Cosmic Talks: Recent Episodes

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You know how I remarked in the previous Moon Monday about having two feature stories instead of one to adequately contextualize big new developments? Well, this week’s Moon Monday has three! For Europe, China, and the US. 🙈

Europe’s new test facility brings more of those lunar vibes on EarthAn astronaut and a robot in the LUNA testbed. Image: DLR / ESAOn September 25, ESA and DLR inaugurated a 700-square-meter LUNA test facility near Cologne in Germany, which when fully complete will simulate multiples aspects of our Moon to conduct robotic and crewed exploration hardware tests, touting:

• a lunar-like volcanic regolith surface
• simulated lunar polar sunlight cycles
• sampling and drilling areas (up to 3 meters)
• an adjustable ramp for testing rover mobility on lunar slopes
• a simulated entrance to a lava tube
• spacesuits and a fascinating vertical suspension system to allow astronauts to perform simulate Moonwalks under lunar-equivalent gravity
• a seismic station
• and a connected habitat training area

ESA and DLR will also add more testing niceties over time so the above list is not even comprehensive! The LUNA facility is located next to ESA’s European Astronaut Centre. ESA says space agencies, academia and researchers, and space companies from all over the world can make use of LUNA facilities for testing their lunar hardware, prototypes, and operational scenarios.

The LUNA test facility for lunar exploration hardware and operations. Image: ESALUNA is the crest of a coordinated effort across Europe by ESA and several national space agencies to invest in comprehensive planetary testing facilities.

• Last year in September, DLR inaugurated a new 1500-square-meter Moon-Mars facility in Oberpfaffenhofen to test mobile robotic explorers on basaltic surfaces and landforms similar to those on the Moon and the Red Planet.
• The Luxembourg-ESA co-run European Space Resources Innovation Centre (ESRIC) aims to establish a terrestrial pilot plant to accelerate as well as de-risk technologies and concepts related to extracting and utilizing lunar oxygen and other resources before their use in actual Moon missions.
• DLR has been testing a robotic motion simulator configured to mimic a lander’s motions as it would be during descent and touchdown on the rocky terrain at the Moon’s south pole. With this, ESA aims to establish preliminary requirements for an eventual crewed lunar lander—although no such funded plan currently exists. The simulator allows testing multiple landing scenarios, including manually avoiding hazardous regions and overriding autonomous landing in favor of manual controls after experiencing technical faults.
• ESA runs the Pangaea campaign, which trains international partner astronauts in lunar geology, a highly valuable skill when exploring the Moon and collecting samples
• ESA and DLR have been pooling researchers from across the continent for the “Movement in low gravity environments” (MoLo) program to study how human bodies would react and adapt long-term in lunar gravity, particularly in the context of stays in lunar habitats. Based on their current research using bungee rope-like setups and parabolic flights both simulating some lunar conditions, it seems that having astronauts do controlled hopping coupled with the expected extravehicular activities (EVAs) as well as daily tasks could be effective in helping mitigate or even prevent physiological deconditioning.

A Sino suit for LunaA suited person demoing China’s new lunar spacesuit prototype. Image: CMSA / CCTV / CMSOn September 28, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) unveiled their lunar spacesuit prototype design, thus revealing the final major element that will be employed in China’s march towards realizing a crewed Moon landing by 2030. Just like was the case of China’s crewed lunar lander and spacecraft, China is asking its citizens to help name the suit by submitting ideas by October 31.

The on-stage demos showed a suited person climbing a ladder akin to what an astronaut would do after China’s first crewed Moon landing. CMSA says the lightweight lunar suit is designed to ease walking on multiple lunar terrains, and that it allows better squatting and bending than suits used in Earth orbit since those actions are useful for lunar sampling and deploying & operating surface instruments. Naturally, the suit is (and has to be) made to withstand the extreme vacuum, radiation, dust, and thermal environments of the Moon.

Supposedly, the suit is fully indigenous, unlike the Russian-derived-and-inspired suits China currently uses on its Earthbound human spaceflight missions. CMSA’s deputy chief designer Zhang Hailian stated last year that the suits are designed such that astronauts can explore the lunar surface for at least eight hours at a time. As Andrew Jones reported, the suit’s anti-glare visors, helmet cameras, and a control console (and likely headlights) will aid astronauts during such excursions.

On the other side of the world, Axiom Space is busy developing and purportedly prioritizing the AxEMU suit that Artemis astronauts will wear for the program’s first US Moon landing. The suits remain a pacing item for the mission alongside the SpaceX Lunar Starship lander.

Back to China’s crewed Moon landing plan, in May 2023 CMSA solicited industry proposals for a mission rover, which the crew can drive up to 10 kilometers from the landed site. That’s more than the range of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) driven by Apollo astronauts but does fall short of the 20-kilometer peak of the upcoming Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle. In any case, 10 kilometers is in itself a decent range for expansive crewed Moon missions.

Many thanks to Arun Raghavan and Frank Genin for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource, kindly join them and support my independent writing.

Intuitive Machines to also launch lunar comm relays—not yet for $4.82 billion..Illustration of the Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite relaying signals between Earth and robotic hardware at the Moon. Image: SSTLNASA is awarding $150 million to Intuitive Machines for launching the first few satellites which will provide navigation and communications (navcom) services to hardware at the Moon part of crewed Artemis and robotic CLPS programs. The first such satellite will launch in late 2025 onboard the company’s third Moon landing mission. Two more will launch on Intuitive’s fourth lunar flight in 2027. With these and more such high-bandwidth communications satellites sent via CLPS, NASA hopes to reduce burden on the agency’s overworked Deep Space Network.

If Intuitive Machines manages multiple successful demonstrations with these initially contracted satellites, NASA’s awards to the company could potentially extend up to $4.82 billion for expanded services. But as the newsletter “The Space Investor” pointed out, most investors wrongly assumed $4.82 billion to be the currently contracted value instead of $150 million—which made Intuitive’s stocks soar. Part of the issue is the company’s press release did not mention the ~$150 million figure. I wonder why. But many western media publications covering the development didn’t dig up and specify the $150 million part either, including the very positive coverage from space journalism veteran Ars Technica, which in the same article continued to perpetuate Intuitive’s first Moon landing attempt as being more successful than it really was. Quote below, emphasis mine:

Despite some technical troubles, including the failure of its altimeter, the company's first lander managed a soft touchdown on the Moon on its side. Even with this unintended orientation, the Intuitive Machines-1 mission still managed to complete the vast majority of its science objectives.

Soft touchdown? It was not. Unless of course breaking a lander leg is a gentle landing in the New Moon Dictionary.

Completing the vast majority of its science objectives? Sure, if most payloads collecting limited data and one collecting none constitutes a vast majority.

Anyway, on the other side of the world, as part of a broader strategy for China’s upcoming full-fledged navcom constellation, the country has already deployed two communications relay orbiters: Queqiao 1 and Queqiao 2, which served the Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6 missions respectively on the Moon’s farside. Queqiao 2 will also relay communications for China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 lunar landers, which CNSA is targeting to launch in 2026 and 2028 respectively.

ESA also aims to have a navcom lunar constellation with its Moonlight initiative. The launch of UK’s Lunar Pathfinder orbiter in 2026 will constitute ESA’s first Moonlight element. ESA will be Moonlight’s anchor customer but expects European companies to actively commercially provide services to missions globally. For more on the US side, Lockheed Martin’s subsidiary Crescent Space was targeting a 2025 launch for its first two navcom lunar orbiters but there’s been no update on its progress. More potential competitors in the lunar navcom space include ArkEdge Space, Aquarian Space, and Plus Ultra but only China has launched hardware yet.

More mission updates Video: The next Moon landing missions by Intuitive Machines for NASA CLPS (based on Moon Monday!) * “A piece of the Moon*” is an excellent behind-the-scenes video showing key moments in operating the Chang’e 6 spacecraft, which successfully brought lunar samples from the Moon’s farside to Earth past June. Other than showing several people on the mission, the video features the terrestrial lander and local surface site replica which CNSA created to test and verify commands before sending them to the actual Chang’e 6 lander so as to avoid making mistakes during critical operations. * ispace US has built a new control center for mission operations at its headquarters in Denver, Colorado. This development is in the run up to the first Draper-led Moon mission part of NASA’s CLPS program targeting a 2026 launch, wherein ispace’s US subsidiary is providing the lander. ispace US is also providing ground communications and relay satellite services for the mission to enable communications with the lander and its instruments on the Moon’s farside. Draper’s CLPS mission has been a driver of capital raises for ispace but the silver lining for science is that it hasn’t cost significant additional money to NASA unlike the case of several other CLPS missions including the first ones that flew this year from Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines.

More Moon* Jeff Foust reports that Lockheed Martin has left the “Lunar Dawn” rover team led by Lunar Outpost competing for the development of a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle for Artemis. Lockheed’s departure has meant that Lunar Outpost had to significantly change their rover design to remove Lockheed’s intellectual property contributions. Separately, and not replacing Lockheed’s role, Leidos has joined the rover team to support work on astronaut safety and operations based on their experience serving NASA at the International Space Station. Relatedly, NASA has contracted Leidos to support cargo processing and management work for Artemis orbital and surface missions. * Random lunar fact: Earth observation satellites periodically image the Moon to detect, calibrate, and correct deviations in the performance of their imagers. The latter happens naturally due to aging hardware, degradation of imager material or coating, radiation exposure, and other such factors. It’s our Moon’s stable and known light intensity that allows it to act as a celestial reference for satellites based on which they can continue accurate observations. Some fresh examples of satellites imaging Luna for calibration are ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-2C and Azista Space’s AFR spacecraft.

Just our lovely Moon as captured by the Sentinel-2C satellite on September 20. Image: ESA

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A popular YouTube channel has worked with me to create another video based on my Moon Monday blog+newsletter, this time on the next three Moon landing missions by Intuitive Machines for NASA as part of the agency’s CLPS program.

Note: I didn’t choose the video title. My job is to provide the core info. The title doesn’t make much sense to me but I do think the channel team did a great job with the video itself.

The video is based on four Moon Mondays:

1. Moon Monday #189: The next lunar missions by Intuitive Machines for NASA CLPS, and more things that orbit Luna
2. Moon Monday #191: A stream of CLPS and Artemis lunar mission updates
3. Moon Monday #166: An intuitive 98% success
4. NASA is funding a Moon mission to the magnetic swirl of Reiner Gamma

The previous two videos we made:

1. Everything you need to know about China’s Moon missions
2. Everything you need to know about India’s Moon missions

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This week’s Moon Monday has not one but two feature stories! So much has been happening in lunar exploration this whole year that I’ve transitioned to writing deep dives more frequently so as to adequately capture and contextualize big updates. If you appreciate my efforts to bring you such a highly curated community resource every single week, please do support. 🚀🌗

Chandrayaan 4 has entered the chatThe proposed elongated Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stack of five modules (left) versus the two modules which comprised Chandrayaan 3 (right). Images: Jatan Mehta | ISROOn September 18, the Indian Government Union Cabinet approved Chandrayaan 4, a lunar sample return mission with a budget of ₹2104 crores ($252 million). The government press release says the mission is expected to be executed within three years, which means we can expect a launch to be in the latter part of 2027—if all preparations and yearly budgetary approvals go well.

Chandrayaan 4 currently aims to bring somewhere between two to five kilograms of lunar samples for scientific studies to enrich our understanding of the Moon. The mission consists of five spacecraft modules: the lander, the propulsion module, the ascent module, the sample transfer module, and the Earth reentry capsule. Combined, these would weigh nearly 10,000 kilograms, which is roughly twice the maxed out GTO payload capacity of India’s most powerful rocket, the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3). Since LVM3’s lift prowess is less than half of China’s Long March 5 rocket which enabled CNSA to undertake the Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 sample return missions, ISRO’s approach with Chandrayaan 4 instead involves two LVM3 launches, with the modules split between them.

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 mission with Chandrayaan 4. One of the most complex parts of Chandrayaan 4 would be remotely docking robotic modules in lunar orbit, a feat only China has achieved so far. And so, as Kalyan Ray recently reported, ISRO will launch the ~$14 million SPADEX (space docking experiment) mission end of this year (but likely early next), wherein two spacecraft will practice docking in Earth orbit. SPADEX will buy down risk not only for Chandrayaan 4 but for the upcoming Gaganyaan human spaceflight missions—in particular the cargo flight to the International Space Station and to India’s upcoming first space station module later this decade. Together these missions will feed into enabling ISRO to send humans to the Moon, wherein large crew-rated modules will need to safely dock with each other.

LUP-ex’d*Top left: Illustration of an ISRO lander having delivered the (stowed)JAXA-built LUPEX rover to the Moon; Top right and bottom left: The LUPEX rover shown traversing the Moon’s south pole; Bottom right:* An early LUPEX prototype testing drive system performance in a simulated lunar soil pit. Images: JAXA / MitsubishiWhile Chandrayaan 4’s formal commissioning is great news, it also means that the joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX mission aimed at directly studying the nature, abundance, and accessibility of water ice at the Moon’s south pole was not proposed for the Indian government’s approval as of now. Not that a successfully executed Chandrayaan 4 sample return won’t have its own positive influences but as a signatory to the US-led Artemis Accords, India could’ve positioned LUPEX to be immediately useful in a unique way.

LUPEX would feed into as well as build on ISRO’s ongoing aid to NASA with lunar polar resource prospecting and hazard classification for planning of crewed Artemis missions. Especially when considering the ongoing scramble in the US to save NASA’s VIPER rover mission from getting canceled against budgetary challenges, the ISRO-JAXA LUPEX rover would’ve provided the much-needed ground truth about water ice deposits on the Moon’s south pole based on which increasingly complex robotic and crewed missions can even be conceptualized.

As for the mission’s journey so far, the Japanese government approved the LUPEX mission a while ago but have been waiting on India to do the same. The mission’s lander, which ISRO will provide, supposedly has its preliminary design review pending. The rover’s development is farther along with prototype hardware built and tested for mobility but the rover’s instruments—coming from both the countries—haven’t been finalized yet despite it being originally expected to be done over a year ago. ISRO-affiliated scientists have been conducting landing site selection studies for LUPEX. Considering that LUPEX had been in the making for years now, with ISRO and JAXA even building anticipation for a mid-decade launch, it was expected to be the next mission India green-lits but clearly Chandrayaan 4 has superseded it.

However, one must also note that this linear fashion of Moon missions from ISRO is what is to be expected. Despite the many highs of 2023 for Indian space, the FY2024 budget of $1.56 billion for the country’s Department of Space (DOS)—of which ISRO gets the major chunk—has essentially stayed flat. India’s approach to even attempt its planned increasingly complex lunar and crewed exploration missions is gradual and different than the US or China by necessity. ISRO simply lacks the scale of resources and threaded execution of planetary missions that NASA and CNSA enjoy, with governmental Indian space funding being only a tenth to twentieth of China and the US, and private funding for deep space exploration being nearly zero. And so, what ISRO has done to prioritize Chandrayaan 4 is swap its mission order with LUPEX.

Announcement: I’ll be speaking at the Galaxy Forum in Hainan, China about India’s collaborative crewed lunar exploration plans! Being held this December, the conference will focus on international crewed Moon landings, science enabled by it, and astronomy from Luna. 🤓

Prepping Chang’e 6 lunar farside samples for scientific studiesScooped lunar farside samples brought to Earth by Chang’e 6 contain a diversity of stony, volcanic, impact-induced as well as glassy materials. Image: Chunlai Li, et al.The National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) has now stored the 1.61 kilograms of lunar samples which were scooped by China’s Chang’e 6 lander on the Moon’s farside over three months ago and subsequently brought to Earth on June 25. It took Chinese scientists about two months to carefully unseal, size-sort, and store these samples in more than a dozen curated bottles, which now sit in a NAOC lab shelf below rows of Chang’e 5 samples.

Chinese scientists also completed determining the broad physical, chemical, and mineral characteristics of the Chang’e 6 samples, as published on September 17 in the National Space Review journal. As was expected, the samples indeed are very different from those picked from the Moon’s nearside—the farside material as collected by Chang’e 6 has a whiter appearance, is less dense and more porous, contains more rocky highland material rather than bits from volcanic plains, and lacks heavier minerals.

Chang’e 6 also brought to Earth 325 grams of drilled samples from below the lunar surface. Scientists will need up to two more months to prepare, sort, and store these since they plan on segregating the samples into 100 layers—one for every 1.5 centimeters of depth.

A panorama from the Chang’e 6 lander on the Moon’s farside, showing one of its legs and the scoop sampling arm and its surface digs. Image: CNSA / CLEPThe Chang’e 6 samples will be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples. They are expected to help scientists solve a whole host of Moon mysteries such as understanding the distinct lunar farside volcanism and why the farside is so enigmatically different from the familiar nearside—which is necessary to understand not just Luna’s evolution but that of our Solar System.

In order to maximize scientific return from the Chang’e 6 samples, Chinese scientists from across the country have been gathering for seminars and workshops to identify key scientific themes that could be tackled. Chinese research institutions are expected to be able to start applying to study Chang’e 6 samples after all of them have been prepared to be effectively analyzed. As per CNSA’s regulations on lunar sample management, international researchers can apply for mission samples two years after they’ve been brought to Earth.

Late last year NASA secured a remarkable exception from the US Congress for the country’s researchers to be able to apply to access and study Chang’e 5 samples despite policy and legal barriers. This exception might extend to Chang’e 6, or so we should hope anyway. Shortly after the Chang’e 6 samples arrived on Earth, both Victoria Bela and the Associated Press had reported CNSA’s Vice Administrator Bian Zhigang stating that the US remove the legal obstacles to allow for regular Sino-US cooperation in space.

Either way, looking ahead, China is firmly on track to launch the Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 spacecraft to the Moon’s south pole in 2026 and 2028 respectively. This will be followed by landing humans on Luna by end of decade, and then building a hybrid crew-robotic long-term Moonbase in the 2030s.

P.S. The Chang’e 6 mission itself is not done yet. Continuing the trend, CNSA has repurposed its orbiter module to enable future deep space missions.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Gordon Roesler for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too love this curated community resource, please join them and support my independent writing.

More mission updates* To my query regarding the lander testing aspect of ispace Japan’s upcoming second Moon mission, the company has told me in an email response that their engineers have completed field testing of lander sensors in lunar-like environments at multiple locations worldwide. The software suite used to simulate the spacecraft’s ability to softly land on the Moon has also been updated for the mission’s chosen landing site. As such, following the failed lunar touchdown attempt with the M1 mission in April 2023, ispace has expanded its lunar lander testing plan to improve the chances of a successful touchdown this time around. Recall that ISRO’s focus on enhanced testing, including with a dedicated simulations group, played a key role in Chandrayaan 3’s successful Moon landing last year since the simulations characterized the lander’s ability to recover from off-nominal trajectories. It also checked each redundant path the Chandrayaan 3 lander could’ve successfully taken during its autonomous descent. Here’s hoping that ispace achieves the same outcome. * The team behind the upcoming NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer orbiter—which will provide scientists with unprecedented high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across the Moon—continues to churn out great mission infographics. This is something more missions should do for public outreach. Having recently successfully passed the standard series of launch and space environmental tests, Trailblazer is on track for launch as a rideshare alongside Intuitive Machines’ second Moon lander early next year.

Image: Isabelle Adamczewski / Lunar Trailblazer teamMore Moon* Lunar Outpost, the company sending rovers on two upcoming Moon missions part of NASA’s CLPS program, has developed a Moondust sensor for future lunar missions. Its data will be useful to better protect astronauts and hardware in long-term habitats. Notably, this solar-powered wireless sensor is also being used on Earth to detect a variety of pollutants. * ESA’s Pangaea campaign to train future astronauts in geology continues with the latest batch learning how to spot meteorites on the Moon. Such an activity is important as it expands the scientific output from future crewed lunar missions to evolutionary processes in the wider Solar System. * Andrew Parsonson reports that, following a preliminary design study, a NASA review board has approved the development of the Multi-Purpose Habitat module for Artemis Basecamp to be led by the Italian Space Agency (ASI). To be launched and placed on the Moon sometime in the 2030s, the module—being developed by Thales Alenia—can host two astronauts for up to 30 days nominally while a larger crew can stay for short periods during emergencies. The module will have wheels so it can reposition itself on the Moon’s surface as needed for smooth operations. It will take at least two years to complete the habitat module’s development after which its flight model can be constructed.

Illustration of Italy’s mobile Multi-Purpose Habitat module for Artemis. Image: Thales Alenia Space

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After a week full of chores, writing this week’s Moon Monday yesterday and today has made me feel alive again. Hope you enjoy this edition as there’s a lot to contextualize! 🤓

Continuing the trend, China repurposes Chang’e 6 orbiter moduleThe Chang’e 6 spacecraft stack, with the lander and orbiter module prominently visible. Image: CNSAThe Chang’e 6 orbiter module, which enabled China to bring valuable farside lunar samples to Earth a few months ago, has been detected at the second Sun-Earth Lagrangian Point (L2) as of September 9 by enthusiastic spacecraft tracker Scott Tilley. On June 25 after the orbiter module released Chang’e 6’s sample capsule for atmospheric reentry on Earth, CNSA commanded the orbiter module to steer away from our planet and subsequently maneuvered it into a trajectory that has now placed it in the Earth-Sun L2 region. Here the Chang’e 6 orbiter module will presumably test operations for China’s upcoming exoplanet hunting telescope called Earth 2.0. This region of space is currently host to flagship astronomy missions by other space agencies such as the NASA-led JWST and ESA Gaia.

While China remains characteristically mum about official Chang’e 6 updates, the development fits the long-followed trend by CNSA of repurposing Chang’e spacecraft after their primary Moon missions have been accomplished. In fact, the first lunar craft to visit Sun-Earth L2 is China’s Chang’e 2 orbiter. Later on, CNSA also made the spacecraft fly past asteroid 4179 Toutatis at a close distance of 3.2 kilometers. Chang’e 2 thus enabled China to test its communications, tracking, and maneuvering abilities for farther, deep space missions.

Destinations explored by the Chang’e 2 spacecraft: The Moon, Sun-Earth L2, and an asteroid. Image: NAOC / CAS/ Chunlai Li / Han LiAfter Chang’e 5-T1 performed a practice mission in October 2014 ahead of CNSA launching the Chang’e 5 sample return mission in 2020, the T1 orbiter module entered the same halo orbit at Earth-Moon L2 that the Queqiao 1 communications relay satellite would eventually use for helping successfully execute the Chang’e 4 mission on the Moon’s farside.

After Chang’e 5 delivered lunar samples to Earth, CNSA also maneuvered its orbiter module away from our planet and placed it in the Sun-Earth L1 region in March 2021. Later in December 2021, it was brought back to the Moon and put it in a Distant Retrograde Orbit (DRO). This is the same orbit that two Chinese spacecraft launched earlier this year, DRO-A and DRO-B, are now present at. The craft pair are part of China’s broader in-progress lunar communications and navigation network of Queqiao satellites, and specifically aim to test laser-based navigation and timing between the Moon and the Earth-orbiting DRO-L satellite.

Another recent Moon mission that performed extended and repurposed goals after accomplishing the original mission is India’s Chandrayaan 3. A few months after the Chandrayaan 3 lander touched down on the Moon, ISRO pulled the mission’s propulsion module from lunar orbit to Earth orbit against the nominal plan, thereby demonstrating a small but key capability that will be required to pull off a robotic sample return mission in the future with Chandrayaan 4. The propulsion module also hosted experimental nuclear radioactive heating units to enable future Moon missions that could tout lunar night survival, something ISRO did not disclose before and after launch. ISRO also had the Chandrayaan 3 lander perform an unexpected last-minute hop toward the end of its surface mission.

Earth and our Moon as seen from beyond the lunar farside by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft on October 28, 2014. Image: CASTBack to the Chang’e side of things, a future experiment with the aforementioned Queqiao communications network will also enable better deep space exploration. Chinese researchers have suggested that when coupled with Earth-based ground stations, the Queqiao network can help CNSA track deep space missions with sub-kilometer accuracy all the way to Jupiter and possibly beyond. Queqiao 2 will test an element of this during the Chang’e 7 mission, which is currently targeting a 2026 launch. As noted by Chi Wang, et al. in a December 2023 paper on the scientific objectives of Chang’e 7, the LOVEX payload onboard the Queqiao 2 satellite will perform a deep space craft tracking experiment:

The LOVEX on the relay satellite is used [sic] to construct a 400 000-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.

On the horizon: ispace’s second Moon mission and a Trailblazerispace Japan’s second Moon lander, named RESILIENCE, at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center. Also seen integrated into the lander is ispace’s first rover TENACIOUS. Image: ispaceispace announced on September 10 that their first rover TENACIOUS has been integrated into their second Moon lander RESILIENCE. On September 12, the company revealed that the landing site for this M2 mission will be in the lava plains of Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold) at 60.5° N, 4.6° W. The lander is now progressing through the standard series of launch and space environmental tests at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center after passing which it can be shipped to Cape Canaveral, Florida for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than December 2024.

ispace previously announced on June 27 that the lander passed thermal vacuum testing, a major element of the aforementioned standard pre-launch tests. ispace engineers have also verified commanding the lander and receiving data from it, and performed other unspecified tests.

For the mission’s lander testing aspect, ispace had said after the failed lunar touchdown attempt with the M1 mission in April 2023 that it will conduct additional field testing of landing sensors to further improve the chances of a successful touchdown this time around. The company told me in an email response that their engineers have completed said sensor testing in lunar-like environments at multiple locations around the world. The software suite used to simulate the spacecraft’s ability to softly land on the Moon has also been updated for the aforementioned landing site.

ispace Europe, which designed the TENACIOUS rover, completed building it in July. The subsidiary completed environmental testing of the rover’s qualification model in April. The 54-centimeter wide, 5-kilogram micro-rover made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastics will explore the Moon’s surface with an HD camera on its front and back. The rover will also have a back-mounted shovel from Epiroc AB using which it will collect lunar soil and transfer its ownership to NASA as part of the latter’s move to set precedence for future resource use under the US-led Artemis Accords. ispace Europe developed the micro rover with funding aid from the Luxembourg Space Agency under an ESA contract.

Other than the rover, the M2 lander will carry three payloads: a water-splitting experiment by Takasago, an algae-based food production module by Euglena, and a deep space radiation monitoring probe by Taiwan’s National Central University. While Israel-based Helios earlier intended to have its (claimed) scalable technology of extracting oxygen from lunar soil to be onboard M2, the payload either wasn’t ready for flight or it isn’t on the manifest for some other reason(s).

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Marc Rayman and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday!

If you too love this curated community resource, kindly join them and support independent writing & journalism—via PayPal, UPI or Patreon (less preferred).

Another mission that’s approaching launch is the NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer science orbiter, which has now successfully passed launch and space environmental testing. The mission’s two science instruments were integrated with the spacecraft last year. Lockheed Martin, who built the spacecraft and will be the launch integrator, is performing final flight system software tests while Caltech—from where the science team will control the orbiter—is testing spacecraft communications and navigation via simulated runs with NASA’s Deep Space Network antennae. After these tests are complete, Trailblazer will shipped to Florida for integration with a Falcon 9 rocket, where it will launch as a rideshare alongside Intuitive Machines’ second Moon lander early next year.

Trailblazer will provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon. It will also help us better understand several other key scientific aspects of Luna. Mission intern Filo Merid had created a nice infographic summarizing Trailblazer’s scientific goals.

Image: Filo MeridMore Moon* China takes another step towards realizing a crewed Moon landing by creating a test stand which can simulate the kind of high-altitude and vacuum conditions that the “Lanyue” lunar lander will go through during its lunar descent and touchdown. The stand will allow 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 from CAST. * In April, the US White House asked NASA to develop a strategy by the end of 2026 for creating an independent time standard for the Moon, a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) that ties back in to Earth’s UTC. Now NASA says it is coordinating with US government stakeholders, partners, and international standards organizations to establish the same. The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how we calculate time on Earth for UTC. Aside: Elizabeth Gibney’s article from last year explains why an independent lunar time is desirable, how ESA and NASA have already been working towards the same, and how it would enable swarms of spacecraft to better and safely operate at Luna. * What Artemis astronauts will experience at the Moon’s south pole

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The latest effort to save VIPERIllustration of the VIPER rover exploring the Moon’s south pole. Image: NASAMembers of the US Congress are stepping up efforts in the ongoing scramble to save the VIPER rover mission, which was envisioned to uniquely study lunar water deposits. Specifically, representatives in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology wrote an open letter to the NASA chief on September 6 questioning the agency’s intent to cancel the mission by remarking on its strategic and scientific implications. The letter then elicits NASA to provide alternate paths that could be pursued to revive the mission.

