Dodging bullets and firing blanksby Jeff Foust
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| “We may have dodged a bullet with the Chang’e-7 mission a couple weeks ago,” Isaacman said. |
Beyond the successful Artemis 2 lunar flyby in April, the most anticipated lunar mission this year was China’s Chang’e-7. The mission featured an orbiter and lander, with the latter touching down near the lunar south pole. That lander also included a rover and a hopper, along with a suite of instruments to prospect for water ice.
Chang’e-7 was to launch in late August on a Long March 5. However, the China Manned Space Engineering Office abruptly called off the launch just hours before the scheduled liftoff, after the rocket had rolled out to the pad. The delay initially was linked to weather, as a typhoon was near the Wenchang spaceport hosting the launch. However, the launch has been postponed indefinitely, at least to some time next year.
Chinese officials have not disclosed what caused the extended delay, although there have been suggestions that the mission had a narrow launch window caused by lighting conditions at the landing site.
Whatever the reason, it was greeted with relief in Washington. “We may have dodged a bullet with the Chang’e-7 mission a couple weeks ago, because that would have gone to the Shackleton crater,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in a talk at the Off World conference in Houston a month after the Chang’e-7 delay.
His argument was that China was targeting one of a small number of locations near the lunar south pole that may be ideal locations for lunar bases. Had Chang’e-7 landed there, it “could have potentially denied access to some of the most interesting spots,” he claimed.
But China is not the only one facing delays in their lunar exploration plans. Early this year, NASA touted up to four robotic lunar lander missions, all part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, launching in 2026. They included Astrobotic’s Griffin-1, Blue Origin’s first Blue Moon Mark 1, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 2, and Intuitive Machines’ IM-3.
With just over two months left in the year, none of the four have launched. The Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, called Endurance, appeared to be in line to launch first, but has been grounded by the New Glenn pad explosion and is now not expected to launch until early 2027.
| “By the end of calendar year 2026, we’ll have made ten additional [CLPS] task order awards,” Stephan said. “That’s due to the demand signal that we got from our administrator.” |
Blue Ghost 2 and IM-3 have also seen their launches slip into 2027. In a talk Monday at the American Astronautical Society’s Von Braun Space Exploration Symposium, Ryan Cole, spacecraft engines manager at Firefly, showed a recent photo of Blue Ghost 2 still being assembled at the company’s Texas factory.
The lander, he noted, was still lacking its engines and other propulsion system components. “We have quite a lot of work to do before the end of the year, when we’re trying to have all of that closed out,” he said.
That leaves Griffin-1. Earlier this month, Voyager Lunar Systems—the new name for Astrobotic after it was acquired this summer by Voyager Technologies—announced it had completed environmental testing of the lander at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The lander was back at its Pittsburgh facility for some final work before shipping to Cape Canaveral for a launch it said was still planned for late this year.
However, Ryan Stephan, acting director of the cargo landers office for NASA’s Moon Base program, said in a talk at an October 14 meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) that the launch was planned for “end of this year, beginning of next year.” The slides accompanying his talk listed a launch date of no earlier than January 2027.
Those delays come as NASA seeks to accelerate the pace of lunar landings. The agency announced at its Ignition event in March an ambitious push of robotic lunar lander missions to support plans for that base, starting with precursor missions before moving to larger landers that would provide infrastructure for the base.
Stephan noted there are 15 CLPS missions under contract, several of which have been awarded since Ignition. “By the end of calendar year 2026, we’ll have made ten additional task order awards,” he said. “That’s due to the demand signal that we got from our administrator.”
Companies have been gearing up for that growth. Cole said that Blue Ghost 2 was just one of four spacecraft in various stages of construction at Firefly for lunar missions. Those include landers as well as a spacecraft that will ferry to the Moon NASA’s MoonFall mission, a set of three hoppers under development by JPL that will touch down on the Moon and then hop from one location to another across the surface.
A challenge, though, is the success rate. Of the four CLPS missions flown to date, only one, Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 lander, was fully successful. The IM-1 and IM-2 landers toppled over upon landing, with IM-2 operating for less than a day. Astrobotic’s Peregrine suffered a propulsion malfunction shortly after its launch and was not able to attempt a landing.
CLPS started with what NASA called a “shots on goal” philosophy, accepting that some missions would fail. But the agency wants to shift that approach as it counts on landers to support the lunar base. “It’s shots on goal and win the game,” quipped Carlos García-Galán, NASA’s Moon Base program manager, in March.
At Ignition, he outlined an ambitious lineup of missions, including nine lunar landings in 2027 and ten in 2028. However, speaking at a meeting of the Space Studies Board last week, Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, mentioned only the goal of ten CLPS missions in 2028.
What about 2027? “We’ll use ’27 to ramp up to it,” she said. “To have ten landings in 2027 you have to have ten landers ready to go.”
| “The latitude to execute on our strategy is based on China,” Isaacman said. “Absent that global competition, very little of the progress that we have made over this past year would be in play right now.” |
Many of those future missions will be part of a new contract, called CLPS 2.0, that NASA requested proposals for earlier this year. CLPS 2.0 will enable up to $10 billion on awards for future landers and other lunar missions. Stephan said that NASA planned to announce the companies selected for CLPS 2.0 in November at the agency’s “Max Power” air show at the Kennedy Space Center.
Despite the delays in both China and the United States, NASA has continued to emphasize a race to return to the Moon. Isaacman, speaking at the Off World conference last month, said American leadership in general was at risk should China land its astronauts on the Moon before NASA returns. “If you come up short with who comes down the ladder first, the impact is felt around the world.”
He acknowledged, though, that NASA’s ability to revamp and accelerate its own lunar plans is based on that perceived space race with China. “The latitude to execute on our strategy is based on China,” he said. “Absent that global competition, very little of the progress that we have made over this past year would be in play right now.”
It’s a race, though, where the competitors are only slowly getting out of the starting blocks.
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