Back to the Moon: Twelve Lunar Spacecraft From SMART-1 to Blue Moon

Begin with the European Space Agency orbiter SMART-1, launched on September 27, 2003, from Kourou in French Guiana. Its name stands for Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology-1. The mission ended on September 3, 2006, when the spacecraft was deliberately crashed into the lunar surface, a way of ending a mission that several later stops repeat.

SELENE, nicknamed Kaguya in Japan, was the second Japanese lunar orbiter after the Hiten probe. The Institute of Space and Astronautical Science and the National Space Development Agency built it together, and it launched on September 14, 2007. After about a year and eight months in orbit, the main orbiter was crashed on purpose near the crater Gill on June 10, 2009.

LCROSS was a NASA spacecraft built to learn whether the hydrogen detected at the lunar poles came from water ice in a permanently shadowed crater. It launched on June 18, 2009, alongside the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It crashed a spent rocket stage into the southern crater Cabeus and analyzed the debris plume, confirming water ice there.

LADEE launched on a Minotaur V rocket on September 7, 2013, to study the thin lunar atmosphere and dust. For seven months it orbited the lunar equator with a dust detector, a neutral mass spectrometer and an ultraviolet-visible spectrometer, and it also demonstrated a laser communications terminal. Controllers crashed it into the far side of the Moon on April 18, 2014.

Beresheet was a small lunar lander operated by the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL together with Israel Aerospace Industries, launched on February 22, 2019. It was meant to deliver a magnetometer, a time capsule and a laser retroreflector. Its gyroscopes failed on April 11, 2019, the main engine shut off, and it crashed instead of landing softly.

CAPSTONE is a twelve-unit CubeSat that NASA launched on June 28, 2022, to test the orbital stability calculated for the once-planned Lunar Gateway station. It reached lunar orbit on November 14, 2022, and also tested a navigation system that measures its position relative to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter without ground stations. It finished its primary mission by May 2023 and kept working as a technology testbed.

Danuri, officially the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, is South Korea's first lunar mission, and the orbiter, its science payload and its ground control all serve as technology demonstrators. It launched on August 4, 2022, and entered lunar orbit on December 16, 2022. It surveys lunar resources such as water ice and makes a topographic map to help choose future landing sites.

Vikram is the lander of India's Chandrayaan-3 mission, built to replace the lander of Chandrayaan-2, which crashed in 2019. Chandrayaan-3 launched on July 14, 2023, from Sriharikota and entered lunar orbit on August 5. Vikram touched down near the lunar south pole, at 69 degrees south, on August 23, 2023, carrying the Pragyan rover.

SLIM, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, was a Japanese lander launched in September 2023 to demonstrate precision landing. It touched down on January 20, 2024, making Japan the fifth nation to soft land on the Moon, within about a hundred meters of its target. One engine lost thrust late in descent and it landed tilted, but it still operated briefly and returned images and data.

Peregrine Mission One, built by Astrobotic Technology, launched in January 2024 as the first mission of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. A propellant leak soon after launch made a landing impossible. Astrobotic used the remaining fuel to test the lander's systems and then guided it to burn up over the Pacific Ocean, so the mission never reached the Moon.

Odysseus, built by Intuitive Machines, launched in February 2024 and landed on February 22, 2024, near the lunar south pole. It was the first commercially built spacecraft to soft land on the Moon and the first American one since the last Apollo mission in 1972. It came to rest on its side after a landing leg caught the surface, yet it kept sending data for about a week.

The path ends with a lander still in development. Blue Origin unveiled Blue Moon in 2019 in several variants. The smaller uncrewed Mark 1 is meant to prove the systems and deliver cargo, while the larger Mark 2 was selected by NASA to carry astronauts as part of the Artemis program, alongside the SpaceX Starship human landing system.