Hopefully, this effort goes well but to truly save VIPER as envisioned, ultimately the US Congress needs to provide the necessary additional funding to NASA, which is not the case right now. Jack Kiraly reported recently that the US Senate’s NASA funding proposal for FY2025 does not include an explicit mention of VIPER or any funding increase necessary to save the project. Note that this situation is worse than the earlier one, wherein the draft NASA budget from the US House of Representatives—the lower house in the US Congress—had at least proposed up to $75 million extra in funding for lunar science. As Michael Greshko noted then, it could’ve potentially allowed NASA to allocate needed funding to VIPER—albeit at the cost of some other mission or program since the overall budget remains flat. Now with the Senate proposal, even that doesn’t seem to be an option.

What can us enthusiastic observers do in the meantime while this scramble plays out? You can increase support for VIPER’s revival by signing a letter addressed to members of the US Congress—even if you’re not a US citizen like myself.

Aussie advances toward Luna continueAustralia’s latest lunar technology building effort comes from the energy company entX, who is building a radioisotope heater unit (RHU) that utilizes nuclear power to enable landers and rovers to survive frigid lunar nights for “several months to up to five years.” Following funding from the Australian Space Agency’s Moon to Mars initiative for a feasibility study and an early prototype, entX is now building the RHU with the notable support of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO). The ultimate intent is to fly the RHU on a US lunar surface mission, wherein the key challenge will be to navigate the US’ Nuclear Flight Safety and Launch Approval process.

An illustration showing Fleet Space’s SPIDER seismometer deployed on the Moon’s surface by the Firefly Blue Ghost lander. Image: FireflyentX’s RHU project represent the latest advance in Australia’s ongoing strategy to enter the US space industry supply chain with NASA as the key partner. Last year, also as part of Moon to Mars Demonstrator Grants, the Australian Space Agency funded three lunar technology projects:

1. $3.4 million to Advanced Navigation for providing US-based Intuitive Machines with a LiDAV navigation sensor for the company’s second or third CLPS mission. The Micro Nova hopper from Intuitive Machines could also use said LiDAV sensor for autonomous navigation.
2. $3 million for a ground station for the NASA Artemis Orion capsule’s high bandwidth optical laser communications terminal in support of the Artemis II crewed circumlunar flight. Relatedly, the US and Australian governments co-announced in May 2023 that Australia will establish a new ground station to support crewed Artemis missions. Conversely, Intuitive Machines utilizes commercial ground station services from CSIRO’s high-bandwidth Parkes dish in Australia for its robotic lunar missions.
3. $2.4 million to Fleet Space for building a miniature seismic station called SPIDER on the lunar surface that will work for up to 14 Earth days. Firefly announced last November that its second Moon lander, aiming to touchdown on the lunar farside in 2026 as part of NASA’s CLPS program, will carry and deploy the SPIDER payload. The seismometer 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.

Also see: Another seismometer enters the Moon chat

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More mission updatesIllustration of the Luna 26 orbiter. Image: Lavochkin Association, JSC* Following the Russian Luna 25 lander’s crash on the Moon last year, the Director General of Roscosmos Yury Borisov had said that the agency planned to launch the Luna 26 polar orbiter a year earlier than originally planned, that is, in 2026 instead of 2027. Now, TASS reports Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister also stating the same intent. However, planetary exploration missions by Roscosmos continue to face delays since substantial funding has been diverted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to counter its diplomatic effects. Either way, when Luna 26 does launch like its predecessor Luna 25 eventually managed to, the orbiter will contribute useful data towards planning of the China-led long-term scientific station at the Moon’s south pole called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). That’s so because the orbiter’s primary goal is to map the distribution of water ice and minerals on the Moon from altitudes as low as 50 to 80 kilometers. Relatedly, Russia signed a law on June 12 ratifying its involvement in the China-led Moonbase. * ESA is hiring research fellows to study the lunar radiation environment via the agency’s scientific involvement in the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat. Alternately, the agency is also funding proposals from research fellows that advance lunar surface prospecting and resource utilization technologies via landed missions, such as the recently announced European PROSPECT payload. * Speaking of the Gateway, NASA engineers are progressing well on the mini water dispenser that the station’s astronauts will use to rehydrate their food.

More MoonEarth and our Moon as seen from beyond the lunar farside on October 28, 2014 by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft. Image: CAST* Andrew Jones reports that on September 5, Senegal became the 13th country to join the China-led ILRS Moonbase project. Jones also notes how a total of 10 subnational institutes from the UAE, Switzerland, Pakistan, Indonesia, Africa, Panama, and Serbia also formally joined the ILRS project, bringing the number of non-country signees to around 25. * The Global Exploration Roadmap document from the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) has been updated for 2024, after six years. The document focuses on upcoming robotic orbital and surface missions from many countries around the globe which could act as necessary capability demonstrations before crewed exploration can be sustained the future. The document goes on to say that these missions “form a de-facto international polar exploration campaign” but that’s farther away from where global lunar exploration stands right now. While Section 8 of the US-led Artemis Accords does promote member nations—and not private entities—to share scientific data with the international scientific community, we’ll have to wait and see if it extends beyond active partnerships like NASA-KARI and within ISRO-NASA, wherein data from the South Korean and Indian orbiters is actively used to plan Artemis missions.

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Intuitive Machines to launch a fourth Moon mission for NASAIllustration of the Nova-C lander on the Moon’s south pole. Image: Intuitive MachinesNASA has awarded Intuitive Machines a $116.9 million contract to deliver six science & technology payloads to the Moon’s south pole in 2027. The mission part of NASA’s CLPS program is the fourth and largest such task order contract the company has bagged.

Two of the mission’s experiments stand out (to me) in particular. First, similar to the CubeSat-hosted BioSentinel biological experiment launched into deep space by NASA on Artemis I, the LEIA experiment on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander will measure the impact of deep space radiation on yeast. The researchers chose yeast because their cells have many similar DNA damage and repair mechanisms as human cells. Terrestrial facilities can’t fully simulate the unique radiation environment of deep space so this study will lend us more insights on its effects on biological life as NASA seeks to establish long-term human presence on the Moon.

The PROSPECT lunar drill (left) and ProSPA (right), an automated miniaturized laboratory by ESA to detect and study volatile resources such as water ice on the Moon. Image: Leonardo / Open UniversitySecond, the Nova-C lander will host and operate the ESA-provided PROSPECT payload suite, which includes a one-meter drill, a powerful oven, two spectrometers, and more aspects of a mini robotic lab. The goal is to excavate frigid subsurface regolith to detect and study water ice and other such volatile resources it may contain. Following the precursor NASA experiment on the second CLPS mission by Intuitive Machines with more instruments, PROSPECT will provide scientists with an enhanced understanding of lunar volatiles. Moreover, PROSPECT also aims to be one of the first to demonstrate extracting oxygen from lunar soil, a capability that will help sustain long-term activities on the Moon. ESA has an excellent explainer page for details on every aspect of PROSPECT.

Wait, where’s the Aussie rover? It was expected that Australia’s first lunar rover, called Roo-ver, will be on the same mission as PROSPECT, wherein the rover would fetch lunar soil for compositional studies too. But NASA made no mention of the rover’s inclusion in the aforementioned CLPS news release. Roo-ver is specifically intended to explore the Moon’s south pole, and given that no other upcoming planned CLPS contract announcements remain with a landing site in that region, the omission is noteworthy—and hopefully not a sign of potential cancellation or further delays.

Queue another CLPS landerThe fully assembled ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander. Image: FireflyAfter completing the assembly of its ‘Blue Ghost’ lander, Firefly has sent it to NASA JPL for launch loads and space environmental testing ahead of a Q4 launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. For Firefly’s first CLPS Moon mission, the Blue Ghost lander aims to descend in the lava plains of Mare Crisium at 18.56°N, 61.81°E. It carries 10 NASA sci-tech payloads, which will primarily study the lunar environment. One of the lander’s legs will host PlanetVac, a low-cost soil sampling technology partially funded by The Planetary Society to enable future sample return missions from the Moon and Mars. The mission will also be NASA’s first attempt to get a GPS lock from the Moon.

And for the mission’s lander testing aspect, Firefly previously conducted nearly 100 drop tests on lunar soil simulants and sand to qualify the legs of the lander. William Coogan, Firefly’s chief lunar lander engineer told me earlier this year that the team “even tested leg drops on concrete because it’s harder than anything we’ll land on.” Firefly has also built a one-acre moonscape to test via a heavy-lift drone the lander’s hazard avoidance and terrain-relative navigation capabilities to ensure a safe landing during the final descent.

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Those pesky valvesAstrobotic’s first Moon lander Peregrine pre-launch. Image: John ThorntonContinuing their excellent mission transparency, Astrobotic has published findings from the team of experts who investigated why the company’s first lunar lander Peregrine failed shortly after its launch in January. Essentially, a pressure control valve which supplied helium to the oxidizer tank failed mechanically due to launch vibrations. The valve being unable to close led to helium flowing uncontrollably into the lander’s oxidizer tank, rapidly over-pressurizing it and leading to a rupture. Astrobotic acknowledged that the particular valve was launched as is despite it being known to be a potential mission risk, explaining that it had passed acceptance tests prior to its assembly into the lander. To avoid this failure on their next Moon mission with the Griffin lander, which though now won’t carry NASA’s VIPER rover, Astrobotic will use redesigned valves along with pressure regulators.

On a related note concerning Peregrine’s propulsion system, a recent report on CLPS published by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed that Astrobotic hadn’t adequately flight-qualified the lander’s main engine prior to launch, and how the issue could cascade to Griffin:

Both Astrobotic’s Peregrine and Griffin landers use the same engine and tank subcontractors with a scaled up TALOS axial engine for Griffin. Due to engine delivery delays and testing performance issues, the Peregrine TALOS axial engines were never subjected to qualification levels or fired for full duration prior to its flight.

Presumably, Astrobotic will avoid this issue with Griffin too. Here’s hoping that Griffin’s landing late next year is successful, which would bring online a commercial lander with substantial payload capacity and precision landing ability.

Cost plus plusCapability comparison of the Mobile Launcher 1 and the Mobile Launcher 2 for hauling their respective SLS rockets. Image: NASA OIGAnother scathing report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) about the Mobile Launcher 2, which will haul the heavier Block 1B SLS rocket variant for Artemis launches starting Artemis IV, reveals that NASA will end up paying its prime contractor Bechtel at least $1.8 billion, which is $1.4 billion more than the originally contracted amount in 2019. Even then, the delivery of Mobile Launcher 2 is expected to miss the new already-delayed deadline of 2027. The OIG doesn’t just blame Bechtel for poor performance but as Marcia Smith highlights, the report calls out NASA for consistently poor management too.

File this situation under the increasingly stressful episodes of Artemis cannot catch a break and Artemis IV faces yet another BLOCK-er. From the outside, it seems ridiculous that a crucial mission like VIPER can get cancelled for a hundred million dollar gap—despite it being central to Artemis itself—while other projects related to the SLS rocket can just keep ballooning by a billion dollars, and then some more. Yes, I know it’s not how budget appropriations work, and that VIPER can’t just get money from other projects, but it doesn’t change the fact that the scramble to save VIPER is questionable programmatically too.

More Moon* The entire crew of the Artemis II lunar flyby mission underwent lunar geology training for almost two weeks in the Moon-like frozen and volcanic landscapes of Iceland. Last year, two Artemis II astronauts spent almost a week exploring the Kamestastin meteorite impact crater in Canada. Leading both these expeditions for CSA and NASA is Dr. Gordon Osinski, who was recently selected as part of the 12-personGeology Team for NASA’s Artemis III crewed landing mission mid-decade. Similar to ESA’s Pangaea campaign, where NASA also sends its Artemis astronauts for moonwalk training, the aim is to better equip all Artemis crew to refine spacewalking techniques and identify interesting rocks and potential water ice samples for inspection. * ISRO continues to work alongside NASA and KARI to avoid potential collisions between the active (near-)polar lunar orbiters from the three space agencies. From ISRO’s July monthly summary report:

Extensive coordination was carried out to resolve the 12th July, 2024 close approaches between Chandrayaan 2 Orbiter (CH2O) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA, including an online meet on 9th July 2024. Based on SSOM’s request, NASA team made special arrangements to quickly provide the orbital ephemeris after LRO momentum unload manoeuvre on 10th July, 2024 which helped to rule out any CAM requirement for CH2O. Necessary screening was done through BEARCAT (Beyond Earth Collision Avoidance Tool) for OM-85 scheduled on 23rd July, 2024 for CH2O, it resolved the potential close conjunction risks with Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) on 25th July, 2024.

• The University of Arizona is hiring a postdoctoral researcher to dive deeper into how the Moon’s interior formed and evolved with the use of high pressure-temperature experiments.

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A nimble new launch(er)The SSLV rocket and EOS-08 satellite. Illustration and images: ISROOn August 16, ISRO launched its smallest and newest rocket SSLV, which successfully placed the agency’s 175-kilogram EOS-08 Earth observation satellite into its intended 475-kilometer circular orbit. The satellite carries a number of novel technological components as well as an innovative remote sensing method to study soil, surfaces, and water bodies based on reflected GPS & GNSS navigation signals. The SSLV also carried Chennai-based startup Space Rickshaw’s 540-gram Deployer X, the world’s lightest satellite deployer which is now proven to work in space since it successfully deployed the startup-designed demonstration nano-satellite.

Now that the SSLV has demonstrated two consecutive successful orbital launches, ISRO now considers the rocket to be operational. With a purported sticker price of around $4 million and a fast, modular 4-day assembly, India intends to start commercially flying the SSLV for payloads up to 500 kilograms, putting it squarely against Rocket Lab’s Electron and the Firefly Alpha in terms of mass class.

However, said US launchers have progressed faster between the SSLV’s previous flight in February 2023 and now. Electron has flown many times, including with repeat customers, and Firefly has had two successful launches while also bagging multi-launch agreements for tens of flights with L3Harris and Lockheed Martin respectively. Of course, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Transporter flights are eating into lunches of other rockets anyway—despite its price hike last year—but the Falcon 9’s exceptionally high demand means the 2-year average wait time to fly cheap will certainly not work for enough customers, leaving some room for other launchers.

The nozzle-end segment of the SSLV rocket’s first stage being transported. Image: ISROIn any case, the launch vehicles that should worry the most about SSLV’s existence are from India’s own aspiring private launch companies such as Skyroot and Agnikul, who might find themselves strapped for customers against ISRO itself. And, regardless of the SSLV’s global commercial competitiveness, ISRO will keep improving the rocket for the country’s own civil and strategic needs—just as the other ISRO launch vehicles exist to ensure independent access to space for India. This will end up creating potential commercial benefits too anyway.

The SSLV is set to be productionized via an impending industry handover, with a notional target of as many as ten yearly launches by 2026. Realistically though, this goal might be a couple of years out but will be good to achieve either way. In parallel, ISRO has begun making a dedicated 8 square-kilometer spaceport at Kulasekarapattinam in Tamil Nadu. While Sriharikota will remain India’s primary spaceport, the new port will be dedicated for launching SSLV rockets and small-lift private launchers starting 2026. The new spaceport will enhance the performance of the SSLV for sun-synchronous polar orbits because then it won’t need to follow a less fuel efficient curved path in order to avoid flying over Sri Lanka.

Gaganyaan updatesCrew of the Ax-4 Mission set to fly to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Images: Axiom Space ISRO announced on August 2 that it has selected Group Captains Shubhanshu Shukla and Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair as two of the four Gaganyaan Indian astronaut candidates to undergo advanced training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. After the training, Shubhanshu Shukla will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) early 2025 via the NASA-enabled Ax-4* Axiom Space private mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as the Mission Pilot, with Prasanth Nair being his backup. NASA’s international ISS partners will need to approve for the Ax-4 crew to fly. * The ISS mission will provide ISRO with experience to feed into India’s ambition to indigenously send humans to Earth orbit. The next major milestone towards that end is Gaganyaan G1, the first of three uncrewed test flights of the Gaganyaan spacecraft before ISRO deems it safe enough to launch astronauts. We learn from responses to queries in the Lok Sabha—the Indian equivalent to the US House of Representatives—and from updates in ISRO’s July monthly summary that the agency has realized several critical ground facilities for Gaganyaan, including independent spacecraft training and mockup simulators for preparing astronauts pre-flight and apparently facilities to test the Gaganyaan crew module’s environmental oxygen control systems too. Ground stations needed during Gaganyaan missions are nearing completion as well. For Gaganyaan G1, ISRO has readied the human-rated LVM3 rocket’s core liquid stage and twin solid boosters for integration, and is nearing full assembly of the mission’s crew and service modules as well.

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Dive into the latest on Chandrayaan Moon missions*Top left: The Chandrayaan 3 rover rolling out of the lander’s ramp during pre-launch testing; Bottom left: The co-added spectrum from the 23 lunar surface observations made by the rover’s APXS instrument; Right: An artist’s concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Images: ISRO / Santosh Vadawale, et al. / NASA Goddard Dive deeper: On the importance of the Chandrayaan 3 rover and its contribution to learning about our Moon’s origin * Blog post: On (not) celebrating Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing, or that of Apollo * Video: India’s increasingly complex upcoming Chandrayaan Moon missions (Article on which it’s based: https://jatan.space/moon-monday-issue-183/)

More Chandrayaan updates* ISRO has finally made available an initial set of peer-reviewed Chandrayaan 3 lander and rover payload data online, which is 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. * ISRO’s not-yet-commissioned Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return mission now has a more refined architecture, with the current aim being to bring 3 to 5 kilograms of samples, which has increased the mass of the five-module spacecraft stack by about 30% to nearly 10,000 kilograms. That’s roughly twice the maxed out GTO payload capacity of India’s most powerful rocket, the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3). Since LVM3 has less than half the capacity of China’s Long March 5 rocket which enabled CNSA to undertake the Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 sample return missions, ISRO’s approach with Chandrayaan 4 instead involves two rocket launches from Earth. ISRO will soon submit a funding proposal to the Indian government for commissioning Chandrayaan 4. * ISRO continues to work alongside NASA and KARI to avoid potential collisions between the active (near-)polar lunar orbiters from the three space agencies. From ISRO’s July monthly summary report:

Extensive coordination was carried out to resolve the 12th July, 2024 close approaches between Chandrayaan 2 Orbiter (CH2O) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA, including an online meet on 9th July 2024. Based on SSOM’s request, NASA team made special arrangements to quickly provide the orbital ephemeris after LRO momentum unload manoeuvre on 10th July, 2024 which helped to rule out any CAM requirement for CH2O. Necessary screening was done through BEARCAT (Beyond Earth Collision Avoidance Tool) for OM-85 scheduled on 23rd July, 2024 for CH2O, it resolved the potential close conjunction risks with Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) on 25th July, 2024.

More mission updatesThe NISAR satellite in a clean room at ISRO-URSC in Bangalore. Image: VDOS-URSC* The launch of the $1.5+ billion, high-profile NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Earth observation satellite has been delayed to H1 2025 because the L-band SAR antenna from NASA JPL needs additional thermal coating to protect it against higher than expected temperatures. Post-launch, NISAR will observe nearly our entire planet every 12 days to reveal ongoing changes in Earth’s crust, polar ice, climatic processes, biomass, agricultural regions, and more. The satellite will also be used for disaster management, whereby its data will be available within a few hours after observations. NASA has a good overview of how NISAR’s advanced radar system will specifically help scientists better monitor deforestation and wetland flooding. * ISRO Chief S. Somanath has said that ISRO is re-evaluating the Shukrayaan Venus orbiter mission, which essentially puts it on the back-burner. Amid a tight budget, ISRO has been prioritizing Gaganyaan and Chandrayaan missions to the point where the Shukrayaan project has been unable to secure a launch vehicle for even formalizing the final mission proposal, another sign that ISRO’s planetary science program does not have an overarching theme like NASA, ESA, and CNSA do. From an infrastructure standpoint, a way out of this can be if ISRO successfully increases the production rate and payload capacity of its most powerful rocket LVM3 within the next several years. A steady flow of LVM3s could finally allow the agency to equitably serve not just its human spaceflight and commercial launch ambitions but its planetary missions too, which have otherwise been deprioritized even with Chandrayaan 3.

Private space updates Bangalore-based startup GalaxEye raised $6.5 million towards developing and launching their first Earth observation & reconnaissance satellite, which will tout multi-sensor capabilities: specifically simultaneously optical and radar imaging, which the company has been testing with drone flights this year. * Bangalore-based EtherealX has raised $5 million in seed funding with rather bold claims about building a fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle that can “comfortably capture 30-40%” of the commercial launch market.” Needless to say, take the claim with ample grains of salt. * Sponsored job listings:* PierSight is hiring a Senior FPGA Engineer, an Embedded Hardware Engineer, and a RF High Power Amplifier Designer to join the team in building a constellation of SAR and AIS satellites to provide persistent monitoring of all human and industrial activities at sea.

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Grab some tea, coffee, or beverage of your choice because this week’s Moon Monday is a sci-tech deep dive! 🌝

Chandrayaan 3 contributes to learning our Moon’s origin and evolution*Top left: The Chandrayaan 3 rover rolling out of the lander’s ramp during pre-launch testing; Bottom left: The co-added spectrum from all 23 lunar surface observations measured by the rover’s APXS instrument; Right: An artist’s concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Images: ISRO / Santosh Vadawale, et al. / NASA GoddardThe first ever ground-based measurements of high-latitude lunar soil and rocks made by the Chandrayaan 3 rover’s Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument have reinforced the scientific hypothesis that our Moon formed fully molten about 4.5 billion years ago. This key mission finding published in Nature*by a group of ISRO-affiliated scientists is based on the detected elements and their abundances, from which mineral composition of the Moon’s crust can be inferred, and it’s largely similar to the crustal measurements made in the Moon’s equatorial and mid-latitude regions by past landers.

Interestingly, the Chandrayaan 3 rover Pragyan (‘wisdom’ in English) also detected slightly higher quantities of heavier minerals than elsewhere on the Moon, which scientists think must’ve been excavated to the surface from deep within the crust and/or the mantle by a gigantic past impact (geologically) shortly after our Moon’s formation, thereby lending credence to our current understanding of how Luna evolved as well.

*Top left: A simplified illustration of how the Moon’s crust formed with lighter minerals floating and solidifying up top as the global magma ocean cooled; Top right: An illustration showing an asteroid impact excavating deeper crustal and mantle material onto the surface, which later on gets mixed with the uppermost crust by subsequent smaller impacts; Bottom:* Measured elemental and inferred mineral compositions of the lunar surface at the Chandrayaan 3 landing site. The lighter mineral Plagioclase dominates the crust but the heavier Pyroxene and Olivine are present too. Images: LPI / PRLThe varied importance of these findingsThe ISRO-affiliated PRL institute, which led the development of the Pragyan rover’s APXS instrument, has many more details on their website. And so instead I’d like to highlight the importance of this work beyond what is already conveyed and covered by ISRO briefings and the media.

1. While Pragyan’s findings may have been similar to past missions, the fact that the elemental measurements come from a unique region on the Moon is important. Had the rover’s APXS measured a sufficiently different ground truth, it would’ve substantially changed our understanding of the nature and extent of the magma ocean thought to envelop baby Luna. For example, factions of scientists have continued to counter-hypothesize that our Moon was either only partially molten (PDF) after its formation or that the lunar crust didn’t solidify homogeneously enough (PDF) as otherwise suggested by dominant global magma ocean models. The measured compositional ground truth from Chandrayaan 3 is thus uniquely important in casting a metaphorical wide net across the Moon.
2. Chandrayaan 3’s ground truth measurements will also serve as a unique calibration point for orbital measurements of high-latitude and sub-polar regions on the Moon, and in some cases fill-in for polar sites too. Nearly all previous orbital observations of these regions interpreted data based on extrapolations from past missions that landed far from these regions.
3. Pragyan was India’s first planetary rover. As such, its traverse path was optimized heavily for engineering safety than scientific return, more so than your typical tradeoff in a planetary science mission. Furthermore, due to the team facing more roving difficulties than expected amid the high-latitude lunar environment and uneven local topography, Pragyan roved about 100 meters from the lander, which is shorter than the originally expected drive of 300–400 meters. There’s no doubt that more elemental measurements from distinct areas in the landing region would’ve increased Chandrayaan 3’s scientific oomph. But the apt way to view Pragyan is to consider it the Indian analog to NASA’s first rover on Mars, Sojourner, which demonstrated foundational roving technologies based on which the agency iterated and sent increasingly ambitious Mars roving explorers all the way up to the sophisticated Perseverance. With India’s lunar landing and roving foundations set, the next set of increasingly complex Moon missions from ISRO should be very exciting from a scientific standpoint.

*Top left: The Chandrayaan 3 Pragyan rover’s APXS instrument shown in stowed and deployed states; Top right: The instrument head showing the locations of the detector and the radioactive Curium-244 source central to APXS; Bottom:* The Chandrayaan 3 landing site, and specific locations (shown as squares) where the Pragyan rover made measurements with APXS. Images: ISRO / PRL4. The Pragyan rover’s APXS instrument (webpage and PDF) had to overcome many challenges before it could fly to the Moon. It’s a miniaturized X-ray spectrometer weighing a mere 0.7 kilograms. The rover itself is a micro one, weighing only 26 kilograms compared to the beefier rovers that Russia and China have sent before. The principal investigator of APXS, Santosh Vadawale, previously described to me the key challenges in realizing the instrument, saying: “For APXS to work, it has to be within 5 centimeters of its target. It took multiple design iterations to make such a mass-constrained instrument deployable without a traditional robotic arm.” ISRO’s solution was to mount the instrument horizontally on the rover’s front looking at a calibration target, and then rotate it by 90 degrees during stops to study the material below it. Procuring the radioactive Curium-244 source for APXS was another challenge. Vadawale noted that it was “available only from Russia, even for NASA’s Mars rovers needing the same”. The APXS lead engineer M. Shanmugam had added that “its procurement started in 2010, and took about 7 years.”

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More Chandrayaan updatesThe Chandrayaan 3 lander plus orbiter stack mounted in an acoustic chamber for pre-launch testing. Image: ISRO Research results from other Chandrayaan 3 instruments should follow soon. In the meanwhile, a year after the mission, ISRO has finally made available an initial set of peer-reviewed Chandrayaan 3 lander and rover payload data online, which is 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. * Blog post:* On (not) celebrating Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing, or that of Apollo * ISRO’s not-yet-commissioned Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return mission now has a more refined architecture, with the current aim being to bring 3 to 5 kilograms of samples, which has increased the mass of the five-module spacecraft stack by roughly 30% to nearly 10,000 kilograms. That’s roughly twice the maxed out GTO payload capacity of India’s most powerful rocket, the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3). Since LVM3 has less than half the capacity of China’s Long March 5 rocket which enabled CNSA to undertake the Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 sample return missions, ISRO’s approach with Chandrayaan 4 instead involves two rocket launches from Earth. ISRO will soon submit a funding proposal to the Indian government for commissioning Chandrayaan 4.

China avoids a lunar mission failureA schematic diagram of DRO-A, DRO-B, and DRO-L spacecraft testing laser-based navigation between Earth and the Moon. Image: Journal of Deep Space Exploration / SCMPThe Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has managed to have the DRO-A and DRO-B twin spacecraft enter their intended lunar distant retrograde orbits (DRO) after all, Ling Xin reports after following up on a tantalizing slide upload on social media. After the (unannounced) March 13 launch of the satellites on a Long March 2C rocket, an upper stage failure left them in Earth orbit instead of Moonward. But it seems that, as was first reported by Andrew Jones, CAS commanded a series of Earth perigee burns to raise their orbits, and then put them in lunar DRO anyway.

While this remedy consumed more fuel than nominally expected and will reduce the mission duration and/or its achievable objectives, it nevertheless means that China has managed to avoid a failure, continuing their uniquely impressive streak of successful lunar missions. DRO-A and DRO-B are a broader part of the in-progress lunar communications and navigation network of Queqiao satellites. They specifically aim to test laser-based navigation and timing between the Moon and the Earth-orbiting DRO-L satellite. China is yet to provide a formal update on the mission though, continuing to be utterly opaque.

Relatedly, in a recent paper published in the Chinese Journal of Space Science, researchers proposed that China should integrate their Queqiao lunar satellites with the existing Earthbound Tianlian ones, which notably serve—among other things—China’s Tiangong space station. As Andrew Jones had highlighted, the proposal’s driving rationale is to substantially improve surface coverage time and area for China’s upcoming ambitious crewed lunar missions leading to a full-fledged Moonbase. It will also ensure redundancy if and when China faces ground station availability issues from its Moonbase partners across the globe.

