Indian Space Progress #28: A pressing PSLV rocket failure and orbital congestion to brood over
• Indian Space Progress #27: Three months of mission updates, and fixing ISRO’s monthly summaries
• India’s achievements in Moon exploration this half year

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Open Lunar is a non-profit organization that actively promotes cooperative, peaceful, and sustainable exploration of our Moon. The organization enables experts globally to collaborate and develop equitable technical and policy building blocks to such ends. It’s a mission I love so much—alongside the people—that I’ve been happily aiding it as their Science Communications Lead since this year. 🚀

Note: All Moon Monday sponsorships, including that of Open Lunar, abide by my public Editorial Independence Policy with zero exceptions.

CNSA held a press conference on July 9 to share novel findings about our Moon as revealed by Chinese researchers studying lunar farside samples brought to Earth by the Chang’e 6 mission last year. This is a good time to highlight all major findings with an accompanying visual that lets you picture the scientific value the Chinese have added to humanity’s exploration of our Moon.

Note: Unlike as reported in many media outlets, the findings include but are not actually limited to the four papers that appear in the July 10 edition of Nature. Some reports are also calling these papers new whereas all but one of them were published earlier. The four papers are simply bundled in this journal edition for context. And there are more elsewhere.

First, take a good look at the sampling site of Chang’e 6 on the Moon, lying at 153.99° W, 41.64° S within the farside Apollo impact crater.

Below is a good look at some scooped samples. Most of the Chang’e 6 samples are stored at NAOC of CAS.

Alongside the 2-billion-year-old samples from Chang’e 5, the Chang’e 6 samples at 2.8 billion years old are among the youngest volcanic material fetched from Luna. Earlier Apollo and Luna volcanic samples are not only older, they belong to a different era in the evolution of our Moon.

One Chang’e 6 study did find evidence of a distinct volcanic episode about 4.2 billion years ago amid samples otherwise dominated by the 2.8-billion-year aged basalts. Scientists concluded that the former was due to the presence of heat-producing and radioactive elements whereas the volcanic outbursts 1.4 billion years later took place despite the lunar interior beneath the landing site being deprived of such catalysts. Chang’e 6 findings have thus added to the complexities of the Moon’s volcanic history.

Another interesting result from the same paper was that the accurate, lab-determined age of 2.8 billion years for the dominant Chang’e 6 basalts falls right in line with their approximate age as previously estimated using the remote crater counting method. This means that the crater-counting based age model established for the Moon’s nearside is gladly closely applicable to features on the farside too. This is what lunar dating for lunar scientists looks like.

In contrast, dating Chang’e 5 samples led to noticeably shifted ages of lunar features as well as refining of the nature of impacts over the last 2 billion years in the inner Solar System. For example, it’s because of Chang’e 5 that scientists realized that some lunar features may be up to 240 million years older than previously thought.

Another study of the dominant Chang’e 6 basalts with embedded micrometer-sized iron grains revealed a surprising increase in magnetic field strength, providing the first ground truth constraints for farside lunar magnetism. From the paper:

These results record a rebound of the field strength after its previous sharp decline of around 3.1 Ga [billion years ago], which attests to an active lunar dynamo at about 2.8 Ga in the mid-early stage and argues against the suggestion that the lunar dynamo may have remained in a low-energy state after 3 Ga until its demise.

Let’s switch gears to the few hundred million years after our Moon’s fiery formation. This earliest era of Luna’s evolution is where findings from Chang’e 6 have been deeply insightful.

Until recently, all direct evidence of our Moon being covered in a global magma ocean shortly after its formation has come from Apollo and Luna samples sourced from nearside equatorial and near-equatorial regions. Surface measurements made by Chandrayaan 3’s Pragyan rover in 2023 extended this hypothesis’ validity to high-latitude regions on the nearside. But we lacked any such tactile measurements from the Moon’s farside. Recently though Chinese researchers studying two grams of Chang’e 6 samples confirmed the presence of key chemical elements that are compatible with a fully molten young Moon. Chang’e 6 has thus lent unequivocal credence to said hypothesis.

In another critical study, researchers analyzed 1600 fragments from five grams of Chang’e 6 samples and found 20 relevant pieces to determine the truest age yet of the massive South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin—within which the spacecraft landed—as being 4.25 billion years. Spanning 2500 kilometers, the SPA basin is the Moon’s largest, deepest, and oldest impact crater. Its age and nature of formation has huge implications for understanding how our Moon evolved.

The CNSA release about the study notes:

This finding provides the first direct, sample-based evidence that the Moon's largest impact basin formed approximately 320 million years after the beginning of Solar System. The definitive age of 4.25 billion years for the SPA basin can serve as a crucial anchor point for refining the lunar cratering chronology and establishing a more complete temporal sequence of the Moon's early evolution.

The impact that created the SPA was so colossal that scientists think it changed the physical and chemical makeup of the Moon’s mantle down to hundreds of kilometers. And that’s exactly what more Chang’e 6 studies are finding. The dominant Chang’e 6 basalts are from lava erupted ~1.4 billion years after the SPA event’s morphing of the mantle. These thus exhibit a unique makeup compared to other volcanic lunar samples. A study of 16 fragments scooped up by Chang’e 6 found them severely lacking elements such as titanium and thorium.

Another study analyzing 578 particles weighing a total of 5 grams revealed for the first time that the Moon’s farside mantle contains less water than within the nearside. The finding added to the debate on the topic by lending a solid and unique credence to the hypothesis that our Moon indeed lost most of its water during its fiery formation. CASC’s news release on the study noted how Francis McCubbin, NASA’s Astromaterials Curator and a peer reviewer of the paper, called the work “a landmark study on the water abundance of the lunar farside.”

With this long march of notable scientific discoveries, China’s Chang’e 6 sample return mission has lived up to its bold promises of helping scientists advance on a host of Moon mysteries. Chang’e 6 anchoring past lunar events and providing literally deep insights on the Moon’s farside-nearside enigma is helping us not just understand our celestial companion’s evolution but that of our Solar System.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Ajay Kothari for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing. 🌙

More Moon

• For the versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) to be used across Artemis missions starting end of decade at best, NASA has announced that the rover will carry three agency-funded instruments: an infrared spectrometer, a microwave spectrometer, and a ground penetrating radar. Together, these would map minerals, volatiles like water ice, and subsurface structures on the Moon’s south pole. NASA will also have an infrared spectrometer in orbit—but whose flight opportunity is not yet determined—to provide regional context for the LTV rover’s measurements and observations. The agency will announce later this year which of the three competing teams has been selected to make and operate the LTV.

• US-based Advanced Space (who leads the NASA-funded CAPSTONE lunar orbiter mission) has partnered with Firefly Aerospace (who is building orbiters too and recently demonstrated a soft Moon landing) so as to study design reference missions for NASA for future lunar communications and navigation services, an area of lunar infrastructure which China currently leads.
• The Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) is offering a PhD position for calibration and analysis of data obtained by the organization-built instrument on the Moon’s farside. The instrument is the Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface (NILS) payload, which flew on China’s Chang’e 6 lander last year. NILS detected negatively charged particles, a world first. These ions are produced due to highly energetic solar wind particles slamming the Moon’s surface and kicking up secondary particles. NILS is the first of two European and ESA-involved instruments to operate on the Moon’s surface, and was Europe’s first such collaboration with China.

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