More MoonFeatures of the next-generation spacesuit to be worn by Artemis astronauts. Image: NASA* Axiom Space is partnering with Nokia to add 4G/LTE communications to their AxEMU suit, which astronauts will wear during the crewed Artemis III lunar surface mission later this decade. It will offer astronauts a redundant communication option as well as increased bandwidth for streaming astronaut Moonwalks, which should also help mission scientists on Earth better inform astronauts which rocks to select for inspection and return to Earth. This 4G/LTE demonstration with crew would follow the robotic one on Intuitive Machines’ second Moon mission flying in less than a year as part of NASA’s CLPS program. * As an aside, Axiom has been testing how well the AxEMU suits could allow astronauts to perform tasks related to handling samples on the Moon. Chosen competitively, the suits offer enhanced mobility than the current EMU suits used in Earth orbit. They also sport upgraded insulation and cooling for the harsh lunar polar environment, a back hatch to climb into and close the spacesuit by oneself, a HD helmet cam, and even a light band. * After previously raising $2.5 million in 2023, lunar startup Starpath Robotics has now raised $12 million, Tim Fernholz reports. Starpath has big plans to mine lunar water and soil, extract oxygen from it, and then sell processed liquid oxygen to companies planning to regularly operate hardware at the Moon. The latter could include, after end of decade, Blue Origin with its Blue Moon lander as well as SpaceX with its upgraded Lunar Starship. The company says it will use the new capital infusion to build terrestrial demonstrations of their envisioned mining system ahead of building hardware for Luna. * Following NASA’s selection of three crew-capable Lunar Terrain Vehicle rover proposals for Artemis, and the subsequent release of white papers on lunar mobility and lunar cargo summarizing the agency’s thinking on these key elements shaping their Moon to Mars architecture, NASA is now asking the industry to conduct studies for an integrated end-to-end solution for managing, transporting, and disposing surface cargo part of future habitats or active sites. With such a consultative process, NASA hopes to optimally refine its Moon to Mars Objectives and the strategies employed to achieve them.

This month I’ve received reader donations for my Moon Monday blog & newsletter from space enthusiasts in 4 countries: the US, Australia, India, and the UK. I love serving a genuinely international audience, and will keep doing it. If you too find value in my writings, see and join all supporters here. 🚀🌗

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Many readers have asked me this week if I plan on blogging something today for the anniversary of Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing, which India now celebrates as National Space Day. The answer is the same as what I do for Apollo anniversaries: Nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled that as more countries explore our cosmic companion (such as South Korea), people globally are now gaining diverse ways, days, and missions to celebration lunar exploration. To that end, Chandrayaan 3 is very important to me personally too because I have watched it launch from Sriharikota, covered its landing from ISRO, interviewed its Associate Project Director for Nature, and delivered a talk on the mission at ESA in Netherlands. But I’m personally just not the kind to buzz on meta events of any sort. Heck, I might even start new years with a call for realizing how insignificant we are on a cosmic scale.

On a more serious and professional note though, with my Moon Monday blog+newsletter, I celebrate and communicate civil lunar exploration efforts by any country every single week. In India’s case, I’ve been extensively covering developments and outcomes from the Chandrayaan program for years now. And I push the need for international collaboration and outreach everywhere I can. My key driving factor across it all is for us to prioritize endurance.

As veteran planetary scientists can attest, rooting for the Moon doesn’t start or stop with a single mission or program. Moon Monday will be here when a NASA Artemis crew lands on polar lunar soil or when increasingly complex Chandrayaans take off or when astronauts drive JAXA’s cool pressurized rover on Luna. But Moon Monday will also be here if Artemis, CLPS, or the crewed Chandrayaan ambitions get pulled from under the rug, just like when NASA’s VIPER rover was canceled.

Of course, one could argue that celebrating meta events and pushing for sustained lunar exploration aren’t mutually exclusive. Even if true, it’s important to remember that our guiding north star be sustained momentum stemming from fundamental reasons to explore our Moon, and not celebratory or nationalistic spikes on social media or worse yet, mixing Moon missions with mythology at schools.

Just as many inspiring staunch lunatics the likes of late Paul Spudis, I’m in this ultimate Moon mission for the long run with conviction, and I love and thank everyone who’s supporting along the way.

To our Moon,
– Jatan

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First lander to drill on the Moon’s south pole delayed for goodIllustration of the Nova-C lander on the Moon with its drill. Image: Intuitive MachinesJeff Foust reports that NASA will provide an additional $12.4 million to Intuitive Machines for its upcoming second Moon landing mission (IM-2) part of the agency’s CLPS program for work related to changing the landing site of the Nova-C spacecraft to 89°S. This means IM-2’s CLPS task order amount has now increased from the original $47 million to about $62.4 million. [The recent investigation on CLPS by NASA’s Office of Inspector General noted a prior $3 million increase over the original sum]. The landing site change has in part delayed the mission’s launch target to no earlier than December 2024.

Neither Intuitive Machines nor NASA have specified the new site’s coordinates but it’s interesting in any case because the landing site was moved from 85°S to meet the mission’s primary goal of encountering water ice. At 89°S, scientists expect better chances of water ice being present within a meter of the surface—the maximum extent of the Honeybee-Robotics-provided TRIDENT drill aboard the lander. Another payload on Nova-C, the MSolo mass spectrometer, will analyze the material excavated by the drill to identify water ice and other such volatiles, a first such study.

Last month, Intuitive Machines completed hot-firing its in-house developed VR900 methalox engine for the mission, which will improve lander performance over their first CLPS landing IM-1. Jeff Foust has previously reported that Intuitive Machines is refining several systems on Nova-C with the hope of bagging full success this time around instead of the partial one with IM-1—which NASA and Intuitive disappointingly skewed the success criteria of and continues to at various space events when talking about the mission.

Illustration showing Lunar Outpost’s rover on the Moon with deployed antennae for 4G/LTE network testing. Image: Nokia / Lunar OutpostThe IM-2 mission has more enticing exploration to offer. The Nova-C lander will deploy Lunar Outpost’s MAPP rover on the lunar surface, which sports a near-field depth camera to reconstruct the surface for future astronaut training in virtual reality. The rover itself will deploy a miniature robot called AstroAnt, which will take temperature measurements of the surface. AstroAnt will also inspect physical parts of the MAPP rover to provide a clear view on its health to mission operators.

Notably, MAPP will collect some lunar soil and transfer its ownership to NASA as part of the agency’s move to set precedence for future resource use under the US-led Artemis Accords. MAPP will also host antennae from Nokia to test a 4G/LTE network on the Moon for NASA, for which Nokia has gotten an experimental spectrum certification. The aim is to see how we might enable high-throughput, long-range, and low-latency communications necessary for building a sustainable lunar presence in the future.

Inaugural mission plan as of June 2023 for the five lunar hops to be performed by Intuitive Machines’ Micro-Nova spacecraft (shown in the inset images). The hops start from where Nova-C, the lander, is marked in the image, and end with going in and out of a permanently shadowed region. Image: Trent Martin / Intuitive MachinesNova-C will also deploy the Intuitive’s own NASA-supported, $41 million one-meter tall hopper called Micro-Nova. It aims to hop five times to take high-resolution imagery and other measurements of the surface under its flight path. One hop would be over a permanently shadowed region to detect potential water ice in there. Trent Martin from the company said at the European Lunar Symposium in June 2023 that the hopper—which sports two Canadensys high-resolution imagers—was enhanced with multiple instruments over time:

• a neutron spectrometer for detecting subsurface hydrogen, as indirect sign of water ice
• a DLR-funded radiometer for measuring surface temperatures
• and a Nokia 4G antenna similar to the one on the MAPP rover

Aside: The NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer orbiter will launch as a rideshare alongside the IM-2 lander. Trailblazer will provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon. It will also help us better understand several other key scientific aspects of Luna.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Gordon Roesler and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support independent writing and journalism.

NASA’s mission to a magnetic swirl also delayedClick to explore Reiner Gamma on a map (Image: NASA / LRO / Quickmap / Jatan Mehta)Intuitive Machines’ third CLPS mission (IM-3) intended to land on the lunar magnetic swirl of Reiner Gamma is also delayed—this one due to “NASA payload delivery dates moving to the right” according to company chief Steve Altemus. IM-3’s launch is now targeted for October or November 2025.

It’s not clear which payloads are causing delays though. It was last year that Lunar Outpost delivered the mission’s MAPP rover to the Johns Hopkins University APL for space environmental testing. The lead of the mission’s Lunar Vertex instrument suite, David Blewett, said at last year’s NASA Exploration Science Forum that all of Vertex’s spectrometers and magnetometers were delivered from their end. Two of these instruments to be aboard the MAPP rover were subsequently integrated with it. Christopher Cokinos later reported that Lunar Vertex successfully passed a NASA acceptance review in December 2023, after which the MAPP rover was delivered to Intuitive Machines in January for integration with the Nova-C lander.

Secondly, as of March this year, NASA JPL had completed building the three shoebox-sized, solar-powered CADRE rovers that Nova-C will deploy during IM-3. The rovers passed all standard pre-launch space environmental tests. Engineers had also tested autonomous driving abilities of the CADRE pack in tandem with each other over at JPL’s Mars Yard with full-scale engineering models. The flight rovers were then ready to be shipped to Intuitive Machines. It’s not clear if they have reached the company’s facilities yet or what is their lander integration status.

The other two IM-3 mission payloads—a retroreflector and a radiation monitor—are from ESA and KARI respectively so they can’t be part of the NASA payload delays being alluded to above.

Members of the NASA CADRE team pose in a JPL clean room with the Moonbound rovers. Image: NASA / JPL-CaltechIn any case, during the mission the Lunar Vertex suite will study the composition of the Reiner Gamma swirl, and map the strength and direction of magnetic fields on its surface. This will help scientists 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 evolution. As for CADRE, the rovers have multistatic ground penetrating radars to create 3D images of the subsurface structure to a depth of up to 10 meters. The rovers aim to autonomously navigate the swirl region to demonstrate collectively mapping it with better efficiency than a single rover would.

Also see: KPLO provides a new view of Reiner Gamma

More MoonProgress in preparing ground infrastructure and systems for the SLS rocket launch of the Artemis II crewed Moon mission. Image: NASA* NASA continues slow progress in preparing ground infrastructure and systems for the mid-decade SLS rocket launch of Artemis II, which will push four astronauts in an Orion capsule around the Moon and back. Following a successful test of the launch-noise-suppressing water deluge system in July and that of the upgraded environmental control system in June, teams now demonstrated a major aspect of the emergency escape system on August 11. More such tests will follow, including one with the mission crew before launch. * In a paper published in the Chinese Journal of Space Science, researchers propose that China should integrate their in-progress lunar communications relay network of Queqiao satellites with the existing Earthbound Tianlian satellites which notably serve—among other things—China’s Tiangong space station. As Andrew Jones highlighted, the proposal’s driving rationale is to substantially improve surface coverage time and area for China’s upcoming ambitious crewed lunar missions leading to a full-fledged Moonbase, which will simultaneously ensure redundancy if and when China faces ground station availability issues from its Moonbase partners across the globe. * Rockstar is a NASA small satellite proposal, which will carry a thermal infrared imager to map distributions and abundances of boulders and water ice on the Moon’s south pole with a higher resolution than the upcoming Lunar Trailblazer orbiter and the existing Chandrayaan 2 orbiter so as to aid human-scale traverse planning of future Artemis crewed missions. From an earlier abstract accepted at the 2022 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference:

At 4-m/pixel, the instrument resolution is finer than that of Diviner (200 m/p), Chandrayaan-1 Moon Mineralogy Mapper (100 m/p), Kaguya Multiband Imager (20 m/p), and Lunar Trailblazer (30 m/p).

Instrument spatial resolutions of LRO Diviner Lunar Radiometer, Chandrayaan 1 Moon Mineralogy Mapper, Kaguya (SELENE) Multiband Imager, Lunar Trailblazer, and Rockstar. Image: C. M. Ferrari-Wong, et al.

This month I’ve received reader donations for my Moon Monday blog & newsletter from space enthusiasts in 4 countries: the US, Australia, India, and the UK. I love serving a genuinely international audience, and will keep doing it. If you too find value in my writings, see and join all supporters. 🚀🌗

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Before we begin this week’s Moon Monday, I’m excited to share that I’ll be conducting a study on Indo-US lunar exploration as an Adjunct Scholar at the Takshashila Institution! As India too takes on increasingly complex Moon missions, my aim with the study is to identify specific collaborative avenues that will elevate lunar science & technology capabilities of both countries in line with their independent goals. 🇮🇳🌗🇺🇸

Well-founded collaboration can provide more than just technical outcomes. It can create enduring bridges between people across communities. If this topic is important to you, please feel free to email me for a chat.

Scramble and try to save VIPERAn illustration showing NASA’s VIPER rover onboard the Griffin lander. Image: AstroboticFollowing up on NASA’s July 17 announcement to cancel the CLPS program’s VIPER rover mission, which was supposed to uniquely explore water ice on the Moon’s south pole to help plan crewed Artemis missions, the agency is now asking US organizations to propose a mission of their own by September 2 that would fly and operate VIPER at virtually no cost to NASA.

Partner(s) would start with the existing VIPER rover and be expected to complete any remaining systems level testing, arrange for the integration and successful landing on the Moon, conduct a science/exploration campaign, and openly disseminate science data. U.S. domestically based partners would also be expected to provide other resources required to complete the mission from the hardware’s current state and to reimburse NASA for use of any NASA capabilities (including but not limited to any additional testing and anomaly resolution activities, payload preparation and processing support, or science/instrument/operations teams support) needed to successfully conduct the mission.

I hope the US space industry steps up to this challenge but despite all the tooting and touting, lunar commercial capabilities are as yet nascent. In spite of data-and-fame-related incentives, it’s hard to imagine many companies that would be able to not only put in the investment needed to fly VIPER soon enough but also execute the mission successfully while not descoping the rover’s science goals—the aspect that matters the most as astutely pointed out by CLPS co-creator Thomas Zurbuchen. In any case, it’s better for the US Congress to step up and direct NASA to revive VIPER by providing additional funding not just for the rover but also for getting to an optimal lander.

Adding to the VIPER project’s injuries, the aforementioned official NASA page requesting proposals from US organizations to fly VIPER links to a slide (page 4) which ironically highlights how only VIPER science would’ve filled key knowledge gaps about water on the Moon for the agency before long-term lunar habitats can even be conceptualized.

Image: NASA / VIPER team / Daniel AndrewsIt doesn’t require us to be scientists to understand that this illustration is overly simplistic. Never mind the fact that the existing Chandrayaan 2 orbiter—which is already aiding Artemis crewed mission planning—as well as the upcoming surface missions of CNSA’s Chang’e 7 and the ISRO-JAXA LUPEX rover are all omitted in here. In fact, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS Moon landing mission funded majorly by NASA itself to drill for lunar water ice is missing in the illustration too.

In any case, it’s not like VIPER was the ultimate mission to study lunar polar water and other volatiles. What the illustration does capture though is the unique importance of the depth and breadth of science VIPER was supposed to perform. In fact, as Alexandra Witze has previously reported, it’s possible VIPER may not have found much lunar water at all. But that was the whole point of doing the mission as envisioned: to learn ground truths.

NASA has also said it will separately explore if its international partners are interested to fly VIPER. Given the high landing complexity and reliability involved for a VIPER-like mission, the only such (geopolitically) feasible option seems to be the ISRO-JAXA LUPEX mission, which has similar as well as complementary goals to VIPER. However, since LUPEX already has its namesake rover flying on it, the realistic option would not be to fly VIPER on the ISRO-made LUPEX lander but rather carry VIPER’s instruments on the JAXA-made LUPEX rover, which boasts capabilities and a mission profile comparable to VIPER.

Among lunar missions planned in the near future, LUPEX presents the only scenario where flying VIPER’s instruments without the rover makes any scientific sense. A possible alternate local route is retrofitting VIPER’s instruments to fly on the upcoming US-industry-provided versatile Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle for NASA but the timelines don’t match—the project is in preliminary stages and a launch doesn’t seem to be on the cards until at least end of decade.

A CLPS contract for Blue out of the blueIllustration of the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander. Image: Blue OriginJeff Foust reports that NASA has awarded—unannounced—a small $6.1 million CLPS contract to Blue Origin for the company’s Blue Moon Mark 1 robotic lander to carry the agency’s payload called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) to Luna next year. Images from SCALPSS will help NASA understand exactly how lander plumes blast out lunar soil and affect the local lunar environment, and thus how best to protect astronauts, critical hardware, and habitats long-term.

If the payload name sounds familiar, you’re right. The first version of SCALPSS flew on Intuitive Machines’ first CLPS lander earlier this year. Sadly, it couldn’t image plume effects because the spacecraft had an anomalously hard landing. Another SCALPSS is set to fly on Firefly’s upcoming CLPS lander later this year so hopefully we get data from it. However, what sets Blue’s Mark 1 apart for NASA is that it’s the only US commercial lander that generates high enough trust to allow the agency to gauge lander plume effects at the scale of large crewed (Artemis) landers. This allowed the agency to award Blue the payload flight without a competition under the clause of “Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity”. Well, SpaceX’s Lunar Starship is also part of the CLPS pool of landers and boasts way more thrust than the Mark 1 but the other factor NASA considered was that Blue’s mission is set to fly next year itself.

For Blue Origin, the Mark 1 is about much more than carrying a NASA payload. With two self-funded Mark 1 flights with a large payload capacity of 3,000 kilograms each, Blue Origin wants to test and refine critical landing and associated systems before graduating them to the Mark 2 lander, which aims to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA with Artemis V by end of decade. Competitor SpaceX’s Lunar Starship is currently targeting landing astronauts for NASA with Artemis III and Artemis IV in late 2026 and 2028 respectively. Note that NASA requires both Blue Origin and SpaceX’s crewed landers to touchdown within 100 meters of their targeted spots on the Moon’s rocky south pole. This is something the robotic Mark 1 will attempt as a precursor to the crew-capable Mark 2. The ability is also precisely what JAXA’s robotic SLIM lander achieved earlier this year.

Many thanks to Astrolab, Alexandra Witze and Matt Ryall for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support independent writing and journalism. 🌙

Artemis IV faces yet another BLOCK-erCapabilities of the SLS rocket’s upcoming Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) compared to its current Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS). Image: NASANASA’s complex Artemis IV crewed lunar orbital and landing mission banks on its SLS rocket element upgrading to an enhanced second stage called the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS). Comprising the Block 1B configuration of SLS, the EUS will be capable of lifting ~10,000 kilograms more cargo to the Moon than the current SLS variant launching the first three Artemis missions. However, somehow leaving aside the substantial mission delays caused chiefly by the Mobile Launcher 2 element necessary to launch the Block 1B vehicle, another critical report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General says that the EUS itself may not be ready for a 2028 launch. More importantly, as Marcia Smith highlights from the report, there are concerns about substantial cost increases by Boeing in building the EUS, poor quality control and unsatisfactory course-corrections by the company, and even mismanagement by NASA. From the report:

We project SLS Block 1B costs will reach approximately $5.7 billion before the system is scheduled to launch in 2028. This is $700 million more than NASA’s 2023 Agency Baseline Commitment, which established a cost and schedule baseline at nearly $5 billion. EUS development accounts for more than half of this cost, which we estimate will increase from an initial cost of $962 million in 2017 to nearly $2.8 billion through 2028. Boeing’s delivery of the EUS to NASA has also been delayed from February 2021 to April 2027, and when combined with other factors, suggests the September 2028 Artemis IV launch date could be delayed as well. Factors contributing to these cost increases and schedule delays include redirection of EUS funds to the core stage during Artemis I production, changing Artemis mission assignments, maintaining an extended workforce 7 years more than planned, manufacturing issues, and supply chain challenges.

More MoonAn illustration showing the Moon Diver rover spooling down a lunar pit wall. Image: JPL / NASA In my feature story last week exploring lunar lava tubes, I completely missed mentioning the cool NASA mission concept of Moon Diver, which aims to have a rugged axle rover go down a lunar pit and chemically map its wall. This will help scientists not only figure out future, advanced exploration of lava tubes but also better understand the nature of past volcanism on the Moon and what the structure of the lunar crust is like. * US-based SEOPS is extending its satellite integration and deployment services from Earth orbit to the Moon via a rideshare partnership with Intuitive Machines. * Sponsored listing:* Open Lunar Foundation’s 2024 research fellows are virtually presenting their recent work on cooperative lunar landing pads, lunar power standards, community payloads, lunar accidents, and more this month and next. Learn more and register here for free: openlunar.org/events

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A high-Sun view of the Mare Tranquillitatis pit on the Moon, revealing its floor. The image spans an area 400 meters across, and North is up. Image: NASA / LROC / GSFC / ASURadar data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has helped scientists confirm that the lunar pit of Mare Tranquillitatis indeed does lead into a wide lava tube/cave for at least 80 meters. These results corroborate what scientists long suspected about many lunar pits leading to underground passages based on orbital imagery under different lighting conditions from JAXA’s SELENE spacecraft followed by LRO. SELENE had also bounced radars from some pits and gotten multiple echos, potentially hinting at large lava tubes with enough volume to host entire towns inside.

The lure of lava tubesAnother recent LRO finding suggested that insides of these lava tubes could maintain stable and comfortable temperatures unlike the rest of Luna. One particular pit floor area measured a pleasant 17°C with <1°C variation across the lunar day. Coupled with the fact that such lunar caves provide sheltering from micrometeorite bombardment as well as radiation, they might make for great places to base future crewed habitats in. Many underground lava tubes have convenient openings, or “skylights”, on the surface which robots and humans could enter and exit from.

Lunar lava tubes are thought to have formed similar to those on Earth, that is, when volcanic lava flows cease, their surface can harden while the lava within drains to leave behind an underground tunnel. Openings to such lava tubes form if a surface area collapses due to hot flows underneath or if lava flows breach the surface. As such, lava tubes are also pristine places to study the Moon’s volcanic past and analyze rock samples untouched for well over a billion years.

Exploration plansAn illustration showing the LunarLeaper bot exploring and mapping different locations around a lunar pit that leads into a lava tube. Image: ESA / LunarLeaper teamBefore lava tubes can be directly explored by robots or humans, it would be necessary to map the outer and inner structures of their lunar pit openings in high resolution. Late last year ESA released a call for proposals for small Moon missions under €50 million to fly before end of decade to meet some of the agency’s exploration and science goals. Evan Gough had reported one proposal being that of a small lunar leaper bot that will jump around and map lunar lava tubes. ESA was previously considering a 2033 mission to explore a lunar pit leading into a lava tube but with no updates in over a year, the project seems to be on a halt. There’s also a cool NASA mission concept called Moon Diver, which aims to have a rugged axle rover go down a lunar pit and chemically map its wall, which will help scientists not only figure out future, advanced exploration of lava tubes but also better understand the nature of past volcanism on the Moon and what the structure of the lunar crust is like.

An illustration showing the Moon Diver rover spooling down a lunar pit wall. Image: JPL / NASAChina is also considering exploring lava tubes with robots and then humans. Recall that CNSA has been sending ground penetrating radars on many of its Chang’e Moon missions. For example, the Yutu 2 rover from Chang’e 4 has a ground penetrating radar with a probing depth of up to 30 meters. Over the last five years, it has been uncovering the recent history of its landed region in the 180-kilometer-diameter Von Kármán crater on the Moon’s farside. Among other things, the radar has detected evidence of a buried crater underground and also a thick, ancient regolith layer sandwiched between two now-solidified lava flows. Sending a rover like Yutu 2 to map the structure of a lunar pit and its underground lava tube section from outside while on the surface will help plan direct robotic and crewed exploration of these cave conduits in the future.

On the crewed exploration end, ESA’s Pangaea campaign to train future lunar astronauts in geology—a highly valuable skill when exploring the Moon and collecting samples—includes astronauts visiting a 8-kilometer long lava tube called La Corona at the Spanish Canary Islands northwest of Africa. While La Corona is one of Earth’s largest lava tubes, it pales in comparison to those on the Moon where lower gravity and lack of intense erosion mechanisms can make for much longer and wider tunnels, potentially up by three orders of magnitude!

ESA’s Pangaea crew exploring minerals in the La Corona lava tube in the Spanish Canary Islands. Image: ESA / A. RomeoOh, well..Now if lunar lava tubes are nice shelters for future astronauts, and if permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s poles are water-rich to serve future habitats, why not consider exploring shadowed near-polar lunar pits as the ideal “best of both worlds” lunar homes? That’s the question scientists explored in a 2022 study by modeling thermal environments of near-polar lunar pits.

They found that even floors of high-latitude lunar pits don’t get cold enough to trap and accumulate water ice and other volatile resources the way permanently shadowed regions on the lunar poles do. This means future habitats will still need to fetch such resources from polar regions. However, the low, stable temperatures of polar or near-polar lunar pits should slow down escape of volatiles, thus making them good homes to launch resource fetching campaigns from—if we find them.

Artemis cannot catch a breakThe VIPER lunar rover in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center while it was being assembled. Image: NASA / Josh ValcarcelThe VIPER rover’s woes continue in the aftermath of NASA’s July 17 announcement to cancel the mission, which was supposed to uniquely explore water ice on the Moon’s south pole. Jack Kiraly reports that the US Senate’s NASA funding proposal for FY2025 does not include an explicit mention of VIPER or any funding increase necessary to sustain the project. This is even worse than last month’s situation, wherein the draft NASA budget from the US House of Representatives—the lower house in the US Congress—had proposed up to $75 million extra in funding for lunar science. As Michael Greshko had noted then, this could’ve potentially allowed NASA to allocate needed funding to VIPER albeit at the cost of some other mission or program since the overall budget remains flat. Now even that doesn’t seem like an option.

In the meanwhile, former NASA associate administrator for science and CLPS’ co-brainchild Thomas Zurbuchen has weighed in on the problem. He says in an interview with Nadia Drake that NASA losing VIPER “pulls the scientific teeth from the Artemis program in an irreversible way.”

So what worries me is that with this cancellation, science in Artemis is reduced to mostly opportunistic investigations. It’s no longer a program that actually drives toward deeper scientific understanding so that when everything is said and done, you have a much better understanding of the Moon itself, or the timing of the outer planets’ migration, which has a lot to do with how we ended up in a stable solar system. The history book for all of that is written on the Moon. It's not on Earth. Right? And it's not on Mars.

Many thanks to Off Planet Research and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support independent writing and journalism.

Illustration showing the first two modules of the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat. Image: NASAAnother element of Artemis facing immediate problems is the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat. A new report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the first two (mated) Gateway modules will launch as late as December 2027 instead of September 2025, confirming Philip Sloss’ May 2023 reporting.

The GAO revealed a major issue that a core network chip defect could result in flight hardware within the Gateway to lose communications. Separately, the GAO finds that the Gateway’s HALO habitat module for hosting crew and the PPE propulsion module it will be attached to pre-launch combined weigh 1312 kilograms more than expected for their SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch. Marcia Smith reports that NASA will look into resolving this issue with a program review next month. Recall that as Jeff Foust previously reported, NASA’s decision to launch the two Gateway modules together resulted in habitat module contractor and module-integrator Northrop Grumman taking a $100 million loss out of a $935 million fixed-price contract. The baseline cost estimate for the Gateway itself is $5.3 billion.

As an update on Gateway’s progress otherwise, its HALO habitat module went through a series of structural stress tests in April. Its components and subsystems will be outfitted later this year. The PPE module’s structure is also ready for installation of its propulsion system components, starting with the tanks. Electric field testing for Gateway’s communications antennas are also progressing.

Also see: A gist of Gateway science

More MoonThe flipped SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by the LEV-2 (SORA-Q) bot it carried. Image: JAXA / TOMY / SONY* Despite the nearly upside down orientation of JAXA’s SLIM lander on the Moon, NASA and JAXA worked together to have LRO successfully laser-ping NASA’s small retroreflector onboard SLIM on May 2 from a ~70-kilometer orbital altitude. Combined with similar ongoing pings to NASA’s retroreflector on ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 lander, these unique demonstrations are a stepping stone towards a future where Mooncraft with purpose-built lasers can locate such targets and land near them as they arrive. For example, this technique will be relevant for repeated cargo deliveries near future habitats. * The latest update to the excellent LROC Quickmap web app adds a wealth of spacecraft imagery and datasets specifically related to the Moon’s poles while also touting shadow and traverse modes that help visualize in 3D the challenging lighting conditions there for exploration. I’ve ~~wasted~~ spent more time exploring our Moon on LROC Quickmap than I’d care to admit to my past employer, and this update isn’t helping all the more because I’m my current employer. 🌝 * Studying precise compositions of ten Apollo lunar samples has revealed that the primary mechanism replenishing the Moon’s thin atmosphere over long periods of time seems to be elements released by micrometeorite bombardment rather than from the smashing solar wind. * There’s another video based on my Moon Monday blog+newsletter: India’s increasingly complex upcoming Chandrayaan Moon missions

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Going deeper into VIPERAn illustration showing NASA’s VIPER rover egressing from Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. Image: AstroboticMuch has been said about NASA’s July 17 announcement to cancel the VIPER rover supposed to fly to the Moon’s south pole on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander mid-decade as part of the agency’s CLPS program to uniquely explore water ice there. Instead of duplicating arguments about continually rising cost and launch delays, I thought it might be informative to add questions and thoughts on more things related to or affected by VIPER.

What happened to NASA-tasked tests for VIPER’s lander?Owing to VIPER’s vitality to helping NASA plan future crewed Artemis missions to the Moon’s poles, the agency took a more conservative approach for VIPER’s delivery compared to any other mission in the CLPS program. In 2022, NASA awarded Astrobotic an additional $67.8 million atop the original $199.5 million contract to perform three propulsion system tests of Griffin to reduce risks of a landing failure. This would delay VIPER’s launch by a year to November 2024 but one NASA was willing to accept in part because the rover itself would need time to be fully built after facing supply chain delays from the pandemic.

Neither NASA nor Astrobotic have shared results of these tests with the public, which is all the more concerning since Astrobotic’s first lunar lander Peregrine failed shortly after its launch in January due to a propulsion system issue. In fact, a recent report on CLPS published by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) reveals that Astrobotic hadn’t adequately flight-qualified Peregrine’s main engine prior to launch, and how the issue could cascade to Griffin:

Both Astrobotic’s Peregrine and Griffin landers use the same engine and tank subcontractors with a scaled up TALOS axial engine for Griffin. Due to engine delivery delays and testing performance issues, the Peregrine TALOS axial engines were never subjected to qualification levels or fired for full duration prior to its flight.

To better gauge all risks associated with Griffin being able to safely deliver VIPER to the Moon, the OIG CLPS report states that NASA had modified VIPER’s delivery contract to get “augmented insight” into the mission’s development:

Augmented insight allowed NASA to assign a full-time resident CLIM [CLPS Integration Manager] at the vendor’s [Astrobotic] facility to improve communication between NASA and the vendor. In addition, the vendor is now required to provide monthly status reports on the development of its Griffin lander and support three new Independent Assessment Team reviews. These reviews will be held approximately 2 years, 1 year, and 1 month prior to NASA handing over VIPER to Astrobotic for launch. According to CLPS management, this augmented insight gives NASA a greater understanding of the risk environment and the VIPER mission’s risk exposure.

Furthermore, consider that Peregrine’s mission ended well before its lunar descent could even begin. As such, Astrobotic unfortunately couldn’t get any data from this critical phase to know how well the lander’s guidance, navigation, and control systems would’ve performed against engineered expectations. Such information would’ve certainly enhanced Griffin’s ability to nail VIPER’s landing amid the treacherously rocky terrain at the lunar south pole.

And so, what if the combined results of Griffin’s propulsion tests, NASA’s augmented insight into the mission, and Peregrine reviews did not provide enough confidence to NASA about Griffin ability to deliver VIPER safe and sound? If so, NASA’s decision may not be about saving additional costs to be spent on VIPER or approaching the US Congress for extra funds as much as it could be about expecting that the mission lander might not be up to the task after all, and in which case more testing would mount costs on that end too.

Has VIPER affected other CLPS missions?Illustration of the VIPER rover exploring the Moon’s south pole. Credit: NASAAccording to the aforementioned OIG CLPS report, “one NASA SMD [Science Mission Directorate] official stated that the Agency has removed at least one future CLPS mission to help pay for and ensure the success of VIPER.” Relatedly, recall that it’s been over a year since NASA was supposed to announce which CLPS vendor is being awarded a payload suite delivery to one of the (formerly-)volcanic Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon in 2026. Given the lack of such an announcement, two more CLPS missions supposed to follow the flight to Gruithuisen—one to the lunar south pole and one to mysterious Ina—have subsequently seen little progress as well.

In the announcement and follow-on briefings about NASA’s intention to cancel VIPER, the agency stated growing mission costs risking overstepping into budgets meant for other CLPS missions. Considering that NASA’s quoted cost to continue VIPER while accommodating launch delays is at least $50 million a year, which is approximately half the actual average cost of all other CLPS delivery contracts, it’s plausible to think the agency chose to be able to fly at least one additional CLPS mission instead of prioritizing VIPER. As Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society notes:

From the perspective of NASA’s science leadership, however, finding $51 million in the existing budget presents some impossible choices. Within LDEP [the Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program—VIPER’s budgetary home], the only significant sources of funding available for VIPER would be to reduce the politically popular CLPS program, cut funding to scientific instrument development for CLPS missions, or cut funds for science instrumentation for upcoming Artemis missions. None of these were deemed acceptable tradeoffs.

Additionally, Michael Greshko notes for Scientific American how the larger NASA budget constraints are acting in the background:

In a draft NASA budget released on July 9, the House of Representatives’s Committee on Appropriations recommended giving between $458 million and $533 million to the NASA program that houses VIPER—up to $75 million more than the Biden administration had asked for. While this language would give NASA some flexibility to boost VIPER’s funding, it also creates a zero-sum game because Congress hasn’t signaled that it will raise NASA’s overall science budget.

This drives home the point the Orbital Index (a Moon Monday sponsor) made about the US Congress micromanaging NASA spending:

Much of the issue is also appropriations micromanagement from Congress, with the broken legislative environment in the US leading to congressionally-mandated spending on unsustainable ‘jobs’ programs like SLS.

As such, with NASA’s exploration and technology development funding—especially from the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft—not being transferrable to VIPER in any way, NASA chose to kill it in favor of more CLPS flights, hoping to convince the US Congress to fund a CLPS 2.0 for another decade. NASA sacrificing VIPER to save CLPS is rather ironic though since, as Eric Berger reported previously, NASA had briefly considered a traditional delivery for VIPER considering its importance for Artemis. But the higher costs and timelines for VIPER bypassing CLPS would’ve effectively killed the CLPS program, which NASA SMD as CLPS’ managing body wouldn’t accept.

Are VIPER’s launch delay costs really that high?It seems NASA did not provide the VIPER team an opportunity to propose cost-saving measures prior to announcing the intent to cancel the mission. As Marcia Smith reports, VIPER’s Project Scientist Anthony Colaprete pushed back against NASA’s assertion that VIPER would induce added costs after going through the standard series of environmental tests required to be cleared before it can launch to space. Colaprete noted that the VIPER rover has already passed launch vibrational and acoustic testing with no major problems, that is, with no substantial added costs to the mission. Thermal vacuum testing to simulate temperatures VIPER could face in space and on the Moon’s south pole is scheduled for end of August, wherein Colaprete doesn’t expect any surprises either because individual elements of VIPER have already passed this test prior to integration.

Did NASA prematurely award the VIPER CLPS task order?Since NASA contracted VIPER’s delivery to Astrobotic in 2020, soon after the first batch of CLPS contracts in 2019 and—crucially—before any of them could fly, the aforementioned NASA OIG report on CLPS posits the following:

Inserting a larger lander to accommodate VIPER into CLPS’s early schedule interfered with a progressive development approach. This introduced the added risk of beginning the first large lander delivery before knowledge could be gained from the success (or failure) of smaller deliveries.

NASA has realized this in retrospect. As Jeff Foust reported on The Space Review:

Scaling up CLPS to accommodate VIPER, though, may have been premature. He [Joel Kearns, the NASA SMD deputy associate administrator for exploration] said VIPER required a “large and somewhat unique lander” compared to the smaller CLPS landers, but with the expectation at the time VIPER started that industry would move faster on those smaller landers, building up experience, than what happened.

“We originally thought in the government that the first landings on the Moon would take place in 2021 and 2022 by CLPS,” he said, but in fact just happened this year. “We and the companies have not yet accrued enough experience to probably understand how to smoothly deliver such a large and sophisticated payload as VIPER to the lunar surface.”

What next?The VIPER rover in a test chamber. Image: NASANASA has said it will consider expressions of interest from the US industry as well as international partners to fly VIPER at no cost to NASA before going ahead and disassembling the rover next year. It will be some time before the viability of alternative solutions proposed via this route becomes clear. In any case, the US Congress will decide if NASA will need to reconsider flying VIPER somehow or if the agency can go ahead with the formal cancellation it desires. You can help push for VIPER’s revival by signing a letter addressed to members of the US Congress explaining the mission’s importance— even if you’re a non-US citizen like myself. Either way, Astrobotic will still attempt to land Griffin on the Moon’s south pole for NASA under their existing $323 million CLPS contract, albeit with a drab simulated mass replacing VIPER.

Despite how NASA may put it, no other CLPS mission can perform the depth and breadth of science VIPER was supposed to. The advanced rover intended to explore areas in and around frigid permanently shadowed regions for over four months to help scientists determine the nature, accessibility, and abundance of the Moon’s water ice deposits. In comparison, most CLPS missions last a single lunar day (14 Earth days), are minimally mobile at best, and will carry only one of the four key VIPER instruments which otherwise were to work in tandem.

Results from VIPER were to feed into NASA’s planning of crewed Artemis missions but it would seem the first such astronauts will have to meet some of VIPER’s goals themselves—and even then they can’t meet them all. Never mind the separate fact that the crewed Artemis III mission is not realistically expected to launch until later in the decade. The only missions that actually hit the kind of broad as well as specific goals VIPER had are CNSA’s Chang’e 7 and the JAXA-ISRO LUPEX rover.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and The Orbital Index for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support independent writing and journalism.

ispace ready to roveThe TENACIOUS lunar micro-rover. Image: ispace EuropeOn July 25, ispace Europe announced completing building their flight rover, which will be aboard ispace Japan’s second Moon mission launching end of 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This update follows the company completing environmental testing of the rover’s qualification model in April.

The 54-centimeter wide, 5-kilogram micro-rover made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastics will explore the Moon’s surface with an HD camera on its front and back. The rover will also have a back-mounted shovel from Epiroc AB using which it will collect lunar soil and transfer its ownership to NASA as part of the latter’s move to set precedence for future resource use under the US-led Artemis Accords. ispace Europe developed the micro rover with funding aid from the Luxembourg Space Agency under an ESA contract.

Next up, the rover will be integrated with the ispace lander in Japan. While the overall mission is named M2/RESILIENCE, reflecting the spirited reattempt following ispace Japan’s failed lunar touchdown attempt with the M1 mission in April 2023, the rover carries the theme with the name TENACIOUS. Relatedly, ispace Japan announced on June 27 that the mission’s lander passed thermal vacuum testing. ispace engineers have also verified commanding the lander and receiving data from it. The ongoing tests are part of a slew of launch and space environmental tests ispace is conducting at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center.

More mission updates* On July 23, the second core stage of the SLS rocket arrived from Michoud to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for final rocket assembly in the coming months, to be followed by its integration with the Orion spacecraft. If all goes well, this SLS rocket will launch the Artemis II mission by end of mid-decade, pushing four astronauts in the Orion capsule around the Moon and back. * Ling Xin reports that China recently successfully test fired the high-energy hydrolox YF-75E engine. Three of these engines will power the third stage of China’s Long March 10 rocket, which will be the launch vehicle used to send astronauts to the Moon starting end of decade.

More MoonImage: ESA* Following a £2.9 million award, the UK Space Agency is funding £4.8 million to a team led by Rolls-Royce to further develop a lightweight and modular autonomous nuclear micro-reactor with the hope of an initial demonstration on the Moon by 2030. This will help future missions survive frigid lunar nights at lower costs. * The Luxembourg-based European Space Resources Innovation Center (ESRIC), in partnership with ESA’s Business in Space Growth Network, has launched an accelerator program to help co-fund European organizations focused on developing technologies related to prospecting, extracting, and utilizing lunar resources. To start off, the accelerator aims to provide a total of €1 million for the first batch of ideas. * Ling Xin reports that on July 12, the non-profit Hungarian Solar Physics Foundation became the 14th non-country to join the China-led long-term scientific base on the Moon’s south pole called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). * In honor of the women “human computers” and “Hidden Figures” contributing to early US spaceflight research as well as to the Apollo program, NASA has named one of the buildings in the Johnson Space Center as the “Dorothy Vaughan Center”.

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I hope you enjoy this bird’s-eye view of all major developments in India’s space trajectory over the last two months! 🚀

India’s space budget for FY2024A tailor-made truck carrying the large and tall fairing of a Launch Vehicle Mark III rocket. It housed the Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft stack. Image: ISRODespite the many highs of 2023 for Indian space, the FY2024 budget of $1.56 billion for the country’s Department of Space (DOS)—of which ISRO gets the major chunk—has essentially stayed flat. The 18% increase over the previous financial year may seem significant but that’s only because the revised total expenditure of $1.32 billion during FY2023 was lower than the amount allocated for it. Notably, DOS underutilized its space technology budget in FY2023 by about $150 million, a trait the country’s Ministry of Science & Technology as a whole suffers from. As Mukunth has pointed out previously, it’s the latest example illustrating that increasing ISRO’s budget alone isn’t a solution in itself for continuing advances in space.

There’s some more incentive for space startups though. Earlier this year, during the interim national budget announcement, India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the availability of $12 billion dollars in interest-free loans across 50 years for Indian tech startups—including space ones—to tap into. Now, Sitharaman has announced a pool of about $120 million in venture capital funding for space startups to apply for, a move many Indian space industry experts are cautiously optimistic about. In any case, just like the government opening up approval-less foreign direct investments (FDI) for the country’s private space sector, this can be seen as a welcome option now available to India’s nascent startup ecosystem.

What India’s flat FY2024 space budget gives a clearer picture of is ISRO’s continued limited approach to deep space exploration and human spaceflight despite the rhetoric. As I explained in my article about ISRO taking on increasingly complex lunar and crewed exploration missions, India’s approach to even attempt ambitious its milestone missions would be different than the US or China, and that it would progress gradually at best. Even without budget underutilization, ISRO simply lacks the kind of resources that NASA and CNSA enjoy, with governmental Indian space funding being only a tenth to twentieth of China and the US, and private funding for deep space exploration being nearly zero.

Increasing mass to orbit, and a spaceplaneWhile ISRO works with the Indian industry to ramp up the production rate of India’s most powerful rocket, the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), from the current two a year to four and then six, the agency is also testing an engine upgrade to LVM3’s core stage. ISRO will replace its current two Vikas engines with an indigenously built 2000 KiloNewton semi-cryogenic kerolox engine called SCE-200. This will increase the rocket’s GTO capacity from ~4,000 kilograms to at least ~6,000. ISRO is also testing engine restart capability for LVM3’s upper stage cryogenic engine to enable more complex mission profiles.

At the India Space Congress 2024 in New Delhi late June, the Director of ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Space Center, V. Narayanan, said that the target to launch an SCE-200 on an LVM3 is 2027, a point in time later than originally expected but still early enough to be leveraged by the upcoming complex Chandrayaan and initial Gaganyaan missions.

ISRO’s spaceplane test vehicle RLV-TD autonomously landing on a runway. Image: ISROOn June 23, ISRO successfully landed their uncrewed, autonomous spaceplane prototype called the Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator (RLV-TD) on a runway at Chitradurga, India for the third time. Notably, the craft reused the winged body and many flight systems from the second landing test with minimal modifications, and steered through more stringent drop conditions. As seen in the video, ISRO used an engine smoke marker this time to better trace the descent trajectory for future improvements. As Chethan Kumar reported, ISRO next aims to fly a 60% larger RLV (named Pushpak) as the third stage of a modified GSLV Mk II rocket so as to test the spaceplane’s atmospheric reentry from orbit.

ISRO envisions the RLV not as a satellite deployer as much as a means to autonomously operate onboard payloads and experiments for a month or more in space and then bring them back to Earth for valuable follow-on studies. Media outlets have frequently compared the RLV to NASA’s retired Space Shuttle but ISRO is neither designing Pushpak to carry humans nor is it intended to be a heavy-lift launch vehicle. As a highly autonomous platform, Pushpak is more akin to the flying Boeing X-37B and Sierra Space’s upcoming Dream Chaser.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, KaleidEO, PierSight, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress report. If you too love my work of trying to capture true trajectories of Indian space, join them!

Chandrayaan updatesAn initial integrated lunar and crewed exploration roadmap for India. Image: S. Somanath / ISRO* Since official information from ISRO regarding India’s lunar and crewed exploration plans remains vague and scattered in bits and pieces, which also make it difficult for media reports to capture missions in context, I have compiled and laid down everything we know about ISRO’s plans for undertaking increasingly complex robotic Chandrayaan missions, where human spaceflight comes in, and what realistic timelines look like:

From Chandrayaan 3 to an Indian on the Moon 🌗* By combining optical, radar, neutron, and other data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), complemented by the ISRO Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s dual-frequency radar observations, a new study led by several Indian scientists estimates that the Moon’s poles host five to eight times more water ice 1-3 meters underground than near the surface. They also find that the extent of such water ice appears to be about twice as large on the lunar north than south. The study also suggests that the Moon’s past volcanism is the primary source of this subsurface water ice but not all researchers agree. Either way, the study has implications for the many upcoming lunar missions dedicated to studying the nature, abundance, and accessibility of lunar water, which include CNSA’s upcoming Chang’e 7 mission, the JAXA-ISRO LUPEX rovers, and NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter. * At the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability, a Korean researcher presented on July 11 how NASA, ISRO, and KARI have been voluntarily sharing information about the exact trajectories of their active (near-)polarlunar orbiters. The agencies use the NASA MADCAP software to predict and get notified about uncomfortably close approaches between the orbiters after which a decision can be taken for one of the craft to perform a diversion maneuver. Recall that in October 2021, ISRO commanded its Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to change its orbit slightly for avoiding a close approach of about 3 kilometers to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). In the May 2023 summary of India’s space activities, ISRO mentioned that on its request the LRO team postponed their spacecraft’s “Momentum Dumping” plan to avoid more close conjunctions. An August 2023 blog post by ISRO alluding to the importance of managing growing lunar traffic mentioned the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter maneuvering to avoid a close approach to KPLO. Per the May 2024 monthly summary of Indian space activities, ISRO performed two more such maneuvers this past May to avoid running into KPLO.

Private and commercial space updatesThe three stages of the Skyroot Vikram-I rocket during their respective proof pressure tests. Images: Skyroot* As of July 15, Skyroot completed proof pressure testing all three stages of its upcoming small-lift rocket called Vikram-I. It’s the company’s latest milestone in the lead up to attempting an orbital flight later mid-decade, for which the company recently raised $27.5 million. Other recent Vikram-I milestones include flight qualifying its Raman-I engine, which will provide roll attitude control, hot firing the Raman-II engine powering Vikram-I’s fourth stage, and successfully test firing the rocket’s second stage motor. Unfortunately, Skyroot and local competitor Agnikul face an uphill battle to survive and be profitable this decade but a lot will ride on the first orbital demonstration going well too. * In what seems to be the first satellite export order for an Indian private company, Azista will build and launch a satellite to fly a novel napthalene-based thrust vector system from Australia’s Boswell Technologies to help CubeSats get more effective guidance, navigation and control systems. Relatedly, recall that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Transporter flight in June launched Azista-BST’s first satellite called AFR. The 80-kilogram satellite is the first of up to five Earth imagers the company hopes to operate within three years. In the long run, the company hopes to leverage its big 50,000 sq. ft facility to mass produce eight satellites a month to provide commercial offerings to agricultural, strategic, and analytics customers in South East Asia. * ISRO and IN-SPACe, a DOS entity created to “promote, hand-hold, guide and authorize space activities”, put out a call for proposals on July 25 for the Indian private industry to propose building and managing Earth observation satellites under a Public Private Partnership. Other than providing cost-sharing incentives to the private industry, India hopes that this effort will improve and promote usage of Earth observation data from an access and distribution standpoint, which in turn could help create national demand for space launches—something ISRO Chief S. Somanath recently said is currently missing from the country’s space ecosystem beyond the baseline ISRO missions. * Building on its work to operate its own ground stations for demonstrator missions related to CubeSats and small satellites, Dhruva Space has received authorization from IN-SPACe to begin offering ground stations as a commercial service.

More Indian SpacePlot visualizing Aditya-L1’s halo-orbit around the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1) without a trajectory correction maneuver (blue) and with the performed one (green). Image: ISRO* ISRO’s Aditya-L1 solar telescope—which began studying the Sun’s surface, atmosphere, its activities, and the solar wind from January this year—has successfully completed its first halo orbit of 178 days around the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1). ISRO needed to command only three small maneuvers for Aditya-L1 to stay on course, which validates the complex flight dynamics software developed in-house by ISRO’s URSC center in Bengaluru for the mission. Thanks to redditor u/ravi_ram for pointing out that you can visualize Aditya-L1’s orbit and those of other solar missions with a web plotting tool. * Relatedly, ISRO confirmed that unlike Aditya-L1’s other instruments, the solar observatory’s key coronagraph VELC and its ultraviolet imager SUIT in fact did not observe the peak of aurora-causing solar flares and coronal mass ejections during May 10–11 because the instruments were in baking and calibration modes respectively. VELC and SUIT observed the aftermath of the solar storms May 14 onwards. ISRO has been frustratingly silent on the true nature of the calibration issues affecting these instruments. * Check out job opportunities at ISRO, SkyServe, Pixxel, and SatSure.

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China’s ambition to build a lunar navcom constellationLing Xin reports on China’s ongoing studies to have a phased constellation of 30+ satellites which would provide high-precision navigation as well as high-bandwidth communications for most places on the Moon with up to quadruple coverage. Earlier studies focused on a navcom constellation that optimizes for the lunar south pole. The overall intent is to support China’s ambitious crewed lunar surface missions driving towards a full-fledged Moonbase. A part of making this work would include China developing capabilities to monitor and track spacecraft across cislunar space—the space enveloping Earth and the Moon. This is similar to what the US is planning starting with the launch of Advanced Space’s Oracle spacecraft later this decade to monitor cislunar traffic.

A three-stage concept of developing a cislunar navigation and communications constellation proposed by Chinese researchers. Image: SCMPSince 2018, China has already deployed two communications relay orbiters, Queqiao 1 and Queqiao 2, in service of the Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6 missions respectively on the Moon’s farside. Queqiao 2 will also relay communications for China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 lunar landers, which CNSA is targeting to launch in 2026 and 2028 respectively. Also, the Queqiao 2 launch carried two experimental Tiandu CubeSats, which entered lunar orbit too. In all, the Queqiao 2 mission is testing and verifying technologies which will feed into China’s upcoming full-fledged navcom constellation.

Why build a navcom constellation around the Moon?For one, such a system can enable cost-effective Moon missions since spacecraft would no longer need hefty communications hardware and rented ground infrastructure. Partner nations with smaller space budgets can take advantage of this to send their own lunar missions at lower costs, including to the less explored farside lunar surface.

A navcom constellation can especially aid crew and hardware on the Moon’s poles, where Earth’s visibility is limited due to it being lower on the horizon than it was during the near-equatorial NASA Apollo missions. A navcom constellation will also aid lunar-water-hunting future rovers to better venture inside permanently shadowed regions, where Earth visibility worsens further. Moreover, a lunar navcom can provide a common time reference for the Moon, which would help swarms of lunar spacecraft operate safely, and also aid lunar-based fundamental physics and astronomy experiments including farside radio astronomy.

The Lunar Pathfinder will relay communications between Earth and robotic mission hardware at the Moon as a commercial service. Image: SSTLOther than China, ESA also aims to have a navcom lunar constellation with its Moonlight initiative. The launch of UK’s Lunar Pathfinder orbiter in 2026 will constitute ESA’s first Moonlight element. ESA will be Moonlight’s anchor customer but expects European companies to actively commercially provide lunar navcom services to missions globally. On the US side, last we heard, Lockheed Martin’s subsidiary Crescent Space was targeting a 2025 launch for its first two navcom lunar orbiters. More potential competitors in the lunar navcom space include ArkEdge Space, Aquarian Space, and Plus Ultra. But only China has launched hardware yet.

Chinese researchers have suggested that when coupled with Earth-based ground stations, China’s navcom network can help CNSA track deep space missions with sub-kilometer accuracy all the way to Jupiter and even beyond. In fact, Queqiao 2 will try testing an element of this during the Chang’e 7 mission currently targeting a 2026 launch. As noted by Chi Wang, et al. in a December 2023 paper on the scientific objectives of the Chang’e 7 mission, the LOVEX payload onboard the Queqiao 2 satellite will perform a deep space craft tracking experiment:

The LOVEX on the relay satellite is used [sic] to construct a 400 000-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.

Let’s talk VIPER?The VIPER lunar rover in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center while it was being assembled. Image: NASA / Josh ValcarcelNASA announced on July 17 that it intends to cancel the VIPER rover mission that was supposed to fly on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander mid-decade. The agency cited continually rising costs and more launch delays, and the risk of overstepping into budgets meant for other missions in the CLPS program, as the cumulative reasons for the decision. NASA says it will consider expressions of interest from the US industry as well as international partners to fly VIPER at no cost to NASA before going ahead and disassembling the rover next year. The US Congress will decide if NASA will need to reconsider flying VIPER somehow or if the agency can go ahead with the formal cancellation it desires. In any case, Astrobotic will still attempt to land Griffin on the Moon’s south pole for NASA under their existing CLPS contract but with a simulated mass replacing VIPER.

Despite how NASA may put it, no other CLPS mission can perform the depth and breadth of science VIPER was supposed to. The advanced rover intended to explore areas in and around permanently shadowed regions for over four months to help scientists determine the nature, accessibility, and abundance of lunar water ice deposits. In comparison, most CLPS missions last a single lunar day (14 Earth days) and are minimally mobile at best. Results from VIPER were to feed into NASA’s planning of crewed Artemis missions but it would seem the first batch of such astronauts will have to meet some of VIPER’s goals themselves. The only missions that actually hit the kind of broad as well as specific goals VIPER had are CNSA’s Chang’e 7 and the JAXA-ISRO LUPEX rover.

I want to cover what really happened to VIPER beyond what is already said and propagated, and everything that it affects going ahead. If you’d like to speak to me about the VIPER mission and its consequences, please reach out:

Email me: hey@jatan.space

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Gordon Roesler for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support independent writing and journalism.

Intuitive Machines gears up for second Moon missionFor Intuitive Machines’ second Moon landing mission targeting launch between November 2024 and January 2025 as part of NASA’s CLPS program, the two organizations have finalized the Nova-C spacecraft’s landing target to be a 200-meter diameter elliptical region on a rocky ridge on the Moon’s south pole which connects the Shackleton and de Gerlache craters. Neither Intuitive Machines nor NASA have specified the particular location or its coordinates but it’s an interesting development in any case because the mission’s landing site has now moved from 85°S to around 89°S. The latter presents better chances of finding water ice within 1 meter below the surface—the maximum extent of the Honeybee-Robotics-provided TRIDENT drill. The lander will analyze the excavated material for water ice and other such volatiles using the MSolo mass spectrometer, a first such study.

Components of the Honeybee Robotics provided TRIDENT drill as flying on Intuitive Machines’ second Moon mission. Image: NASA LangleyIn the meanwhile, Intuitive Machines completed hot-firing its in-house developed VR900 methalox engine for the mission, which improves lander performance over their first CLPS landing IM-1. Jeff Foust previously reported that Intuitive Machines is refining several systems on its Nova-C lander with the hope of bagging full success this time around instead of the partial one that was IM-1—which NASA and Intuitive disappointingly skewed the success criteria of and continues to at various space events when talking about the mission.

More MoonNASA is progressing slowly on the mid-decade launch of the Artemis II mission by an SLS rocket, which will push four astronauts in an Orion capsule around the Moon and back. With a successful test of the water deluge system, which will suppress the intense sounds of the launch, NASA is now about halfway through preparing ground systems for the crewed rocket’s second liftoff off Earth. In the meanwhile, the core stage of SLS for the mission is on its way to the Kennedy Space Center from Michoud for final rocket assembly followed by its integration with Orion. Jeff Foust reports how the assembly process for SLS is now cleaner due to lessons from assembling the large rocket for Artemis I.

The Artemis II SLS rocket core stage being transported towards NASA’s Pegasus ferry barge near the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Image: NASA / Eric Bordelon / Michael DeMockerAndrew Parsonson reports that ESA plans the first launch of their large lunar lander called Argonaut to be in 2031 onboard an Ariane 64 rocket. Argonaut will be built by Thales Alenia or Airbus, and will be capable of deploying up to 2100 kilograms of payload mass on the Moon. With a planned launch cadence of 2 years starting 2031, ESA hopes for Argonaut to support NASA’s Artemis crewed missions with cargo supplies, large rover deliveries, and habitat-related infrastructure such as lunar oxygen extraction and solar power supply.

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I’m glad to share that alongside many inspiring individuals like Louis Burtz, Ranjana Kaul and Yoav Landsman, I’ve been an Affiliate at the Open Lunar Foundation for a while now. We’re thrilled to aid the non-profit’s daunting work of developing key technical and policy building blocks which aim to help ensure that the exploration of our Moon is cooperative and sustainable for everyone. 🚀🌙

In turn, Open Lunar’s work makes me proud also because they have been a kind sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for four years now! 🌗

openlunar.org/affiliates

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On the intersection of ispace, NASA CLPS, funding, and scienceIllustration of the APEX 1.0 lunar lander design by ispace US. Image: ispaceThe publicly traded ispace Japan is taking another loan from the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, amounting to $62 million, to continue working on its upcoming three Moon missions:

• The company’s second lunar lander M2/RESILIENCE, launching end of 2024
• The Draper-led Moon mission part of NASA’s CLPS program targeting a 2026 launch, wherein ispace’s US subsidiary is providing the large APEX lander. ispace US is also providing ground communications and relay services for the mission.
• Another Moon landing mission by ispace Japan targeting a 2027 launch

While ispace’s progress on M2/RESILIENCE has been going well on both the lander and the rover front, it’s Draper’s first CLPS mission targeting touchdown on the Moon’s farside which has been a driver of capital raises for ispace. In April, the company announced taking a bridge loan of $45 million from Sumitomo Mitsui to majorly continue work on Draper’s CLPS mission. Jeff Foust reported in March that ispace raised $53.5 million through a stock sale, $47 million of which is being used for the Draper mission too. ispace’s share of Draper’s $77 million CLPS contract is supposedly $55 million.

ispace has needed these multiple investments not only due to the resource intensive nature of doing Moon missions but that, as revealed in a recent report on CLPS published by NASA’s Office of Inspector General, ispace US had to redesign the APEX lander to accommodate the needs of the NASA payloads on the mission:

Draper’s lander development progress was impacted by lander redesigns that caused a 12-month schedule delay. Draper subcontracted the lander’s design and development tasks to ispace, inc. (ispace). According to a NASA official, ispace’s original lander design was too small and not adequate for any CLPS delivery. ispace later redesigned a bigger lander, but it still did not meet the payload requirements. [...] Draper experienced significant schedule delays due to lander redesigns and when a major subcontractor fell behind schedule in obtaining external capital investments.

To that end, some amount of ispace’s two loans from Sumitomo Mitsui will go towards the Draper CLPS mission too. The latest capital raise—including a previous $80 million Japanese government grant to launch a large lunar lander by 2027—brings ispace’s cumulative investment to about $490 million, probably the highest for a lunar company.

There’s a silver lining for science on the Draper-led CLPS mission since the extra capital raised by ispace to continue mission development doesn’t (yet) seem to have cost significant additional money to NASA over the original contract, unlike the case of several other CLPS missions including the first ones that flew this year from Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines.

Status of NASA CLPS task orders as of February 2024. Image: Screengrab from NASA OIG’s CLPS report from June 2024Note that while the table above shows Draper’s $77 million contract value being unchanged despite additional work required on lander development, NASA’s original announcement of the CLPS task order states a contract value of $73 million. While not clear, this $4 milliondifference might be due to ispace having to meet specific vibrational requirements of the NASA-funded payloads onboard.

The science end of the Draper-led CLPS mission has been progressing well. The two distinct seismometers to be aboard the ispace-provided lander to the geologically fascinating Schrödinger crater on the Moon’s farside recently passed the slew of space launch and environmental tests. The “Farside Seismic Suite” (FSS) payload suite is thus ready to fly. Data from over four months of its operations, combined with seismic measurements from the upcoming missions of Chang’e 7, Chang’e 8 and Artemis III will help scientists better understand the Moon’s internal structure and how it evolved. FSS will also help us know the rate of seismic activity and amount of micrometeorite impacts on the Moon’s farside, which is not well constrained at the moment but is needed to understand its potential impacts on human and robotic lunar exploration.

Science goals of the Farside Seismic Suite flying aboard the Draper-led, ispace-developed CLPS landing mission. Image: M. Panning, et al.The mission lander will also carry a drill, a probe, and a magnetic sounder to measure the farside crust’s internal heat flow and electrical conductivity in a way that will resolve some murkiness of its structure. And there’s an experiment to study electric and magnetic properties in the region, which being shielded from Earth’s electromagnetic interference is apt for studying the solar wind’s interactions with the lunar surface, and for characterizing the Moon’s radio emissions for lunar-based radio astronomy like studying cosmology and habitable exoplanets.

And so, if ispace and Draper ultimately manage to deliver the lander to Luna and operate its instruments without NASA paying for work the agency didn’t task by itself, the mission would be a clear demonstration of the CLPS model working as intended; with the companies getting the fixed returns they originally proposed in their CLPS bids and researchers getting unique scientific lunar data at low costs and reasonably fast turnarounds.

Many thanks to Astrolab and Tim Glotch for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support independent writing and journalism.

Coordinating lunar trafficAt the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability, a KARI researcher presented on July 11 how NASA, ISRO, and KARI have been voluntarily sharing information about the exact trajectories of their active (near-)polarlunar orbiters. The agencies use the NASA MADCAP software to predict and get notified about uncomfortably close approaches between the orbiters after which a decision can be taken for one of the craft to perform a diversion maneuver. KARI has made South Korea’s first lunar orbiter KPLO perform four such maneuvers so far, including one to avoid a close approach to Japan’s SLIM spacecraft before its Moon landing—for which decisions were taken within a day.

Slide from KARI’s presentation at SWF’s Summit for Space Sustainability in July 2024. Slide credit: Moon-Jin Jeon of KARI, who leads KPLO mission operationsRecall that in October 2021, ISRO commanded its Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to change its orbit slightly for avoiding an uncomfortably close approach of about 3 kilometers to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). In the May 2023 summary of India’s space activities, ISRO mentioned that on its request the LRO team postponed their spacecraft’s “Momentum Dumping” plan to avoid more such uncomfortably close conjunctions. An August 2023 blog post by ISRO alluding to the importance of managing growing lunar traffic mentioned the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter maneuvering to avoid a close approach to KPLO. Per the May 2024 monthly summary of Indian space activities, ISRO performed two more such maneuvers this past May to avoid running into KPLO.

More mission updates* For a different kind of lunar impacts, ESA has approved the LUMIO (Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer) CubeSat mission. As its name suggests, LUMIO will monitor flashes of meteorite impacts, particularly on the Moon’s farside to determine its poorly constrained rate and potential impact (pun intended) to long-term robotic and crewed exploration. ESA aims to launch LUMIO in 2027 to the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian point (L2), from where it can continuously look at the Moon’s farside. The CubeSat also aims to demonstrate autonomously determining its position in space and navigating accordingly, independent of communications with Earth.

Mission phases of LUMIO. Image: ESA* For the mid-decade Artemis II mission, which will push four astronauts in an Orion capsule around the Moon and back, NASA has selected astronautAndre Douglas as a backup crew member for the three NASA astronauts on the flight. Relatedly, CSA announced in November last year that astronaut Jenni Gibbons will be Jeremy Hansen’s backup for Canada’s seat on the mission. Hansen is flying in return for CSA contributing the Canadarm3 robotic servicing system to the Gateway, which is an upcoming NASA-led international lunar orbital habitat. * Jeff Foust reports that an internal confirmation review conducted by NASA on the readiness of SpaceX’s Lunar Starship gives the agency’s Artemis III crewed Moon landing mission a 70% chance of launch by February 2028, nearly a year and a half later than the current public date of September 2026.

More Moon* Andrew Jones reports that Kazakhstan became the 12th country to join the China-led long-term scientific base on the Moon’s south pole called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). The two countries will explore using Kazakhstan’s iconic launch site Baikonur cosmodrome for lunar missions. Also, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Deep Space Pvt. Ltd. joined ILRS in June as the 13th non-nation organization, wherein in return for participating in China’s lunar missions, Supreme Deep Space intends to provide ground communications support for missions. And, researchers from both countries aim to collaborate on 3D-printing lunar infrastructure. * NASA’s ARES division is hiring a Subject Matter Expert to conduct research on lunar samples & analogs and support of human & robotic Moon missions. + Related tangent: ARES-developed Astromaterials 3D lets you (virtually) hold Moon rocks * Join the July 20 International Moon Day celebrations in China, Germany, and around the world and tell people why we must explore our Moon! 🌝

Moon Monday but in video!There’s now a comprehensive video on China’s insane scientific and technological advances in exploring the Moon. It’s based on 7 editions of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter, made in collaboration with the popular YouTube channel “The Space Race”. Sean and team did a great job at adapting my writing to something I’d never do. For those of you who wanted me to make videos, this is as close as you get and you will ever get. 🌝

*Watch on YouTube*

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The successful touchdown of Chandrayaan 3 on the Moon last year was pivotal for India’s space ambitions as well as for global lunar exploration. Having taken place amid many lunar landing failures, Chandrayaan 3 kept the worldwide momentum for the Moon going by feeding into the frenzy of sending robotic explorers to our cosmic companion. Chandrayaan 3 changed perceptions developed space powers had of India’s ability to explore space beyond Earth orbit. Internally too, paired with the new national space policy, the Moon landing signaled the Indian government to let ISRO not only double down on lunar exploration but go many steps further and develop a roadmap for human spaceflight which converges with Chandrayaan at the Moon—best highlighted by late last year’s announced national goal of sending an Indian to Luna by 2040.

An initial integrated lunar and crewed exploration roadmap for India. Image: S. Somanath / ISRONow, to be clear, ISRO lacks the kind of resources for its space program that NASA and CNSA enjoy, with governmental Indian space funding being only a tenth to twentieth of China and the US, and private funding for deep space exploration being nearly zero. Despite the many highs of 2023 for Indian space, the FY 2024-25 budget of $1.58 billion for the country’s Department of Space—of which ISRO gets the major chunk—has essentially not budged. As such, India’s progress towards these lofty robotic and crewed lunar goals will be gradual at best. Timelines of missions even in the “Near Term” phase of the aforementioned roadmap should be taken as seriously as those under NASA’s Artemis program.

Having said that, each milestone mission is interesting in itself for the space exploration abilities it unlocks for India and its partners. The biggest of those partners is now the US, thanks to last year’s joint government announcements of broad Indo-US sci-tech collaborations as well as India’s signing of the Artemis Accords. Since official information from ISRO regarding India’s lunar and crewed exploration plans remains vague and scattered in bits and pieces, which also make it difficult for media reports to capture missions in context, this piece is my attempt at clarifying and laying down everything we know about ISRO’s plans for undertaking increasingly complex robotic Chandrayaan missions, where human spaceflight comes in, and what realistic timelines look like.

Upcoming Chandrayaan missionsThe Chandrayaan 3 lander Vikram imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan on August 30. Image: ISROThe list of missions below is in a realistic order of their likelihood plus the definitiveness of their objectives, with missions down the line being increasingly murky representations of the lunar capabilities India would like to achieve.

• Chandrayaan 4: Lunar sample return mission (by end of decade)
• ISRO-JAXA LUPEX: A rover to study polar lunar water (by end of decade)
• Chandrayaan 5: Demonstrate frigid lunar night survival to enable long-term lunar missions (early 2030s)
• Chandrayaan 6: Demonstrate use of lunar resources towards building infrastructure and habitats (mid 2030s)
• Chandrayaan 7 (late 2030s): Tap into lunar water for building fuel stations that ultimately sustain long-term lunar living, and potentially also enable advanced deep space missions that could launch from Luna as part of their mission profile.

Upcoming Gaganyaan missionsInitial set of Gaganyaan human spaceflight missions following ISRO’s first crewed orbital flight demonstration. Slide image: M. MohanAt the India Space Congress 2024 in New Delhi late June, the Director of ISRO’s Human Space Flight Center (HSFC), M. Mohan, provided clarity on what human spaceflight missions India aims to undertake after the initial demonstration of a crewed orbital Gaganyaan flight mid-decade.

• ISS: One of the four Indian astronaut candidates will fly to the International Space Station early 2025 on a NASA-contracted Axiom Space mission aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The specific Axiom mission would either be Ax-4 or Ax-5, depending on the closing of many multi-organizational agreements involved in the deal.
• HLVM3-H1: First crewed Gaganyaan flight with one or two astronauts (from the aforementioned four) flying on an indigenously developed rocket and crew capsule late mid-decade (Mission duration: 1 day)
  • [Note: The term HLVM3 refers to ISRO’s human-rated LVM3 rocket]
  • The pacing item for this mission remains the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), whose feasibility ISRO is still evaluating, and so a crewed Gaganyaan flight will likely not take place mid-decade.
• HLVM3-H2: Second crewed Gaganyaan flight (Mission duration: 3 days)
• LVM3-G4: ISRO’s first cargo supply mission to the International Space Station (under consideration with ISS partner countries for end of decade)
  • [Note: LVM3-G1 through LVM3-G3 are likely the mission names for the uncrewed Gaganyaan test flights taking place before HLVM3-H1]
• BAS-B1: First module of India’s upcoming space station called the Bharatiya Antarikhsha Station (BAS), which translates to “Indian Space Station”, to be put into Earth orbit (end of decade at best)
• LVM3-G5: First cargo supply mission to BAS-B1
• Multi-module BAS: Late 2030s

Obviously, setbacks in these missions would likely delay the next one by years.

Where Chandrayaan and Gaganyaan converge HVM1: An uncrewed test flight of a human-capable spacecraft going to the Moon and splashing back on Earth safely (early 2030s; mission akin to NASA’s Artemis I). * HVM2: A crewed flight to the Moon and back (mid-2030s; mission akin to Artemis II and Apollo 8) * Lunar cruiser: A crew-capable ISRO spacecraft docking with the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat, and potentially supplying cargo via a robotic configuration (late 2030s) * HVM3:* An Indian landing on Luna, with or without a potential Gateway docking in the mix (2040s; mission akin to CNSA’s first crewed lunar mission)

You’re reading a combined special edition of my Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress newsletters! Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Takshashila Institution, KaleidEO, PierSight, and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this piece!

If you love my work too, join them and support independent writing and journalism.

Chandrayaan 4 sample returnOne of the mission profiles and its elements considered for ISRO’s upcoming Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission. Newer studies show both launchers being LVM3s instead. Image: ISRO / S. SomanathBecause India’s most powerful rocket, the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), has less than half the payload capacity of China’s Long March 5 rocket which enabled CNSA to undertake the Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 sample return missions, ISRO’s approach to bringing lunar samples with Chandrayaan 4 instead involves two rocket launches from Earth. In a March interview with Chethan Kumar for the Times of India, ISRO Chief S. Somanath said that with the preliminary studies of such a mission architecture complete, ISRO will soon submit a funding proposal to the Indian government for commissioning Chandrayaan 4.

With Chandrayaan 3, the agency hit several extended goals too. One of these was pulling the mission’s propulsion module from lunar orbit to Earth orbit, thereby demonstrating a small but key capability that will be required to pull off a robotic sample return mission in the future.

One of the most complex parts of Chandrayaan 4 would be remotely docking two or more robotic modules in lunar orbit, a feat only China has achieved so far. And so—as Kalyan Ray reports—ISRO will launch the ~$14 million SPADEX (space docking experiment) mission end of this year (but likely early next), wherein two spacecraft will practice docking in Earth orbit. This will buy down risk not only for Chandrayaan 4 but for the aforementioned Gaganyaan cargo flights to the International Space Station and India’s BAS-B1 station module later this decade. Naturally, all these missions will feed into enabling ISRO to send humans to the Moon, wherein large modules will need to safely dock with each other.

The Indo-Japanese rover mission*Top left: Illustration of an ISRO lander having delivered the stowed JAXA-built LUPEX rover to the Moon; Top right and bottom left: The LUPEX rover traversing the lunar south pole; Bottom right:* An early LUPEX prototype testing drive system performance in a simulated lunar soil pit. Images: JAXA / MitsubishiIndia and Japan are collaborating on a lunar polar rover mission called LUPEX. The nominal six-month mission comprises an ISRO-developed lander which will deliver a JAXA-built ~350-kilogram rover to directly study the nature, abundance, and accessibility of water ice at the Moon’s south pole (between 89–90°S). This makes LUPEX similar to CNSA’s Chang’e 7 and NASA’s VIPER missions. To safely and precisely land LUPEX amid unforgiving lunar polar terrain, ISRO will build the lander with input from both Chandrayaan 3’s success and that of JAXA’s SLIM lunar lander. LUPEX builds on the previous Indo-Japanese lunar collaboration of ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helping JAXA nail SLIM’s goal of a precision lunar landing.

In the March interview with Chethan Kumar for the Times of India, ISRO Chief Somanath said that work is progressing slowly on new throttle-able engines needed for the LUPEX mission’s big 6,000-kilogram ISRO lander. In a November 2023 talk at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Director of ISRO’s Space Applications Center Nilesh Desai said that LUPEX will be executed in no less than five years—as was to be realistically expected but not previously clarified by ISRO or JAXA.

While the Japanese government has approved the LUPEX mission, India is yet to. This formal green light is expected soon but we aren’t there yet. The lander’s preliminary design review seems to be pending too. The rover’s development is farther along but its instruments aren’t finalized yet despite it being originally expected to be done over a year ago. Landing site selection studies for LUPEX have been ongoing, feeding into as well as building on ISRO’s ongoing aid to NASA for planning crewed Artemis missions.

Chandrayaan 5 lunar night survival*Left: The nuclear device powering deep space missions like Mars 2020. Image: NASA; Right:* A radioactive plutonium-238 dioxide pellet, used in NASA’s Cassini mission as a power source. Image: Los Alamos National LaboratoryVirtually nothing is known about Chandrayaan 5 at the moment other than its core goal of demonstrating survival against frigid lunar nights. However, Chandrayaan 3 had another trick up its sleeve that will let ISRO ideate on Chandrayaan 5 sooner rather than later. The Times of India confirmed last year that there are two 1-watt radioisotope heater units (RHUs) on the Chandrayaan 3 propulsion module. ISRO hadn’t previously announced their presence. The mission’s Project Director P. Veeramuthuvel said the RHUs couldn’t be installed on the lander and rover for their lunar night survival due to mass constraints. The RHUs, made in collaboration with the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, are based on the radioactive source of Americium-241. The Indian space agency’s foray into operational RHUs is a great sign as it’s precisely the technology that has enabled China to have its Chang’e 4 lander and rover wake up after cold lunar nights.

ISRO to contribute to the NASA-led lunar Gateway space stationA slide showing major ambitious programs India is planning to ultimately enable a crewed lunar vehicle. Graphic: ISROThe second Indo-US collaboration meeting of the “initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology” (iCET) was held in New Delhi on June 17. As per its US White House briefing, NASA and ISRO are exploring opportunities for India to participate in the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat.

While the briefing didn’t specify the nature of India’s contributions, ISRO’s aforementioned notional roadmap for Chandrayaan and Gaganyaan missions shows a crewed Gaganyaan “lunar cruiser” craft that can dock with the Gateway (something I had predicted!). In a recent Indian space industry meet, ISRO Chief Somanath once again displayed the same roadmap on a slide while another slide showed the name “Gaganyaan-C”, with a subtitle that read “Lunar Fly By, Lunar landing, Return”.

More rocket oomph neededLiftoff of the Moonbound Chandrayaan 3 by an LVM3 rocket. Image: ISROWhile India is the third nation this century to have announced the goal of sending a human to the Moon by itself, thereby bringing along a complex set of precursor missions, the country (again) doesn’t have the kind of resources that the US and China do. Big rockets are indispensable if India is to undertake such ambitious missions but the truth is Chandrayaan 3 alone filled LVM3’s payload capacity to the brim.

However, ISRO has begun taking its first steps towards increasing its mass to orbit capabilities. The agency is in the process of testing an engine upgrade to LVM3’s core stage, which would replace the existing two Vikas engines with an indigenously built 2000 KiloNewton semi-cryogenic kerolox engine called SCE-200. This will increase the rocket’s GTO capacity from ~4,000 kilograms to at least ~6,000. ISRO is also testing engine restart capability for LVM3’s upper stage cryogenic engine to enable more complex mission profiles. At the India Space Congress 2024 in New Delhi late June, the Director of ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Space Center (LPSC), V. Narayanan, said that the target to launch an SCE-200 on an LVM3 is 2027, a point in time later than originally expected but still early enough to be leveraged by the upcoming complex Chandrayaan and initial Gaganyaan missions.

ISRO knows that even the semi-cryogenic LVM3 is a stopgap solution for its bigger ambitions, and so the agency has begun developing a partially reusable Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), which will have an expendable GTO capability of 10,000 kilograms. Heavier variants of the methalox-powered NGLV will follow to further increase mass to orbit.

As Chethan Kumar reported in March, the NGLV project has gotten a formal project team, and ISRO expects the rocket to take about a decade to launch. This leaves the semi-cryogenic LVM3 to muster more than would be usual for a rocket of its lift capacity. But it’s also partly why ISRO recently announced ramping up LVM3’s production from the current rate of two a year to four and then six.

Aside: India’s planetary missions follow the fundamental ISRO principle of indigenous launches and self-sufficient missions as much as possible, and so ISRO using a foreign launcher like, say, the SpaceX Falcon 9 for such missions is not on the table unless absolutely needed.

More Chandrayaan!* My blog now has a dedicated page for my ongoing exhaustive coverage of ISRO’s Chandrayaan Moon missions. From the big to the small, I love to track it all:

Chandrayaan coverage by Jatan Mehta 🌗* ISRO is organizing a hackathon for students and early career researchers to work on problems that will directly contribute to India’s new space missions, including Chandrayaan. The hackathon challenges include automatic crater & boulder detection from Chandrayaan orbital imagery, identifying safe rover navigation routes based on lander imagery, auto-classification of spectral data from lunar orbit, and more!

Me giving a talk titled “From Chandrayaan 3 to an Indian on the Moon” at the India Space Congress 2024. Image: Event teamI don’t prefer speaking at events because it’s an inefficient medium across the board, especially when an article on a blog can serve everyone better long-term. But if you could see how much I enjoy writing my Moon Monday blog+newsletter, it would be something like this image. :D

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*Top left: Chang’e 6 reentry capsule after safe descent and landing on Earth; Top right: Chang’e 6 lunar sample container after being lifted out of the reentry capsule; Bottom:* Part of the Chang’e 6 sample return mission team from CNSA and CAST. Images: Xinhua / CCTV+The first ever samples from the Moon’s farside are now cached on EarthAfter successfully collecting samples from the Moon’s farside and stowing them in lunar orbit earlier by excellently orchestrating multiple Mooncraft over months, CNSA made the Chang’e 6 mission’s lunar orbiter module fly towards Earth on June 21. It hosted the 300-kilogram reentry capsule, which contained 1.93 kilograms of lunar samples. When the orbiter module reached 5,000 kilometers away from Earth on June 25, it released the reentry capsule, which later performed a bounced atmospheric reentry in Earth’s atmosphere and safely descended and landed in China’s northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region at 06:07 UTC.

As Andrew Jones reports, the capsule was airlifted to the mission-designer CAST (the China Academy of Space Technology) in Beijing on June 26. Technicians lifted the lunar sample capsule out of the reentry capsule during a ceremony celebrating the mission’s success. Next up, the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) will unseal the sample container and prepare the farside lunar samples for storage. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), which designed Chang’e 6’s samplers mechanisms as Leonard David notes in his nice sampling explainer, has also setup lunar sample storage and sample analyzer facilities for scientific studies.

The Chang’e 6 samples will be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples. After results start coming in from later this year, the Chang’e 6 samples are expected to help scientists solve a whole host of Moon mysteries such as understanding the distinct lunar farside volcanism and why the farside is so enigmatically different from the familiar nearside—which is necessary to understand not just Luna’s evolution but that of our Solar System.

With the Chang’e 6 technology mission now accomplished, China now firmly looks forward to sending Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 to the Moon’s south pole in 2026 and 2028 respectively, followed by landing humans on Luna by end of decade, and then building a hybrid crew-robotic long-term Moonbase in the 2030s.

One robotic arm to rule them allAn illustration of Canada’s highly autonomous Canadarm3 robotics servicing system on the exterior of Gateway. Image: CSA / NASAFollowing two incremental contracts, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is now awarding CAD $1 billion (USD $730 million) to MDA Space for the final design, assembly, and testing of the Canadarm3 robotics servicing system, which is Canada’s contribution to the NASA-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat launching later this decade. In return for providing and operating this core element, Canada has secured seats for their astronauts aboard multiple crewed Artemis missions, starting with Jeremy Hansen flying on NASA’s Artemis II mission around the Moon and back mid-decade.

The highly autonomous Canadarm3 robotics system, including its dextrous arm, will perform many critical functions at the Gateway. These include robotic inspection, maintainence, and repairs, helping assemble new station modules and capture visiting spacecraft, aid astronauts during spacewalks, install and support scientific experiments, and more. As part of the contract, MDA will make a ground segment at its global headquarters in Brampton, Ontario to command and control Canadarm3.

Canadarm3 has also bagged Canada dedicated time to perform science & technology experiments aboard the Gateway. In March 2023, CSA announced it will invest $76.5 million over eight years in Canada-led Gateway experiments. CSA has also funded seven biology-related Gateway experiments totaling $1.25 million.

• Related: A gist of Gateway science

Many thanks to Off Planet Research and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support my work.

Mission updatesispace engineers moving the “RESILIENCE” Moon lander into a thermal vacuum chamber at the Tsukuba Space Center in Japan. Image: JAXA / ispace* ispace Japan announced on June 27 that its second lunar lander M2 (“RESILIENCE”), which is now assembled and has some payloads integrated too, has passed thermal vacuum testing ahead of its Falcon 9 launch end of 2024. ispace engineers also verified commanding and receiving data from the lander. The tests are part of a slew of launch and space environmental tests ispace is conducting at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center. In April, ispace Europe completed environmental testing of the qualification model of its micro rover, the flight model of which will fly on this second ispace lunar lander. * For the upcoming Draper-led lunar farside mission part of NASA’s CLPS program, wherein ispace’s US subsidiary is providing the APEX lander, ispace US announced signing a deal with the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) for the mission’s Earth-Moon communications. Specifically, the mission’s communications will be facilitated through SSC’s four lunar space ground stations across the globe. SSC’s ground stations have recently (commercially) served Moon missions by several space organizations, like for ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 landing. * Astrobotic unveiled a terrestrial landscape in Mojave for testing lunar hardware called the Lunar Surface Proving Ground (LSPG), which mimics conditions on the Moon’s south pole—from its rocky terrain and topography to the challenging long-shadow-lighting caused by the perpetually near-horizon Sun. In particular, Astrobotic will use LSPG to test its Griffin lander’s navigation and precision landing systems before the flight lander carries NASA’s VIPER CLPS rover to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole mid-decade. Astrobotic’s first Moon mission in January this year failed, which has delayed VIPER’s launch.

More Moon* ESA and the DLR Institute for Planetary Science are ideating on a “Polar Explorer” rover mission to study water ice on the Moon, which sounds similar to CNSA Chang’e 7, NASA VIPER, and the JAXA-ISRO LUPEX missions. * Following the selection of three Lunar Terrain Vehicle proposals for an Artemis crew-capable rover, NASA has released two white papers on lunar mobility and lunar cargo to summarize the agency’s thinking on these key elements comprising Moon to Mars architecture efforts. Recall that NASA conducted its second annual Moon to Mars Architecture Concept Review in November 2023, after earlier conducting a Concept Review and Definitions Document. With such a consultative process, the agency hopes to optimally refine its Moon to Mars Objectives and the strategies employed to achieve them. * I’m delighted that the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) presented at the inaugural UN conference on Sustainable Lunar Activities. A related project Open Lunar has been developing is a Lunar Registry of objects and activities, hoping to improve transparency and understanding of Moon missions globally.

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A spectacular view of our Moon as photographed by South Korea’s KPLO lunar orbiter. Image: KARINewly forged KASA aims to land on LunaAt long last, South Korea formed its space agency called the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA) to consolidate and/or coordinate the country’s various space activities—which span space science research, rocket and spacecraft technology development, and private space activities. So far, each of these core activities tended to have distinct organizations working on or managing them, like the case of South Korea’s first lunar orbiter KPLO which was developed and is being led by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).

Now, KASA is considering launching South Korea’s second lunar orbiter by end of decade, which might be a reconnaissance imager, but the big project on the horizon is an indigenously developed lunar lander planned for launch in 2032. South Korea has been ramping up its space funding to start the lander’s hardware development. As Kim Na-young previously reported, the Moon lander project passed a preliminary feasibility study last October, and should officially begin this year with a budget of at least $393 million.

The tentative plan is to make an ~1800-kilogram robotic lander. Several instruments and a small deployable rover will be aboard the lander. South Korea will also indigenously develop the rocket launching the spacecraft towards the Moon, achieving which would also provide the nation with better independent access to Earth orbit. Last year’s successful launch of South Korea’s homegrown KSLV-2 rocket provided a boost to the ambitious proposal of an indigenous Moon landing—a feat only achieved by five countries so far.

In the meanwhile, KPLO has not only been capturing beautiful high resolution images of the Moon’s surface but uniquely studying it from orbit. KASA will use this data along with imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to help identify good landing site candidates for South Korea’s Moon landing mission.

As an aside, KPLO even flew 18 kilometers above LRO last year and imaged it! The feat required precise coordination of orbital information between mission operators of the two orbiters. LRO was also made to slew by 20 degrees to allow the spacecraft’s back and radiator to be brightly illuminated by the Sun.

A mosaic of the 21-kilometer wide Shackleton crater on the Moon’s south pole, stitched from images by an LRO camera and KPLO’s ShadowCam. The latter’s view, overlaid on the background LRO image, is the highest-resolution image yet of Shackleton, most of which is in permanent shadow. Image: NASA / KARI / ASU / GSFCAnother interesting bit about South Korea’s Moon lander project comes from its original 2022 proposal stating the mission duration as being one year, which if done can only imply three things: either South Korea intends to demonstrate the rare technology of lunar night survival on the mission or the lander will touchdown in a polar location where there is near-constant sunlight. The final option is to do both. The polar lunar night at favorably selected sites doesn’t last for 14 Earth days but just a few. To that end, NASA’s upcoming polar-water-studying VIPER rover will periodically survive complete darkness for about four Earth days by parking at pre-identified high-altitude spots offering such brief lunar nights.

South Korea has also developed a full-scale dirty thermovac chamber that accurately simulates the dynamic electrostatic environment on the Moon’s surface. Such facilities not only let engineers and scientists test the functioning of full-scale hardware in lunar-like environments but help them understand how to mitigate long term damage to lunar hardware and astronaut suits from sticky moondust. Relatedly, the Orbital Index (a Moon Monday sponsor) has a good brief on moondust’s curiously cohesive nature.

Tangent: Stop calling national space agencies local NASAsThe headline for KASA’s launch by the well-respected publication Science.org reads as follows: South Korea launches its own NASA

It’s high time western media publications stop calling national space agencies as being local versions of NASA. It’s hard to imagine readers of such outlets not understanding the terms “space agency” or “space organization”. Such headlines aren’t science communication but if anything a failure of that. They don’t highlight, or even identify, that each national space agency serves various purposes for their respective countries, some of which form and evolve uniquely in form and/or function, and, not all of which have parallels in NASA. The vice versa is also obviously true; that NASA too is unique in many ways.

In case you’re wondering who else did such a thing, the New York Times has called ISRO “the local version of NASA”, among other questionable explainers.

I abhor the like button on socials, or social media itself for that matter, but I admit I was genuinely glad to see the support for this above thought over on my LinkedIn from so many familiar and new faces. :)

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Gordon Roesler for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support independent writing and journalism.

Chang’e 6 about to bring lunar samples to EarthAfter successfully collecting samples from the Moon’s farside and stowing them in lunar orbit earlier this month by excellently orchestrating multiple Mooncraft, China is now bringing the samples to Earth for the finishing act of the robotic Chang’e 6 space mission.

It was expected that the Chang’e 6 orbiter module, hosting the sample capsule, would begin its journey towards Earth around June 21. But as Andrew Jones reports, CNSA frustratingly did not provide an official update about any return maneuver from the orbiter, with such news instead coming from enthusiastic amateur radio observations. In any case, the orbiter module should release the sample capsule around June 25 when near Earth. The capsule will perform a bounced atmospheric reentry and hopefully safely descend and land in China’s northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, presumably around 06:00 UTC.

The Chang’e 6 samples will be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples, expected to help scientists worldwide solve a whole host of Moon mysteries such as understanding the distinct lunar farside volcanism and why the farside is so enigmatically different from the familiar nearside—which is necessary to understand not just Luna’s evolution but that of our Solar System.

ISRO to contribute to the NASA-led GatewayScreengrab of an integrated lunar and crewed exploration roadmap for India. Image: S. Somanath / ISROThe second Indo-US collaboration meeting of the “initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology” (iCET) was held in New Delhi on June 17. As per its US White House briefing, NASA and ISRO are exploring opportunities for India to participate in the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat.

While the briefing doesn't specify the nature of India’s contributions, ISRO Chief S. Somanath has talked about a notional ISRO lunar roadmap in a symposium talk last year, which showed a crewed Gaganyaan “lunar cruiser” craft that can dock with the Gateway (something I had predicted!). In a recent Indian space industry meet, Somanath once again displayed the same roadmap on a slide while another slide showed the name “Gaganyaan-C”, with a subtitle that read “Lunar Fly By, Lunar landing, Return”.

Building on or leveraging a series of upcoming increasingly complex robotic Chandrayaan missions, an evolving Gaganyaan program encompassing an Earthbound space station, and a new heavy-lift (partially reusable) rocket, the lunar cruiser vehicle seems to be ISRO’s hope towards enabling the newly announced national goal of sending an Indian to the Moon by 2040.

A slide showing major ambitious programs India is planning to ultimately enable a crewed lunar landing. Graphic: ISROMore Moon* NASA is halfway through preparing ground systems for the mid-decade SLS rocket launch of Artemis II, which will push four astronauts in an Orion capsule around the Moon and back. * Based on public metadata, Chandra Tungathurthi discerns some operational information about ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter; notably that it can image at a higher resolution of up to 16 centimeters/pixel in certain cases, and that its stereo images typically offer horizontal and vertical resolutions of 28 and 100 centimeters respectively. I should note here that the blog post’s mention of the orbiter’s mapping focus shifting to polar regions recently doesn't only concern planning for the upcoming Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover but also in major part to ISRO’s ongoing aid to Artemis crewed mission planning. * On June 28, Friday, I’ll be speaking on lunar exploration and the role of our Moon in human spaceflight as part of a plenary panel at the India Space Congress in New Delhi. If you’d like to connect with me for a meeting during the week, get in touch.

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The efforts to gauge plume effects of Moon landersA simulation showing plume effects from an Apollo Lunar Module when it’s five meters above the Moon’s surface. Plume gas velocity vectors are colored by velocity magnitude (blue=low, magenta=high). Streamlines indicate strong upward flow directions in vacuum. Image: NASATwo new papers by Philip Metzger suggest that Apollo lander rocket plumes blasted out at least four times more lunar soil than previously thought. This work, captured well by Michael Greshko for Scientific American, is part of an ongoing larger community effort to understand exactly how landers plumes affect the local environment on the Moon. When Apollo 12 astronauts landed near the robotic Surveyor 3 spacecraft that had previously touched down on Luna and brought samples of it to Earth, it displayed severe sandblasting damages and craters from the Apollo lander.Future astronauts in long-term habitats and even robotic surface activities will need protection from landers descending nearby. Some landings need to be near existing hardware if they carry supplies and other cargo.

For engineers to arrive at optimal protection measures, a White Paper submitted by multiple authors to the US Decadal Survey of 2023-2032 strongly suggested that all future NASA missions carry not only descent imagers but also instruments that measure specific aspects of plume effects. A payload called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies flew on Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander part of NASA’s CLPS program but it couldn’t image plume effects during the final landing phase due to an anomalous hard landing. A version of the payload is set to fly on Firefly’s upcoming CLPS lander later this year so hopefully we get data from it.

For the Chang’e 5 sample return mission’s lander, Chinese researchers calculated it to have displaced about 336 kilograms of lunar material during touchdown whereas the latest number for the Apollo 12 lander stands at 2600 kilograms. The Chinese researchers attributed the bulk of this dissimilarity to the contrast between the 13,300-newton, high thrust Apollo 12 engine and the 2900-newton, low thrust Chang’e 5 one. Of course, there are other factors too, such as thicknesses of the loosely bound material varying by landing sites. Ultimately, it’s important to understand plume effects on lunar soil from both low thrust and high thrust engines to comprehensively quantify and characterize risks posed to various kinds of future lunar hardware and habitats. Ongoing analysis of ejecta data from Chandrayaan 3’s last minute lunar hop will also contribute to said end.

Another key issue is that sandblasting and contamination of lunar material from their own lander is why astronauts will have to venture far away from their landing sites to obtain pure surface samples. Furthermore, simulations have shown that water vapor emitted by lunar landers could spread throughout the lunar exosphere within 24 hours.

As one protection measure against the various damaging effects mentioned above, NASA has been looking for sufficiently elevated locations for its envisioned Artemis Moonbase—and which must also lie at least a kilometer away from the crewed and cargo landing areas.

And then you have lunar landing padsIllustration of a lunar landing pad construction system and its elements. Image: Astroport / Tangram 3DSAs a more active lander-sandblasting protection measure though, NASA is funding the development of specific lunar infrastructure like dust-mitigating landing pads.

• Last year 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 doesn’t seem to include 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 are developing 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.

Furthermore, Jack Kuhr reports that new startup Ethos Space Resources has melted lunar soil simulants on Earth and demonstrated the resulting material’s strength against 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). Ethos plans for these pads to have embedded navigational beacons, which would aid precision landing—because otherwise a lander touching down beside the pad would defeat the purpose of it all.

ESA is interested in such technologies too, with the aptly named PAVER project using powerful lasers to melt lunar soil simulants into glassy solid surfaces, which can then be used to create blocks of landing pads and roads. As part of project MOONRISE, funded by Germany at €4.74 million, research teams at LZH and TU Berlin are developing an AI-supported compact laser system to build pads with 3D-printing. They’ve had successful basic terrestrial demonstrations, including under simulated lunar gravity in an Einstein-Elevator, and want to fly to the Moon for a real-world shot.

Related to all of the above, Kevin Cannon’s paper elaborates that just like on Earth, not all soil on the Moon is suitable for construction.

Many thanks to Off Planet Research, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support my work.

China and LunaNASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the Chang’e 6 lander from orbit on June 7. Image: NASA / GSFC / ASU / LROC* Despite ESA(-aided) instruments onboard CNSA’s Change’e 6 lander successfully collecting unique scientific data on the Moon’s farside, ESA’s international relations administrator Karl Bergquist told SpaceNews that the space agency does not intend to continue collaborating on China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 missions to the Moon’s south pole. Bergquist added ESA doesn’t intend to join the China-led long-term scientific base called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) either, citing ESA’s embargo with Russia—China’s biggest ILRS partner. In the meanwhile, Russia signed a law on June 12 ratifying its ILRS involvement. In my opinion, ESA pulling back from clearly beneficial scientific cooperation with China based on a rather disparate Russian element is a poor strategy on Europe’s part, especially when the entire continent has no independent access to the lunar surface. In any case, this thankfully doesn’t affect the two independent instruments from Europe flying on Chang’e 7: a Swiss-aided radiation monitor to measure incoming and outgoing radiation to and from Earth, and a retroreflector from Italy-based SCF Lab—just like the one they have on Chang’e 6. * On June 11, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) added 10 new (unidentified) astronauts to its taikonaut corps, some of whom might fly on China’s crewed lunar missions starting end of decade. Similar to ESA’s Pangaea campaign to train future lunar astronauts in geology and sample collection, which is a highly valuable skill during excursions on the Moon, China will provide geology field training to astronaut candidates followed by activities in mission-specific training simulators akin to Apollo. * In the meanwhile, China test fired three YF-100K prototype engines in preparation towards making the Long March 10 rocket that will fly astronauts to the Moon.

More Moon In an interview with Payload Space, Firefly’s spacecraft program director Ray Allensworth said the company is targeting November 16 to launch its first Moon landing mission. The Blue Ghost* lander aims to descend in the lava plains of Mare Crisium at 18.56°N, 61.81°E. It carries several NASA instruments as part of the agency’s CLPS program. These will primarily study the lunar environment. One of the lander’s legs will host PlanetVac, a low-cost soil sampling technology partially funded by The Planetary Society to enable future sample return missions from the Moon and Mars. The mission will also be NASA’s first attempt to get a GPS lock from the Moon. * On June 12, Armenia became the 43rd country to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. * On June 14, Srinivasa Hegde, the Mission Director of India’s first lunar orbiter Chandrayaan 1, passed away. Here’s my piece on the impact of his work.

Chandrayaan 1 Mission Director Srinivasa Hegde

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Chandrayaan 1 Mission Director Srinivasa HegdeToday (June 14), Srinivasa Hegde, Mission Director of India’s first lunar orbiter Chandrayaan 1, passed away. Among its many unique feats, Chandrayaan 1 discovered water on the Moon, which encouraged many nations worldwide to explore our cosmic neighbor, and also catalyzed NASA—a key partner on the mission—to plan returning crew to the Moon with Artemis.

Srinivasa Hegde worked at ISRO for 36 years, from 1978 to 2014. At ISRO’s Satellite Center in Bangalore, he was involved in planning, analysis, and operations for dozens of space missions.

Having known him, this news of grief stirred up memories of working with him over five years ago during a brief but grateful period. His work on Chandrayaan 1 not only helped India launch its newfound planetary exploration program but was equally instrumental in forging international space collaborations between India and the US as well as India and Europe—an attribute we would be wise to remember and carry forward as we mount many lunar missions from around the globe.

As part of my tribute to Srinivasa Hegde, I’m republishing below an interview of him I conducted in 2020 on his role in Chandrayaan 1, which also shows his optimism for exploring planets with robots and humans—and how India must be part of it all. The responses were edited for clarity, and related links and images have been added for the reader’s benefit.

What first got you interested in space exploration?

As a kid, I was influenced by my grandfather. He was a Sanskrit scholar and an astrologer, with a love for stars in the sky. He used to take me for early morning walks before dawn. During those days of reduced pollution, many constellations were clearly visible. He used to identify and explain all the constellations to me and I was intrigued. Besides, I was generally interested in science and reading up on new discoveries and happenings in the field. Then one day I came across a job opening at ISRO for which I applied and got selected.

Chandrayaan 1 was the first time India explored another world. What were the early stages of its conception like at ISRO?

Dr. K. Kasturirangan, who chaired ISRO from 1994 to 2003, wanted the organization to play a small role in India’s ambition to become a superpower. This planted the seed for undertaking more ambitious missions. The idea of a Moon orbiter was floated around and was received positively by everyone.

At the time, ISRO already had geostationary satellites, which have plenty of fuel. The basic infrastructure was ready and the only delta required was adapting it to the Moon. Initial calculations showed that our PSLV rocket could provide an Earth-bound orbit beyond which the fuel on the spacecraft could be used to go to the Moon and perform orbital capture. In all, Chandrayaan 1 seemed like a logical extension of our capabilities.

What did your role as Chandrayaan 1’s Mission Director involve and what was your biggest challenge?

I was involved in all aspects of the Mission Design—the design of the various orbits, data management, orbit determination, strategies for course corrections, and so on. I was also involved in many aspects of operating the spacecraft.

Chandrayaan 1 was the first ISRO project to involve many foreigners who had their scientific instruments onboard. As Mission Director, I was tasked with accommodating their needs. It posed challenges because they had diverse requirements.

For instance, scientists behind the Mini-SAR payload wanted to calibrate the instrument when the spacecraft would be en-route to the Moon. They were unhappy with the fact that we couldn’t accommodate that due to certain changes in our launch schedule. However, at a later stage we provided them with a geometry in lunar orbit for calibration which they said was even better than what they originally asked for.

Was finding water on the Moon a primary scientific objective during the planning of Chandrayaan 1? Why was it important?

Absolutely. NASA missions to the Moon in the past decade had hinted at the possibility of water ice being trapped in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon. So it was crucial to confirm its presence as it has implications for future human settlements as well as getting insights on the Moon’s origin and evolution.

For Chandrayaan 1, ISRO solicited scientific instruments from other space agencies around the world. What was the driving philosophy behind that?

We had our own science payloads on Chandrayaan 1 but given the renewed global interest in the Moon after so many decades, we also wanted to provide the spacecraft as a platform for others we could collaborate with. And so ISRO put out an announcement of opportunity to scientists all over the world to pitch payloads for Chandrayaan 1. We got instruments from ESA as well as NASA, including universities associated with them. I think the timing of Chandrayaan 1 was good as NASA’s next Moon mapper, LRO, was still a year away.

Tell us about the discovery of water on the Moon by the NASA instruments onboard Chandrayaan 1 and more on the India-US partnership.

As discussed, NASA scientists were really interested in putting their instruments on Chandrayaan 1 and working with us to confirm the presence of water. The discovery ultimately came from two NASA-built instruments onboard—the Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) and the Moon Mineralogical Mapper (M3).

Mini-SAR found that more than 40 craters on the lunar poles reflected signals in patterns consistent with water ice. However, there were still uncertainties like in previous missions about the detections really being water ice instead of false positives from some kinds of rock surfaces.

Likely water ice on the Moon’s north pole (marked by green circles) found by Chandrayaan 1 instrument Mini-SAR. Image: NASAIt was the M3 instrument that confirmed water ice being present in the Moon’s polar craters based on how the surface absorbed infrared light. In fact, M3 detected water and hydroxyl molecules almost everywhere on the Moon. Scientists now knew for the first time that the lunar soil does hold trace amounts of water even in the non-polar regions.

Distribution of water ice on the lunar south pole (left) and north pole (right) as mapped by ISRO’s Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft. Image: NASAThe India-US partnership on Chandrayaan 1 also extended to NASA providing us access to its iconic Deep Space Network, which was used for communications with the spacecraft.

What was the most challenging scenario when operating Chandrayaan 1 in lunar orbit?

Oh, this is my favorite part! Chandrayaan 1 actually managed to view a solar eclipse from the Moon! We were able to see the Moon’s shadow cast on Earth. In 2009, a year after launch, both the star sensors onboard the spacecraft had failed. With that, the spacecraft lost its ability to precisely point to a desired attitude in space. A mission failure was looming.

Instead of losing the craft, we came up with a solution that involved using the Sun sensors to get knowledge of two spatial axes and take aid from the ground station to know the third. This data was utilized by the onboard gyroscopes to be able to point the spacecraft again with reasonable accuracy. The mission was back up and running.

As the spacecraft passed between the Moon and Earth in its lunar orbit on July 22, 2009, it imaged the Moon’s shadow cast on our planet. This was a first for any lunar mission and completely executed when the spacecraft was in a non-nominal state.

The totality shadow cast on Earth by the Moon during the total solar eclipse of July 22, 2009, as captured by Chandrayaan 1 from lunar orbit. Images: ISRO / GIF: Jatan MehtaDo you think there’s enough water on the Moon’s poles to power large human settlements in the future?

It’s too early to comment but going by the minimum amount estimated from Chandrayaan 1 Mini-SAR observations, it seems there could be enough. The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter can reveal more details.

How is the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter positioned to provide us more insights on water on the Moon?

The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has upgraded instruments. Its upgraded radar, that can penetrate deeper into the surface, will map the water ice trapped in the lunar poles and quantify its amount, something no one has adequately done yet. And its infrared spectrometer will build a global, high-resolution map of water concentrations in the lunar soil, and how the amount changes in response to the lunar environment.

How can India compete with China and the US in the renewed return to the Moon?

It is difficult as both these nations have enormous resources. But the spectrum of science that can be done on the Moon is vast and our strategy so far has been to fill crucial gaps in our current understanding, like the discovery of water.

Which planetary destination do you think India should aim for next and why?

Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It is mostly covered with fresh, clean ice, making it one of the most reflective bodies in the Solar System. It is known to host water underneath that icy surface. After Cassini spacecraft’s discovery of organic compounds in Enceladus’ plumes, it has become, to me, by far the most interesting object in our Solar System.

What does having a planetary exploration program mean for a country like India?

It plays an important role in eventual settlement of space. Doing such missions means we gain new capabilities and experiences, all of which give us a good starting point for future endeavors. For instance, the most notable thing in Chandrayaan 2 is that all of its cutting-edge scientific instruments are designed and built indigenously.

What are your thoughts on India sending its own astronauts to space, aka the Gaganyaan program?

Sending humans to space involves too many challenges, like ruggedization of the spacecraft and launcher, having enough fuel at all stages, complex trajectories, multi-layered redundancy in spacecraft functions, etc. At every stage, there should be a means to get back humans safely and there is little to no tolerance for failure. With all those requirements, Gaganyaan is certainly a very expensive undertaking. But it has to be done sooner or later for space settlements, so why not now?

Throughout your career at ISRO, how have you seen the landscape for women in STEM change?

There are many women at ISRO who are doing exceptional work. Over the years they have rightly assumed increasingly higher and more versatile positions inside ISRO’s various missions and centers. This includes women who aren’t necessarily photogenic and don’t feel the need to be in the limelight.

Should humanity establish permanent presence on the Moon first or Mars?

The Moon is good from an energy point of view though it has limited areas for potential habitability, like lava tubes or polar regions. But Mars has a relatively more conducive environment, a near-24-hour day, relatively benign temperatures and is, in general, a more hospitable place. If huge rockets like SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy are available in the future, then energy is not really a problem and Mars becomes a natural target after the Moon.

Originally published at Supercluster.

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I’m truly excited to welcome Astrolab as the latest yearly sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter! 🚀

California-based Venturi Astrolab Inc. (Astrolab) is developing a fleet of large multi-purpose rovers for advanced exploration of our Moon. To that end, Astrolab leads one of the three teams NASA selected earlier this 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. 🌗

What I have always loved about the Astrolab-led LTV bid is that unlike other proposals, their FLEX rover has a publicly known functional terrestrial prototype—tested for mobility as well as crewed, remote, and payload deployment operations. Astrolab is also the only company to have publicly announced plans to send a demonstration rover, one with customer payloads. ✨

Chang’e 6 samples await in lunar orbitA small rover deployed by the Chang’e 6 Moon lander captured this view of the lander, showing its large sampling arm and the ascender module up top. The lander lies on the Moon’s farside at 153.99° W, 41.64° S, within the Apollo impact crater. Image: CNSA / CLEPIn a span of a week, China’s Chang’e 6 lander successfully touched down on the Moon’s farside on June 1, collected up to 2 kilograms of soil and rock samples using a still drill and a movable complementary surface scoop (a process aided by a terrestrial replica CNSA setup of the sampling area to test and verify sampling strategies as well as context-providing lander instruments comprising cameras, a ground penetrating radar, and a mineral spectrometer), used its arm to move the samples to a sealed container, deployed a small 5-kilogram rover to tactically photograph the Chang’e 6 lander, launched the samples to lunar orbit as part of an ascent module on June 3, which autonomously determined its position and orientation with aid from the Queqiao 2 communications relay lunar orbiter, and then docked with the Chang’e 6 orbiter on June 6 following four orbital adjustments, about 30 minutes after which the lunar samples were transferred to the Earth-return capsule.

That’s one impressive way to perform what’s so far looking like a very nominal mission, including the orchestration of many modules the kind that will help China land humans on Luna, which the country hopes to achieve by end of decade. China is the only nation to have performed robotic rendezvous and docking at the Moon.

The Chang’e 6 orbiter will soon jettison the ascent module, which CNSA will deorbit to crash into the Moon similar to Apollo missions. The Chang’e 6 orbiter will remain in lunar orbit until June 20 or 21, awaiting a window for returning to Earth. On its way towards our planet around June 25, it will release the sample-hosting capsule, which will perform a bounced atmospheric reentry and hopefully safely descend and land in China’s northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The Chang’e 6 samples will be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples, expected to help scientists worldwide solve a whole host of Moon mysteries such as understanding the distinct farside volcanism and why the farside is so enigmatically distinct to the familiar nearside—which is necessary to understand not just Luna’s evolution but that of our Solar System.

A panorama from the Chang’e 6 lander, showing one of its legs, the small rover’s tracks on the left, and the sampling arm and its surface digs. Image: CNSA / CLEPIn the meanwhile, Chinese scientists are already thinking ahead on how to glean more scientific value from lunar samples. Researchers at the China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE) are using particle accelerators to detect Iron-60 in simulated lunar samples. Iron-60 is a rare isotope produced by exploding stars, and identifying its trace existence in actual lunar samples soon would be another way scientists utilize the Moon to understand the Universe beyond.

Other than collecting samples, Chang’e 6 mission operators turned on two European instruments aboard the lander: the Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface (NILS) payload from ESA and the Swedish Institute for Space Physics, and the French space agency’s Detection of Outgassing RadoN (DORN) detector. NILS already detected negatively charged particles on the Moon’s farside, a world first. These particles are produced due to highly energetic solar wind particles slamming the Moon’s surface and kicking up secondary particles.

NILS is the first European instrument to operate from the Moon’s surface, and is also Europe’s first such collaboration with China. Furthermore, ESA has been providing ground station tracking and orbital confirmation support for Chang’e 6, similar to how ESA has been helping ISRO’s Chandrayaan missions.

NASA’s road to the Moon continues via StarshipMagnificent view of the IFT-4 SpaceX Starship second stage during atmospheric reentry. Image: SpaceXSpaceX’s fourth launch of its fully integrated Starship Super Heavy rocket on June 6 was a comprehensive success, with both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship second stage completing their flights and performing controlled soft oceanic splashdowns. The latter’s victorious outcome was especially dramatic, as it survived a fiery reentry despite losing many heat shield tiles and actuating a burnt-through flap. With this flight, SpaceX has cleared another milestone in a long path to put humans on the Moon again since NASA has selected Starship’s lunar variant for the Artemis III crewed landing mission later this decade.

But much like the biggest of Starship ambitions, the Lunar Starship as envisioned needs a high launch cadence for adequate in-orbit refueling, for which a key decider will be the heat shield; specifically how well SpaceX can get it to perform on the second stage, and how fast the company can refurbish such Starships. Peter Hague captures it well on his blog Planetocracy:

If due to the thermal protection system or other reasons SpaceX is unable to cheaply and quickly reuse second stages, then the Starship project as envisioned may be in trouble. There are multiple ways the Starship program could turn out. I think we can rule out total failure of the program at this point as very unlikely — but it might be that first stage reuse works, while second stage reuse proves too hard for SpaceX. That would be disappointing, but not the end of the world.

A partially reusable Starship would be a rocket with almost twice the payload of a Saturn V (as it would not have to carry tonnes of reuse equipment) but with the economics of a Falcon 9. Being able to launch a vehicle in this class perhaps 100 times a year would be revolutionary in itself.

Ultimately, it means that we would likely have a US crewed lunar landing enabled via Starship in some form but the hope, of course, is that SpaceX continues to clear immense technical hurdles in developing Starship and provides NASA with a concrete road to the Moon.

Related: Is dearMoon’s Starship flight cancellation purely a financial setback? I doubt it.

Also relatedly, NASA and SpaceX conducted a terrestrial test of astronauts interacting with full-scale developmental hardware of an airlock, its deck, and an elevator part of SpaceX’s Lunar Starship. The astronauts put on Axiom-provided spacesuits and pressurized them outside the airlock. The tests aimed to simulate the mobility environment crew will face on the Moon, and accordingly evaluated procedures, checkouts, specific movements coupled with mobility aids, effectiveness of the control panels, and more. NASA says the tests confirmed that the amount of space available in the Starship airlock, on its deck, and in the elevator are sufficient for astronauts to work with.

Many thanks to Astrolab and Sanket Suman Dash for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support my work.

A critique of CLPSIllustration of Intuitive Machines’ lander on the Moon with NASA’s PRIME-1 drill attached. Image: Intuitive MachinesThe latest report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General has criticized ways in which NASA has been handling its CLPS program to send agency-funded payloads aboard private lunar landers, presenting a commercially unattractive outcome too:

The total value of NASA’s eight delivery task orders increased from an initial value of $781.4 million to $984.3 million as of February 2024. Since CLPS’s inception in 2018, five of eight task orders have experienced cost increases, and seven of eight have experienced schedule delays. Five of the eight experienced both cost increases and schedule delays. Further, two task orders were terminated, one of which had already been paid $66.1 million of the $81.3 million task order value based on milestones performed.

[...]

NASA built the CLPS business model assuming the commercial lunar delivery market would mature with time. However, more than 5 years after the initiative was established, the market is still heavily dependent on NASA task order funding. Vendor officials told us that about 20 percent of demand for lunar delivery services come from commercial or international entities, while NASA provides the other 80 percent. NASA officials also have not conducted any new market studies to assess demand or capability growth across this industry since 2017.

[...]

NASA deviated from its original, hands-off strategy for the initiative and from its plan for incremental progress towards larger missions. Rather, the Agency’s aggressive lander development schedules led to increasingly risk-averse practices and policies. For example, NASA insight and oversight increased, and more detailed vendor proposals were required. This resulted in higher costs and delayed delivery schedules while threatening the initiative’s ability to achieve its broad objectives.

[...]

We found that NASA-directed changes, including augmented insight and landing site changes, led to $171.4 million in project cost increases. Finally, we found CLPS lacks a detailed management plan that could outline a disciplined approach, promote accountability for how the Agency measures success, and help the initiative weigh competing priorities.

More Moon* Bill Anders, who showed us Earth from the Moon during his Apollo 8 flight, passed away at the age of 90 in a self-piloted plane crash.

We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.

• The NASA-funded and Advanced Space-led CAPSTONE lunar orbiter has now completed 18 months in lunar orbit, meeting most of its mission objectives. As a literal pathfinding mission for the upcoming NASA-led international Gateway orbital habitat, CAPSTONE has been test-flying the fuel-efficient Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) the lunar station will be in. Results from it are helping NASA refine the orbit’s mathematical models based on the exact propellant and resources CAPSTONE consumed to maintain desired operations, including the 25 maneuvers it has performed to date. CAPSTONE has also continued to cross-communicate with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to work towards demonstrating autonomous position determination and navigation in lunar orbit, that is, without relying on or chocking up Earthly ground stations. The CAPSTONE team deserves the fruits of the mission’s successes, for they practically fully recovered a failing spacecraft and managed to have it enter NRHO despite a faulty valve in one of its eight thrusters—which is still stuck!
• With a second hot fire test of its prototype Huracan engine, The Exploration Company is inching towards its desire to send their Nyx Moon spacecraft to Luna. The company hopes to one day have Nyx Moon supply up to 5,000 kilograms of cargo to the NASA-led Gateway. The capsule can bring 2,000 kilograms worth of material from the Gateway to Earth too.

Enter the Chandrayaan coffee mug. From a47.in, who sadly are not sponsoring my exhaustive coverage of Chandrayaan Moon missions: https://jatan.space/tag/chandrayaan 🚀🌗

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I’m over the Moon to share that Open Lunar Foundation is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the fourth year in a row! 🌗

Open Lunar is a non-profit organization that brings together and enables a diverse set of experts to develop key technical and policy building blocks which help ensure that the global exploration of our Moon is peaceful, cooperative, and sustainable. 🚀

It’s a mission I like so much—alongside the people—that I’m glad to also share that I’ve been aiding Open Lunar’s work in a small way as part of a group of Affiliates who believe in the cause. 🌙

China lands one more time on the Moon’s farsideA fantastic view from a camera onboard the Chang’e 6 lander which shows the spacecraft’s shadow on the Moon and dust blowoff just moments before touchdown. Image: CNSA / CLEPFollowing a 14-minute descent from an altitude of ~15 kilometers in its lunar orbit, China’s Chang’e 6 lander successfully touched down on the Moon’s farside on June 1, resting at 153.99° W, 41.64° S near the southern rim of the 500-kilometer wide Apollo impact crater. This marks China’s fourth successful nominal landing in four tries. It’s also only the second farside lunar touchdown after Chang’e 4. At this point, China is making lunar landings seem easy while other countries work towards achieving the complex task as a routine.

Much like most modern lunar landers, Chang’e 6 used several key technologies to descend onto a safe spot: a variable thrust engine, optical imagery, onboard maps, hover phases to detect hazards to avoid, and shock-absorbing crush core legs for the final free fall. Chang’e 6 also used a laser-based LiDAR sensor to map the local landing area in 3D before the final landing phase. Interestingly, CNSA’s news release also mentions landing aid from another sensor:

To prevent interference to optical sensors by lunar dust during landing, the lander is also equipped with gamma-ray sensors to accurately measure the height through particle rays, ensuring that the engine can be shut down on time and the lander can touch down smoothly on the lunar surface.

0:00  /0:32  1×    A sped-up interpolated video showing the view from Chang’e 6 during its lunar descent and landing. Video: CNSA

The Chang’e 6 landing site [153.99° W, 41.64° S]—blue dot—in the 3.98-billion-year old, 500-kilometer wide Apollo impact crater. Image: LROC Quickmap / ASU / GSFCSince Chang’e 6’s surface mission of sample collection is on the Moon’s farside, the side we can’t see from Earth, mission operators have been commanding the lander and receiving data from it via relays from the Queqiao 2 lunar orbiter launched earlier in February. However, China frustratingly continues to not share even high-level information about its space activities in near-real-time with the public. At the time of writing this, it’s hard to know if and how exactly the Chang’e 6 lander collected its samples, and what they look like. We don’t have any images from the surface despite it being two days since the landing.

More mission updatesJPL engineers and technicians prepare NASA’s Farside Seismic Suite for testing in simulated lunar gravity, which is about one-sixth of Earth’s. Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech* NASA’s first farside mission via its CLPS program is progressing gradually. The two distinct seismometers meant to fly in 2026 aboard the Draper-led, NASA-funded lander to the farside Schrödinger crater recently passed the slew of space launch and environmental tests. The “Farside Seismic Suite” (FSS) payload suite is thus ready to fly. Data from over four months of its operations, combined with seismic measurements from the upcoming missions of Chang’e 7, Chang’e 8 and Artemis III will help scientists better understand the Moon’s internal structure and how it evolved. FSS will also help us know the rate of seismic activity and amount of micrometeorite impacts on the Moon’s farside, which is not well constrained at the moment. In the meanwhile, ispace US—who is providing the lander for the Draper-led mission—has been raising capital to double down on realizing the spacecraft. * After continuing to defy JAXA’s own expectations by surviving three frigid lunar nights in a row, the solar-powered SLIM lander unfortunately did not wake up during the previous lunar day at its landing site. JAXA says it will try communicating with the lander again when the Sun rises high enough in SLIM’s sky after June 10.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Sanket Suman Dash for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this curated community resource too, join them and support my work.

Is dearMoon’s cancellation purely a financial setback?Illustration of the dearMoon Starship above Luna. Image: SpaceX / dearMoonCiting delays and uncertainty in the launch year, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has cancelled his purchase of SpaceX’s dearMoon Starship mission, which aimed to fly himself and eight more people around the Moon and back. Would-be-mission flyers expressed disappointment with the poor internal communications regarding the cancellation, including the Everyday Astronaut, Rhiannon Adam and Brendan Hall.

While it’s not surprising that dearMoon would’ve never launched in 2023—or even 2024—and that Maezawa’s net worth dropping by half since booking the mission in 2018 certainly played a role in the decision, I disagree with most of the coverage calling the mission a low priority—that it would be a distraction from SpaceX’s development for the Artemis III Lunar Starship mission to land humans on the Moon for NASA. Sans the critical landing element, Artemis III and dearMoon share virtually every developmental milestone Starship needs to hit for safely and successfully carrying humans to the Moon and back—from in-orbit refueling to a high launch cadence. In other words, a Starship program capable of realizing Artemis III even later in the decade can easily fly dearMoon too, as the latter lies squarely along the former’s developmental path. Recall also that Dennis Tito and his wife Akiko Tito purchased 2 out of 12 seats for a circumlunar Starship mission as of October 2022. There have been no updates on the mission since then.

Let’s not forget either that it’s exactly these kinds of commercial missions that NASA said it wants to promote to forge a lunar economy. In fact, the ability to carry out commercial lunar flights was a key evaluation criteria for NASA when awarding lunar lander developmental awards. Here’s an example quote from an interim source selection document while NASA was progressing in its selection of sustainable lunar landers (which ultimately led to the agency shortlisting SpaceX’s Lunar Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon landers):

NASA recognizes the need to foster the commercial development of expertise and technologies required for reusable, sustainable, and human-rated landing systems. As one component of multiple HLS procurements, Appendix N will help NASA and U.S. industry accomplish this goal by procuring critical studies and risk reduction activities in support of sustainable human lunar lander services. Not only will this work meaningfully advance the research and development necessary to meet NASA’s long-term crewed lunar landing requirements, but it will also have commercial applications beyond NASA’s needs.

While there’s no doubt about Lunar Starship’s future potential, the delays and now the dearMoon mission cancellation are a clear sign of Starship milestones proving to be even more complex to achieve than initially anticipated.

Related read: The Lunacy of Artemis by Maciej Cegłowski (I don’t endorse the article wholly but agree with many aspects of it. It’s worth reading either way.)

More Moon* On May 30, Peru and Slovakia signed the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. Slovakia is the 19th European nation to sign the Accords but it’s Uruguay joining as the seventh Latin American country that’s interesting to me. The other Latin American signatories are Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, and Uruguay. Of these, the latter four along with the new Accords signee Peru are members of the recently formed “Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency”, or ALCE. Inspired in part by the model of the European Space Agency, ALCE aims to pool resources of Latin American nations to better their space activities and its impact. * ESA and NASA astronauts provided feedback on the usability of initial mockups of the ESA-led, Thales-provided Lunar I-Hab habitation module, the flight version of which will be part of the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat later this decade. This exercise will allow including major changes before the upcoming critical design review phase, after which assembly and integration of Lunar I-Hab can begin.

Mock spacesuits and a tool cart mimic the equipment Artemis astronauts might use during excursions on the Moon. Image: NASA / Josh ValcarcelLast month NASA conducted the highest fidelity Moonwalk simulation exercise yet in a lunar-esque volcanic field in Arizona for the upcoming Artemis III mission intended to land two astronauts on the Moon’s south pole. 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.

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I’m thrilled to welcome PierSight as the latest sponsor of my monthly Indian Space Progress blog+newsletter! 🚀

Ahmedabad-based PierSight Space, which raised $6 million recently and also won the INDUS-X challenge for oil spill detections, aims to build a constellation of synthetic aperture radar satellites for persistent ocean monitoring. 🌏🛰️

Personally, I have learnt much about space and lunar instruments from PierSight CEO and friend Gaurav Seth, and so I’m glad to have his company be part of the organizations supporting my work of independent space writing and journalism.

On the Agnikul launch, and where the company might landLaunch of the SOrTeD demonstrator vehicle on May 30, 2024. Image: AgnikulAfter persevering through four scrubbed launch attempts over a month, Chennai-based space startup Agnikul launched its first rocket demonstrator mission called “Suborbital Tech Demonstrator” (SOrTeD) on May 30. Unlike what many national and international media reports have implied though, and which tweets from the company or ISRO don’t actively clarify against, the single-stage SOrTeD vehicle was not intended to reach space. It was not just a suborbital mission but a squarely sub-space one, unlike competitor Skyroot’s 2022-launch of Prarambh, which achieved an apogee of 89.5 kilometers—versus the less than 10 of SOrTeD.

As can be gauged from Sibu Tripathi’s previous report, SOrTeD’s true goal was to demonstrate and learn from a controlled minute-long flight, using a minimal rocket structure powered by the in-house developed 3D-printed semi-cryogenic kerolox engine called Agnilet. The flight was successful at that goal. Having said that, the private company did not livestream the launch nor share even high-level flight parameters. Based on the launch video, which came through unofficial means, the engine burnout seems to have happened about five seconds earlier than expected. Since we don’t know the differences between the achieved and intended trajectory though, including the maximum altitude SOrTeD achieved, it’s hard to gauge discrepancies.

ISRO provided the flight termination system for SOrTeD, which thankfully didn’t need to be activated. ISRO also helped the company with mission reviews and enabled Agnikul to set up their private launchpad at the Sriharikota spaceport.

The turbulent trajectory aheadLaunch of the second SSLV rocket on February 10, 2023. Image: ISROAgnikul will use data from the SOrTeD mission to characterize the performance of their systems and prepare for future launches. The company raised $26.7 million last year to start working towards multiple orbital launch attempts of their customizable Agnibaan small-lift launch vehicle. Agnibaan can loft a maximum of 300 kilograms to a 700-kilometer Earth orbit. While SOrTeD is certainly a positive step for Agnikul, a space-reaching orbital test flight will require hitting or absorbing many more milestones. As such, it’s hard to see the company making an orbital attempt in 2025 as claimed.

Competitor Skyroot is further along in attempting an orbital flight of their small-lift rocket called Vikram-I. The company successfully test fired the rocket’s second stage motor called Kalam-250 in March. The company also recently raised $27.5 million, hoping to launch Vikram-I by end of year. 2025 remains realistic though. Other recent Vikram-I milestones include flight qualifying its Raman-I engine, which will provide roll attitude control, hot firing the Raman-II engine powering Vikram-I’s fourth stage, and the first stage passing pressure testing.

However, the trouble is neither company has announced a confirmed payload customer for their orbital flights, citing only letters of intent and MoUs with potential customers thus far. Furthermore, both Skyroot and Agnikul also need to compete with ISRO’s own SSLV rocket, which not only has had a successful orbital demonstration already but will be productionized via an impending industry handover. As such, my concern is that even after demonstrating successful orbital flights, Indian private rocket companies might find themselves strapped for customers in an already cut-throat market.

It’s hard enough being a rocket company out of US soil; an Indian entity only faces even more hurdles. While the Indian government has opened up approval-less foreign direct investments (FDI) for the country’s private space sector, launch vehicle companies are only allowed to freely seek up to 49% in FDI, likely for national security reasons but which do hamper an Indian rocket startup’s ability to scale. With the nature of the competition laid out above, and without a high launch cadence, it will be an uphill battle for these companies to survive and be profitable this decade—unless they pivot to serving the country’s strategic needs?

Preparing for human spaceflightISRO has been doing a comprehensive $240-million upgrade to the second launchpad at Sriharikota in the lead up to indigenously launching astronauts to space mid-decade as part of its Gaganyaan program, U Tejonmayam reports. This includes an egress system and guesthouses for crew. Every major launchpad system will have redundancies, including launch checkout systems.

Relatedly, at part of a recent visit to ISRO by the US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti, the Indian space agency chief S. Somanath discussed an intent to have future Gaganyaan cargo modules provide supplies to the International Space Station. This builds on the interest previously shown by private US companies to leverage parts of Gaganyaan’s technology stack. Chethan Kumar reported last year that Blue Origin and ISRO are keen on using the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3)—India’s rocket of choice for Gaganyaan—to launch capsules to service Blue’s upcoming commercial space station called Orbital Reef. Voyager Space announced similar intentions last year for its upcoming Starlab commercial space station for which it has partnered with Airbus.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, KaleidEO, PierSight, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress report. If you too love my work of trying to capture true trajectories of Indian space, join them!

Ramping up India’s most powerful rocketLiftoff of the Moonbound Chandrayaan 3 by a LVM3 rocket. Image: ISROThe LVM3 rocket itself is on an interesting inflection point. Long known as the GSLV Mk III, India’s most powerful rocket has launched seven times so far—all successfully. These flights notably include Chandrayaan 3’s launch last year as well as the complex orbital deployment of two sets of 36 OneWeb satellites, which lent ISRO a small but definitive place in the medium-lift global space launch market.

Now ISRO wants to ramp up LVM3’s production rate from two a year to four, and then six, via a public-private partnership with the Indian industry as formally stated on May 10 in a Request for Qualification from NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), a Department of Space company tasked with commercializing Indian space technologies. Citing “substantial demand for launching communication satellites in GTO and satellites for Mega constellations in LEO”, NSIL and ISRO say they hope for 60 to 65 launches of the LVM3 across a decade. This move is the latest in a broader effort to increase production rates of ISRO’s launch vehicle fleet via industry handovers, starting with the PSLV and then followed by the SSLV.

In parallel, ISRO will upgrade LVM3’s core stage to an indigenously built 2000 KiloNewton semi-cryogenic kerolox engine, replacing the existing two Vikas engines. This will increase the rocket’s GTO capacity from ~4,000 kilograms to ~6,000. ISRO is also testing engine restart capability for LVM3’s upper stage cryogenic engine.

If ISRO is successful at increasing LVM3’s production rate as well as payload capacity within the next few years, such a steady flow of this launch vehicle could finally allow the space agency to equitably serve not just its human spaceflight and commercial launch ambitions but its planetary missions too, which have otherwise been deprioritized like in the case of Chandrayaan 3 and Shukrayaan in favor of hitting commercial or Gaganyaan milestones.

Tangent: ISRO has also been making progress in improving the performance of the PSLV’s fourth stage with an additively manufactured engine and lightweight carbon-carbon composite nozzle coming soon down the line. For the latter, Mukunth makes an interesting related comment: Infinity in 15 kilograms.

More private and commercial updates Following the release of India’s much-awaited new space policy early last year, and the government allowing private Indian space companies to get foreign direct investments (FDI), IN-SPACe released new guidelines and procedures for companies conducting space activities, as an implementation of the new space policy. However, Ashwin Prasad points out how the guidelines bring into question IN-SPACe’s ability to be an effective authorizer while the entity also faces conflicts in its paradoxical role of being both a promoter and regulator* of private Indian space activities. * Bengaluru- and Cupertino-based SkyServe successfully conducted their first orbital demonstration of smart Earth imaging. In mid-April, the company uplinked their edge computing software stack called STORM on European partner D-Orbit’s satellite, which was launched in 2022 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Within a minute of the satellite photographing a large area in the Egypt-Sinai Peninsula, STORM corrected errors in the imagery, detected and masked clouds and water, identified vegetation, and more, after which it sent back memory-friendly image files to Earth. SkyServe is demonstrating that satellites can do more than what they were envisioned for at launch, and that actionable data can be served faster. The company’s next mission in a series of progressive demonstrations will be on another satellite that’s already in orbit as well. SkyServe has partnered with US-based Loft Orbital to have their YAM-6 satellite—launched aboard a Falcon 9 Transporter on March 4—perform automated tasking and sequencing based on the part of Earth it is observing.

More Indian Space* The recent aurora-causing solar flares and coronal mass ejections were observed by ISRO spacecraft too, specifically by the Aditya-L1 solar telescope and the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter—which doesn’t just study the Moon’s surface but observes the Sun too. Notably, ISRO’s post about observing these eruptive solar events mentions measurements by all of Aditya-L1’s instruments except the coronagraph VELC and the ultraviolet imager SUIT, which are facing calibration issues the nature of which ISRO has been frustratingly silent on. * The third India Space Congress will take place in New Delhi from June 26-28, with an agenda that spans the whole spectrum of the Indian space technology industry. I will be a speaker on a lunar-related panel, and if you’d like to connect with me for a meeting, get in touch.

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An artist’s concept showing initial plans for the Sino-led scientific Moonbase on the Moon’s south pole. Image: CNSA / RoscosmosThrough a CASC news release on April 26, chief designer of China's lunar exploration program Wu Weiren revealed that the upcoming Sino-led long-term Moonbase called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) will have an orbital presence too. While this element of the otherwise surface-based ILRS located on the Moon’s south pole will only exist circa 2045, the news page says the space station will be of “considerable scale” and host multiple continuous experiments. CNSA’s Queqiao satellite constellation should be fully online by then to serve the navigation and communications needs of the many orbital and surface lunar assets operated by China and its currently about two dozen partners. China aims to have 50 nation partners and 500 international organizational collaborators for ILRS.

Following China’s first crewed Moon landing, currently targeting 2030, the country will focus on building the surface phase of ILRS circa 2035. Key to realizing this is a new super heavy-lift—and eventually reusable—Saturn-V class rocket called the Long March 9. China announced in April that it aims to test launch a Long March 9 by 2032. The rocket can put 50,000 kilograms of spacecraft hardware on a Moon-ward trajectory, which is almost twice the performance of the Long March 10 and NASA’s current SLS rocket both of which will be used to send humans to Luna. Relatedly, Andrew Jones reported in May 2023 that China started using an advanced new facility in Tongchuan dedicated to test firing huge rocket engines, starting with the ones being prototyped and built for the Long March 9 and 10.

Earth and our Moon as seen from beyond the lunar farside by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft on October 28, 2014. Image: CASTOnce the Long March 9 is operational, China intends to use it to deliver huge amounts of cargo, and possibly even more crew, to the ILRS Moonbase. The rocket will deliver critical infrastructure for sustainable surface hubs via missions named ILRS-1 through 5. This includes infrastructure for energy needs, communications, transportation services (including landers, rover, hoppers, and ascent vehicles), scientific research equipment, in-situ resource utilization technologies, and more.

The ILRS Moonbase will host large-scale science and technology experiments continually via remotely operated robots and, when available, via humans. It was in 2023 that China finalized key scientific goals of ILRS, as stated by Zou Yongliao, head of the lunar and deep space exploration division at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. These goals are:

• Learning about our Moon’s evolution & structure
• Conducting lunar-based astronomy for doing cosmology and studying habitable exoplanets
• Observing the Sun and Earth from the scientifically unique vantage point of our Moon
• Conducting lunar-based experiments like studying plant growth

Building on Chang’e 8 and China’s first crewed landing, ILRS will also see multiple demonstrations related to extracting and using local lunar resources such as water ice, and melting soil to create 3D-printed structures.

Relatedly, a recent document China submitted to the UN COPUOS concerning the legality of utilizing lunar resources suggests that the country sees such activities as permissible under current international law in much the same way the US-led Artemis Accords does. Some western experts saw China’s action as a positive development since it can now enable—in principle—a mutual dialogue for cooperative resource governance amid a decidedly international fora. In the Explainer Series by Spaceport SARABHAI, Professor Yun Zhao provides high-level context on China’s legal space landscape and the lens through which the country might view such activities.

The search for lunar water deepensIllustration of volcanism on the Moon releasing water vapor. Image: Olga Prilipko HuberBy combining optical, radar, neutron, and other data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), complemented by the ISRO Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s dual-frequency SAR observations, a new study led by several Indian scientists estimates that the Moon’s poles host five to eight times more water ice 1-3 meters underground than near the surface. They also find that the extent of such water ice appears to be about twice as large at the lunar north than south.

The study has implications for the many upcoming lunar missions dedicated to studying the nature, abundance, and accessibility of lunar water, which include CNSA’s upcoming Chang’e 7 mission, the NASA VIPER and JAXA-ISRO LUPEX rovers, and NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter. [Tangent: ISRO aids Artemis]

The study also suggests based on various factors that the Moon’s past volcanism is the primary source of this subsurface water ice. And indeed, a May 2o22 paper aggregating and analyzing results from multiple orbiters and studies has also posited volcanism to be a viable source of lunar polar water deposits. But not all researchers agree.

A February 2022 study analyzed water and other volatiles detected by NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft to determine the likelihood of their source being volcanoes, comets, micrometeorites, the solar wind, or even the Earth’s atmosphere. The volatile ratios from the study suggested comets to be the most abundant lunar water source followed by micrometeorites. A related 2020 study supports this view too since it found that even temporary atmospheres created by the peak volcanic Moon over 3 billion years ago were likely inefficient in transferring and depositing lots of volatiles to permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s poles.

Scientists figuring out this and other related Moon mysteries will help us know not just how our Moon evolved but also what kinds of processes drive the evolution of airless planetary bodies across the Solar System.

The Lunar Trailblazer orbiter will follow up on a key discovery by the Chandrayaan 1 mission: water and hydroxyl (blue and violet on the map) on the Moon. Image: ISRO / NASA

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More mission updates Philip Sloss reports that the launch of the first two modules forming the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat could now be as late as December 2027 instead of September 2025. The Gateway’s HALO habitat module is undergoing a series of structural stress tests after which its components and subsystems can be outfitted later this year. For its SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, HALO will be docked to the PPE propulsion module pre-launch. The PPE structure is now ready for installation of its propulsion system components, starting with tanks. NASA will conduct the critical design review for the integrated spacecraft in the second half of 2024. * Also see: A gist of Gateway science * For a future Moon landing mission currently targeting a 2027 launch, ispace is exploring the feasibility of using radioactive heater units (RHUs) from the University of Leicester to enable the lander to survive frigid lunar nights. The university is doing said technology development in collaboration with the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory, with funding and support from ESA, UKSA, and the UK International Bilateral Fund. Recall that ispace Japan was awarded a $80 million government grant in October 2023 to develop and launch this lander, whose design is called Series 3*. It will carry more than 100 kilograms of payload to the Moon as opposed to the 30-kilogram capacity of Series 1, which flew on the company’s Mission 1 and will fly for Mission 2 too later this year. Based on the mass class and known information about the Series 3 lander, it seems similar to or borrowing from the Series 2 / APEX lander being developed by ispace US for an upcoming NASA CLPS mission via partner Draper.

Explore the Moon’s mountainsA landscape of lunar mountains, part of the Montes Carpatus volcanic range. Image: NASA / LRO / ASU / GSFC* With cool elevation graphs and pictures, Jim Singh explores our Moon’s highest, lowest, and tallest spots. 🌖📏 * The intense way Moon mountains form ☄️…💥 * Gallery: Luna’s marvelous mountains 🏔️✨

More Moon* At the second workshop of multiple countries that have signed the US-led Artemis Accords, hosted by CSA from May 21–23, officials from 24 nations discussed how countries exploring the Moon should avoid interference with activities of others doing so, could have better interoperability, and can share scientific data as widely as possible, all building upon the bare minimum set of mission information expected to be shared publicly such as expected launch dates, the nature of mission activities, and landing sites.

Honestly, very few things feel as satiating as running into people at a conference who express how much they love my blog jatan.space. Multiple people did that at a US-India Commercial Space meet last week. I love being an independent writer but such moments make the challenges worthwhile.

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Welcome to the third Chinese lunar special after Moon Monday #174 and Moon Monday #175. In this edition, the top story focuses on contextualizing all that comprises China’s first crewed Moon landing mission.

CGI concept of China’s first crewed Moon landing mission. Image: PhilLeafSpaceIt’s incredible how China has made systematic strides with their Moon missions. The successful lunar orbiters Chang’e 1 and Chang’e 2 led to the Moon landing of Chang’e 3 in 2013, which in turn led to the farside lunar landing of Chang’e 4 later in the decade. CNSA once again upped engineering complexity by bringing lunar samples to Earth with Chang’e 5 in 2020, and hopes to do it again with the ongoing Chang’e 6 mission of collecting the first ever samples from the Moon’s enigmatically distinct farside.

CNSA is already preparing for a 2026 launch of Chang’e 7, which should provide scientists with a tactile sense of the true nature and accessibility of water ice deposits on the Moon’s south pole. Two years later, China hopes to demonstrate technologies like building 3D-printed bricks out of lunar soil as part of Chang’e 8. Combined, these two missions will allow China to continue charting a clear path that leads to putting humans on the Moon by end of decade—work on which also seems to be progressing well. At a recent press conference, leading officials from the China Manned Space Engineering Office said that elements of China’s first crewed lunar landing mission have progressed into prototype production and test stages.

While not yet announced, owing to the mission’s complexity, it can be expected that China will conduct at least one uncrewed lunar landing and a crewed lunar orbital flight before attempting to land humans on Luna. It will be interesting to see if China maintains the Chang’e naming scheme for crewed or crew-linked Moon missions or calls them something else entirely.

China’s Long March 2F rocket flying with astronauts, with a lunar backdrop. Image: XinhuaRecall that China’s crewed Moon landing plan involves building a giant new rocket called Long March 10, which will take off from a new launchpad in Wenchang. The Long March 10 will be capable of sending 27,000 kilograms of payload on a trajectory to Luna, matching the performance of NASA’s current SLS rocket and more than tripling China’s ability to send things to the Moon compared to their current best Long March 5 rocket—from which the 10 is derived. Andrew Jones reported in May 2023 that China begun using a new advanced facility in Tongchuan dedicated to test firing huge rocket engines, including the ones being prototyped and built for the Long March 10.

For the crewed landing mission end of decade, a Long March 10 rocket will launch a ~26,000-kilogram spacecraft named Mengzhou Y, which will carry three to four astronauts to lunar orbit. There it would dock with the similarly massive Lanyue lunar lander—itself launched on another Long March 10. After the docking, two astronauts will transfer to the lander for a lunar touchdown, and return to orbit after exploring the Moon for at least six hours, and possibly a few days.

In July 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 as well!

🛰️I’d like to express thanks and give a shoutout to *Andrew Jones *for his excellent reporting on China’s space program. It’s his years-long coverage of China’s evolving crewed landing plans that allowed me to put together many major—and minor!—chunks of this overview.Not a limited mission scopeWhile China’s first crewed mission may be of a short duration, do not consider it too limited and Apollo-like against the expansive ambitions of Artemis, as was recently implied by Ars Technica and Payload Space. Other than the long-term ILRS Moonbase plans, the hardware elements themselves leave room for better missions. For one, China is designing the spacesuits such that astronauts should be able to explore the lunar surface for at least eight hours at a time, which implies an expansive next set of missions. Furthermore, CMSA solicited industry proposals for the first landing mission’s rover in May 2023, which the crew can drive up to 10 kilometers from the landed site. That’s more than the range of the rover driven by Apollo astronauts but does fall short of the 20-kilometer peak of the upcoming Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle. 10 kilometers is nevertheless a decent range for long duration missions.

China’s delays will likely be technical in natureWhile China’s goal for a crewed Moon landing doesn’t face significant internal political blockages, like those the US needs to deal with to push the Artemis program forward, technical delays are always possible. In fact, it’s the engineering failures that have primarily slowed down China’s lunar ambitions.

Recall that a failure of the Long March 5 rocket delayed Chang’e 5 by three years. Likewise, the Long March 10 is an even more complex launch vehicle which could take time getting to an operational flight safe enough for humans to fly on. Chang’e 6 got delayed by two years despite having the same broad design as Chang’e 5. Why? Its communications relay satellite Queqiao 2 needed a rethink—but which now is the beginning of a more ambitious communications constellation around the Moon. Likewise, China’s crewed landing system might face realization complexities that induce delays.

Either way, it’ll be good to have a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index, Narayan Prasad and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this community resource too, join them!

Mission updatesEngineers test the VIPER rover’s wheel movement and rotation in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Image: NASA / Helen Arase Vargas Jeff Foust reports that for Intuitive Machines’ second Moon landing mission targeting launch end of year as part of NASA’s CLPS program, the company is refining several systems on its Nova-C lander with the hope of bagging full success this time around instead of the partial one with their first CLPS mission IM-1—which NASA and Intuitive disappointingly skewed the success criteria of. * NASA’s upcoming VIPER CLPS rover designed to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole seems to have gotten its four wheels and completed its assembly as the mission team is now preparing to send the vehicle for the standard series of environmental tests designed to ensure VIPER can withstand the harsh conditions of launch, in space, and at the Moon. VIPER intends to explore areas in and around permanently shadowed regions for over four months to unravel the nature, abundance, and accessibility of lunar water ice deposits to help NASA plan crewed Artemis missions. While VIPER was nominally being planned for a November 2024 launch onboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, the company’s failed first Moon mission in January might induce delays and likely also more tests and associated costs/funds. * ispace Europe announced that the upcoming Draper-led CLPS mission—wherein ispace’s US subsidiary is providing the APEX lander to touchdown on the Moon’s farside—will carry a location-measuring payload from Romania-based Control Data Systems. A rover will deploy it on the lunar surface to test the precision of localization measurements via pings from the lander. * Also see: ispace doubles down on farside Moon mission*

More MoonThe Artemis I Orion spacecraft lost big chunks of its heat shield material in several places, and some of its separation bolts melted and eroded. Image: NASA / OIG Marcia Smith reports that NASA is getting an independent review of the concerning damage incurred by the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield during Artemis I’s flight in 2022 to better understand why it didn’t work as designed. Earlier this month, a public report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed to the US taxpayers that the heat shield had taken a deeper beating than the agency let on a few months after the mission, then deeming it to be a non-blocker for the upcoming crew-carrying Artemis II launch in late 2025. Understanding the issue is a primary blocker for Artemis II because there’s no other way to test the shield at a relevant scale. Recall that NASA already installed the Artemis II Orion’s heat shield in June 2023. * On May 15, Lithuania became the 40th nation worldwide and the 18th in Europe to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. * To maximize scientific gains from lunar samples brought to Earth by Artemis astronauts, the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG)—which helps the agency with scientific, technical, commercial, and operational analysis to form and meet its lunar exploration objectives—is seeking input from the lunar community at large via a 15-minute survey. It seems like the survey is open to scientists outside the US, which is great. Inputs from this survey are expected to directly aid the 12-personArtemis III Geology Team, which will not only provide sampling strategies for water ice and special lunar materials of interest but also be involved in initial studies of returned samples. * There’s now a subreddit for Moon Monday! Join the community: reddit.com/r/moonmonday* 🚀🌙

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This week the Chinese lunar theme continues from Moon Monday #174 as we try to get a contextual understanding of the country’s lunar endeavors—information about which is otherwise usually scattered in bits and pieces.

Illustration of the Chang’e 6 spacecraft stack in lunar orbit. Image: CNSA / CGTNNew craft around Luna, including a first for PakistanOn May 8, China’s Chang’e 6 sample return spacecraft stack successfully entered an elliptical orbit around our Moon. It was the 3,000-newton engine on the orbiter module which performed the braking burn, slowing the spacecraft stack enough to be captured by Luna’s gravity.

Shortly after, Chang’e 6 deployed Pakistan’s 7-kilogram CubeSat called ICUBE-Q in orbit, making it the country’s first mission exploring our cosmic companion. Developed by Pakistan’s Institute of Space Technology (IST) with aid from China’s Shanghai Jiaotong University, ICUBE-Q hosts two optical cameras and a magnetometer. Scientists hope the orbiter will detect potential signs of water ice on the Moon’s poles.

It was last year that Pakistan formally joined the upcoming China-led long-term scientific base on the Moon’s south pole called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Interestingly, CNSA’s post announcing ICUBE-Q’s orbital deployment mentions that Pakistan also wants to fly hardware onboard China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 mission (more on it below), and that Pakistan has applied to study lunar samples brought to Earth by Chang’e 5.

A close look at a Chang’e 5 lunar sample, labelled CE5C0000YJYX03501GP. Image: CNSATo me, this development begs a question: why isn’t India applying to study Chang’e 5 samples too? Sure, India and China aren’t on friendly terms but so aren’t US and China, and yet NASA managed to secure a remarkable exception from the US Congress for the country’s researchers to be able to apply to access and study Chang’e 5 samples. Indian space science stands to benefit from studying these samples both academically as well as practically, the latter for ISRO’s not-yet-commissioned Chandrayaan 4 mission which intends to bring lunar samples later this decade. Indian science research institutions applying to study Chang’e 5 samples could naturally open windows for access to Chang’e 6 samples too.

Also see: How not to interpret Pakistan joining China’s long-term lunar exploration plans

Prepare for crew and double down with mission eightIllustration of the Chang’e 8 lander on the Moon’s south pole. Image: CNSAAfter CNSA’s upcoming Chang’e 7 mission helps scientists get a tactile sense of the true nature and accessibility of water ice deposits on the Moon’s south pole, the agency will follow it up with Chang’e 8 two years later. Launching on a Long March 5 rocket in 2028, the mission will comprise a lander, a rover, and an “operation robot” to collectively explore with 14 instruments the local geology and environment. Most crucially, with Chang’e 8, CNSA aims to test technologies most relevant to begin sending crew to the Moon starting end of decade.

As Ling Xin reported, CNSA called for domestic proposals for 9 out of 14 of the Chang’e 8 instruments in February. One such payload on the lander will melt lunar soil and transform it via 3D printing into parts that can be assembled. Another instrument will monitor and inspect this process. Chang’e 8’s ~100-kilogram “operation robot”—which will move around quickly by lunar robotic rover standards—will carry the 3D-printed parts from the lander to a working area and assemble basic structures as a 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 samples on the Moon for future missions to retrieve them and bring to Earth.

Just like Chang’e 7, and similar to the lunar seismometers selected to fly on the NASA-funded Draper-led CLPS mission and Artemis III, Chang’e 8 will have a seismometer to help scientists better understand the lunar interior and also constrain the rate of seismic activity 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.

What’s also notable about Chang’e 8 is that China has further increased the scope of international contributions. While Chang’e 6 and 7 each offer space for 15-20 kilograms of international instruments, China has been accepting proposals for scientific instruments, technology payloads, and even system-level contributions amassing 200 kilograms for Chang’e 8. As Andrew Jones has reported, CNSA is expected to announce selections for the same by Q3 this year.

Many thanks to Off Planet Researchfor sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this community resource too, join them and support my work.

More Moon* Andrew Jones reports that as part of a new set of cutting-edge space science projects, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is backing a mission comprising 10 small lunar orbiters which when on the lunar farside will measure faint but unique radio signals from our Universe’s ‘Dark Age’—a slice of time right before the first stars were born. It makes the mission’s goal similar to NASA’s upcoming LuSEE-Night lunar payload. * ispace Japan’s second Moon lander—launching end of 2024—will carry a memory disk by UNESCO, which aims to showcase and preserve the linguistic diversity of many human cultures from across the globe. Relatedly, Lonestar also recently announced their memory bank for the Moon, which will be on Intuitive Machines’ second Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program as proof-of-concept. Recall that Lonestar raised $5 million last year towards establishing virtual and hardware-based commercial lunar data centers. * NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy is asking the lunar community to help NASA craft a “deconfliction” framework that helps evaluate the value of landing regions, suggests how to avoid contaminating their natural states to the extent possible, and helps reduce interference to it by other missions. The call is an extension of said office’s published report last year, which prompted NASA and its partners to plan for several policy and technical challenges that could stem from Moon landing missions clustering at the relatively small water-hosting south pole. * Andrew Jones reports that Serbia—which isn’t an ESA member—became the 11th country to join the China-led long-term scientific base on the Moon’s south pole called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). * Communicating lunar exploration via podcasts and panels

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Image: Duke University’s Space Diplomacy LabI’ve been speaking about exploring space, our Moon, and science writing on multiple forums lately, more so than the usual. But I didn’t want to share each of these talks and interviews as individual blog posts, and then also promote them all on like five social networks. These “modern” ways of reaching humans on the Web are, frankly, stupid and a waste of time. And so I’m batching all recent (recorded) talks and sharing them as this one blog+newsletter post, which I feel should be worth your browsing time.

Duke University’s Space Diplomacy LabI was invited by the Duke University’s Space Diplomacy Lab to speak at their Annual Media Roundtable alongside Kristin Fisher, CNN’s Space Correspondent. Here’s the video. I first spoke about how learning the exact nature of the Moon’s water ice deposits is the most interesting thing to look forward to in lunar exploration. I then contextualized India’s recent space developments in the international scene, and highlighted the scope and potential of the country’s Gaganyaan program to send humans to space. Last but certainly not the least, I highlighted how people in power jumping the gun with policy recommendations based on shallow narratives about lunar missions by other countries must account for engineering and scientific factors or else it could adversely affect international cooperation and collaboration, like for the US and China.

But this you would only understand if you have scientists and engineers talking to policy makers. [...] As journalists, our job is to simplify and clarify the layers of what scientists and engineers do, as well as the geopolitical and policy elements.

Related: Did China choose the same lunar landing sites as the US for Chang’e 7? Or is it the other way round?

Speaking on the Space Industry podcastThe Space Industry podcast by satsearch—or what I like to call the Amazon for the space industry and companies—featured me as their guest on Episode 60! We discuss planetary and lunar exploration themes of various countries, and what independent space writing has been like for me these past few years. Oh, and I might have said that the commercial lunar ecosystem doesn’t exist. :)

Give it a listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or directly.

Keep looking up!I enjoyed talking to Abhinav Yadav on his podcast Traveling Through Space which features science communicators. We spoke about why it’s so important to get people to look up at our Moon and wonder! I also explain the writing process I follow for my weekly Moon Monday blog+newsletter.

Tune in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or listen directly.

Sustainable and commercial lunar exploration? A panel discussionThe Asia Pacific Oceania Space Association hosted a panel discussion on what would it take to have sustainable and commercial exploration of the Moon. Are we there yet with the latter? Hint: we are not. On my end of the panel, I stressed that we don’t even know the true nature, abundance, and accessibility of lunar water ice deposits yet, which is something upcoming missions like NASA’s VIPER, the ISRO-JAXA LUPEX rover, and CNSA Chang’e 7 will help us converge on. And so talks about imminent Moonbases and sustainable lunar presence are more aspirational at this point than being housed on facts. But we should remember that there are many more reasons to explore our Moon anyway.

Lastly, I had the opportunity to help explain a wider audience why the US White House recently asked NASA to create an independent time standard for the Moon; got quoted on the Indian Express to that end. ⏳ ... ⌛️ ... 🌙

If you like my efforts to promote global space and Moon exploration among people at large, I’d appreciate your support:

Sponsor my independent writing ♡If you’d like me to speak at your event, conference, or podcast, get in touch:

Email me: hey@jatan.space

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This week’s Moon Monday is a Chinese lunar program special, covering the incredible Chang’e 6 and 7 missions, with some commentary questioning claims and narratives around some of China’s decisions. At 2600 words, this is likely the longest Moon Monday ever so grab a coffee or beverage of your choice and enjoy an uninterrupted read.

Launch of the Chang’e 6 sample return Moon mission by a Long March 5 rocket. The launch attracted hundreds of thousands of excited spectators at and around the coastal Wenchang Space Launch Center. Image: CNSA / XinhuaOn Chang’e 6 and its rich sampling siteOn May 3 at 9:30 UTC, a Chinese Long March 5 rocket launched Chang’e 6, the world’s first spacecraft designed to fetch samples from the Moon’s farside. About 37 minutes after liftoff, the 8200-kilogram Chang’e 6 spacecraft stack separated from the rocket, entering—per CNSA—its planned orbit of 200 by 380,000 kilometers.

Chang’e 6’s complex 53-day mission involves orchestrating four spacecraft: an orbiter, a lander, an ascender, and a reentry capsule (returner). The combined stack will reach Luna on May 7, and attempt entering into its orbit by firing the orbiter’s engines. At some unspecified point the Chang’e 6 lander, carrying atop it the ascender, will separate from the orbiter. In early June, the lander will attempt a soft touchdown within the 3.98-billion-year old, 500-kilometer wide Apollo impact crater on the Moon’s farside, specifically in one of the three candidate regions near Apollo’s southern rim each of which differ in their ages and geology.

The Chang’e 6 lander’s instrument suite—comprising cameras, a ground penetrating radar, and a mineral spectrometer—will provide the context necessary to identify the best spots to drill and scoop samples from. As Andrew Jones reports, the lander hosts a surprise mini-rover carrying an infrared spectrometer which might help. After collecting up to two kilograms of lunar farside material and loading them into the ascent vehicle, the latter will launch itself into lunar orbit and carefully dock with the orbiter. The samples will then be transferred to the reentry capsule. After the ascender is jettisoned, the orbiter will return towards Earth on June 25 and release the capsule, which will perform a bounced atmospheric reentry to hopefully safely descend and land in China’s northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

Chang’e 6 mission profile (with an edit to correct the landing date). Graphic: SCMPThe Chang’e 6 lunar samples will be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples. Since the Apollo crater is embedded in the Moon’s largest, deepest, and oldest crater, the 2500-kilometer-wide South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, the diversity of materials within Chang’e 6 samples could help scientists worldwide solve a whole host of Moon mysteries—from explaining why the lunar farside is so enigmatically distinct to the familiar nearside, which is necessary to understand not just Luna’s evolution but that of our Solar System, to better understanding our Moon’s origin. Since the three Chang’e 6 landing regions along the Apollo crater’s southern rim have different ages and geological features, the Chang’e 6 samples would help solve differing extents of these Moon mysteries—depending on where Chang’e 6 decides to land, a decision CNSA will take before descent based on engineering and operational constraints.

*Top left: The Chang’e 6 landing zone (red box) in the Apollo crater within the South Pole-Aitken basin (black circle); Bottom left: The three Chang’e 6 candidate landing regions (colored lines); also marked with a white cross is the Chang’e 4 landing site; Right:* Zoomed in view of the three candidate landing regions lying along the southern rim of the Apollo crater. Images: Xingguo Zeng, Wei Zuo, et al.Is China landing Chang’e 6 in the Apollo crater to signal the US of a race?Forbes published an article by Greg Autry that implies the same:

There is a serious race to the Moon in a quest for mineral resources and China is sending us a message with this mission. Chang’e 6 will land in the resource-rich South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin. Specifically, China is targeting a crater called “Apollo” which is named in honor of America’s great lunar achievement. Apollo’s interior and adjacent craters are named for Apollo astronauts and memorialize deceased NASA employees including the lost crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Chang’e 6 will literally raise a communist Chinese flag there. The Chinese are extremely careful with protocol, any small slight is intentional.

Imagine being so deep in your own narrative that you find even the name of the region hosting a mission’s landing site to be an intentional declaration of a race and active hostility. Yes, China has its own political gains from choosing to go to the Moon’s farside a second time with another unique mission but as far as the landing site itself is concerned, reading the Chang’e 6 landing site paper and its related trail firmly reveals its selection to be a purely engineering and scientific process based on operational abilities and constraints. Maybe, just maybe, every single space decision of China—or that of any other country—doesn’t orbit the US.

More importantly, recall that late last year NASA secured a remarkable exception from the US Congress for the country’s researchers to be able to apply to access and study China-brought Chang’e 5 samples. This is the sort of bridge that doesn’t get built in a day. But weaponizing even the most mundane, emergent aspects of a complex mission is the kind of aggressive propaganda that further fuels distrust and impedes global scientific progress. Thankfully, so far it seems like the policy of international (and US) access to Chang’e 5 lunar samples will extend to Chang’e 6.

International instruments onboardThe Chang’e 6 spacecraft stack, with the lander and orbiter prominently visible. Image: CNSAThe Chang’e 6 mission also carries various international payloads. Its orbiter will deploy Pakistan’s 7-kilogram CubeSat called ICUBE-Q, making it the country’s first Moon mission. Developed by Pakistan’s Institute of Space Technology (IST) with aid from China, ICUBE-Q hosts two optical cameras and a magnetometer, and hopes to detect potential signs of water ice on the Moon’s poles.

The Chang’e 6 lander carries three instruments from Europe:

1. The French space agency’s DORN instrument will measure the noble gas radon leaking out of the Moon’s surface, which would be independent evidence that our Moon and Earth do indeed have a common origin. DORN will also study volatile gases such as water vapor in the Moon’s exosphere.
2. Italy-based SCF Lab’s INRRI retroreflector will reflect laser pulses from lunar orbiters to make precise distance measurements and aid their navigation.
3. NILS, an instrument from the Swedish Institute for Space Physics, will detect highly energetic neutral solar wind atoms slamming and getting reflected from the Moon’s surface. This will help scientists study surface elements as well as local magnetic fields.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Kris Zacny of Honeybee Robotics, and Gordon Roesler for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this community resource too, please join them and support my work.

Cue Queqiao 2Since Chang’e 6’s surface mission will on the Moon’s farside, the side we can’t see from Earth, mission operators will command the lander and receive data from it via the recently launched Queqiao 2 relay orbiter, which China successfully tested in April. Queqiao 2 will also relay communications for China’s upcoming Change’e 7 (more on that below) and Chang’e 8 landers, currently targeting launch in 2026 and 2028 respectively. The Queqiao 2 mission is testing and verifying technologies that will feed into the upcoming Queqiao satellite constellation, the world’d first lunar navigation & communications service. The Queqiao constellation could also provide communications support for China’s first crewed Moon landing, currently targeting a launch by 2030.

The instrumental & increasingly international 7Illustration of the Chang’e 7 lander and orbiter. Image: CMGCNSA is targeting launching the Chang’e 7 lander and orbiter in 2026. The lander, after touching down in one of the key identified landing regions on the Moon’s south pole, will deploy a rover and one or two hoppers. Similar to the NASA VIPER and JAXA-ISRO LUPEX missions, one of the Chang’e 7 elements will use a drill to sample materials in nearby permanently shadowed areas from varying depths. These will be fed into a heating furnace for the onboard Lunar Water Molecular Analyzer (LWMA) to detect water ice and other volatile resources like ammonia.

Chang’e 7 will also carry a ground-penetrating radar to map the local subsurface, make local magnetic field measurements, and carry spectrometers to measure the composition of the local lunar material. In similar vein to the seismometers selected to fly to the Moon on the NASA-funded Draper-led CLPS mission and Artemis III, Chang’e 7 will have one to help scientists better understand the lunar interior and also constrain the rate of seismic activity and amount of micrometeorite impacts on the lunar south pole, which will help safely plan lengthier crewed missions to the region in the future

Moreover, on April 24, CNSA announced that Chang’e 7 will carry six international scientific instruments. The orbiter will carry a hyperspectral mineral mapping camera made by Egypt and Bahrain, a three-kilogram instrument duo from Thailand to study solar storms and cosmic rays respectively, and a Swiss-aided radiation monitor to measure incoming and outgoing radiation to and from Earth. For Egypt, Bahrain, and Thailand, this mission represents their first study of Luna. On the other hand, the lander will carry a Russian lunar dust & plasma analyzer, a telescope from the International Lunar Observatory Association, and another retroreflector from Italy-based SCF Lab just like Chang’e 6.

The Chang’e 7 lander was supposed to carry UAE’s second lunar rover too but the partnership was apparently blocked by US export control rules.

Also see: A tale of lunar collaboration between JAXA and ISRO

Did China choose the same lunar landing sites as the US? Or is it the other way round?Some of the Chang’e 7 candidate landing sites on the Moon’s south pole. Image: DSELWestern media has tended to cover the Chang’e 7 candidate landing site near Shackleton crater as being “the same” as what NASA desires for the Artemis III crewed Moon landing mission. In fact, Gizmodo titled it “China Oversteps NASA in Choosing Coveted Shackleton Crater for Its Moon Lander”. So, did China really choose the same lunar landing sites as the US? Well, such framing is easily questionable:

• Firstly, it was always likely, and known, that the robotic Chang’e 7 would land on the Moon’s south pole before the crewed Artemis III does. So can we even call the former to be choosing “the same site” as the latter?
• Artemis III has 13 candidate landing zones at the moment, which is not exactly a “selection”.
• More importantly, Shackleton is a big 21-kilometer wide crater, and the number of mission-favorable areas on the rim and nearby ridges are relatively plenty. Even if both missions ultimately chose Shackleton as the main landing region, they may be reasonably far away not just in time but in space too.

While, yes, the water-hosting lunar south pole not being a massive place could eventually mean potential contest between countries—and companies—for some common sites but much before that comes the fact that there are purely engineering and scientific factors that make landing site selections converge to some locations. For example, the Sun perpetually circling the lunar polar horizon coupled with rocky terrain automatically render higher altitude areas desirable power-wise for touchdown—which is what most lunar polar missions end up converging to. I highlighted this point in an invited Media Roundtable discussion hosted by the Duke University recently:

It’s important to keep in mind that not all decisions are taken with the geopolitical adversary in mind. Some of them are purely engineering. But this you would only understand if you have scientists and engineers talking to policy makers. The narrative can cause issues to scale up, and then convert into a lot of unfriendliness that could be impact everyone badly…As journalists, our job is to simplify and clarify the layers of what scientists and engineers do, as well as the geopolitical and policy elements.

Scientists and engineers on both sides of the pond understand these technical factors but they aren’t the only ones in the space chain. Such factors should be considered first before jumping the gun with policy recommendations and changes that are based on shallow narratives. Again, these could also adversely affect international cooperation and collaboration. Ultimately, alarmist propaganda also makes discussing the real challenges more difficult.

Orion’s heat shield took a deeper beating than thoughtThe Artemis I Orion spacecraft lost big chunks of its heat shield material in several places, and some of its separation bolts melted and eroded. Image: NASA / OIGA critical new public report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) finally reveals to the US taxpayers, with pictures, that the heat shield of the Artemis I Orion spacecraft did in fact incur more damage than the agency let on a few months after the mission, then deeming it to be a non-blocker for the crew-carrying Artemis II launch. Several places on the heat shield lost big chunks instead of melting away. Even though the crew module ended up being safe, debris from these chunks could’ve damaged Orion’s parachutes, thus potentially threatening lives of future astronauts riding the capsule. Moreover, three out of four “separation bolts” on the shield substantially melted and eroded, allowing some heat to reach the crew module. More such hot gas entering the vehicle could risk lives. Jeff Foust reports that for Artemis II, NASA will install additional thermal protection material in the bolt gaps to circumvent this issue.

Understanding exactly why the heat shield didn’t work perfectly as designed is thus a primary blocker for Artemis II because there’s no other way to test it at a relevant scale. Recall that NASA already installed the Artemis II Orion’s heat shield in June 2023.

More Moon* As part of the pre-launch testing of the Artemis II Orion spacecraft stack, which will carry four astronauts around the Moon and back no earlier than September 2025, engineers completed checking that Orion’s electromagnetic emissions don’t cause interference with the spacecraft itself, or more specifically, with the functioning of its various components. * Ling Xin reports that by synthesizing data from CNSA’s Chang’e 1–4 missions, NASA’s LRO and twin GRAIL orbiters, and ISRO’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, China has made the highest resolution geological map of our Moon yet. The map, which took more than 100 researchers over a decade to compile, is free to use for non-commercial purposes, including lunar geology research and science communications. China itself is using the maps to support its growing lunar ambitions. The team is also working on furthering the map’s resolution, including making high-accuracy, derived regional maps suitable for advanced mission planning.

Image: Chinese Academy of Sciences / Xinhua🛰️*Reminder: *There’s no good way to follow official news from CNSA. And so I’ve created an RSS feed so you can easily follow such updates via a feed reader.

If you liked this exhaustive edition of Moon Monday, please consider supporting my work by sponsoring future editions of this community resource.

Thank you for reading!

– Jatan

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In this month’s Indian Space Progress edition, I want to highlight how increasing independence in being able to plan and execute planetary missions can lead to uniquely impactful collaborations between organizations globally. India’s Chandrayaan program has been becoming incrementally indigenous, and the two stories below highlight its utility with the case of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter.

How ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped JAXA nail SLIM’s Moon landingJapan’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter on March 16, 2024. Image: ISRO / Chandra TungathurthiOn January 19, the Japanese space agency JAXA’s SLIM lander touched down on the Moon merely 55 meters away from the center of its target spot, making it the most precise robotic planetary landing in history. A key part of how it achieved this feat is a tale of collaboration between JAXA and ISRO.

At the heart of SLIM’s precision landing ability is a technology JAXA calls “vision-based navigation”. During its descent, SLIM snapped images of the Moon and compared them to preloaded onboard orbital maps within just a few seconds to determine where it is and where it needs to go. These maps come from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, and JAXA’s own SELENE craft, each uniquely useful at various heights.

In a post-landing media release, SLIM’s Project Manager Shinichiro Sakai mentioned that the mission used Chandrayaan 2’s imagery not just during the lander’s final descent phase but also to decide the final target landing area pre-launch. This is because Chandrayaan 2’s Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) boasts a general imaging resolution of 0.2-0.3 meters/pixel, which is about twice LRO’s finest.

“JAXA sent us a request in 2021 to image SLIM’s landing site, and so we planned an orbital passover of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to acquire OHRC images for them,” says Amitabh Singh, head of ISRO’s Planetary and Space Science Data Processing Division and a lead scientist on the OHRC team. Then in 2023, ISRO provided JAXA with more images of the landing site from different sun angles, which helped JAXA engineers tune SLIM’s algorithms to instantly identify boulders and other hazards regardless of specific lighting conditions.

This image shows pictures of the Moon taken by Japan’s SLIM lander (blue boxes) when it was at about 50-meter altitudes. They are superimposed on the background view previously snapped by ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. The red frame shows the safe landing zone that SLIM autonomously selected based on hazards it detected. Image: ISRO / JAXA / SLIMEven though most modern robotic landers—including most recently India’s own Chandrayaan 3 and the US-based Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander—can find a good landing spot on their own during the final phase of a landing, the lack of an apt last-mile map affects the landing precision.

When SLIM was roughly 50 meters above the Moon’s surface, it hovered and identified touchdown hazards below it using vision-based navigation with Chandrayaan-2 imagery. But at this point one of its two main engine nozzles mysteriously detached, and the resulting off-center thrust made SLIM go sideways. SLIM’s guidance system identified this anomaly, and decided to descend using the hover-phase and onboard imagery while continually trying to stabilize its orientation with the working main engine and smaller thrusters. While SLIM’s vertical velocity of 1.4 meters per second on touchdown was well within acceptable bounds, the eastward lateral motion and touchdown orientation weren’t nominal, causing it to flip on the surface with its solar panels facing away from the sun. Even when afflicted, SLIM could see and target a safe spot to touch down upon and manage to avoid a crash.

India and Japan now look ahead to their next lunar mission called LUPEX, which is a collaborative effort. The nominal six-month mission comprises an ISRO-developed ~6000-kilogram lander which will deliver a JAXA-built ~350-kilogram rover to directly study the nature, abundance, and accessibility of water ice at the Moon’s south pole (between 89–90°S). To safely and precisely land LUPEX amid its unforgiving polar terrain, ISRO will build the lander with input from both Chandrayaan 3’s success and that of SLIM.

ISRO aids ArtemisThe 13 candidate landing zones for NASA’s Artemis III crewed Moon mission on the Moon’s south pole. Image: NASA / LRO / GSFC / ASU | Browse them on a mapFor ISRO, SLIM’s case also highlights how Chandrayaan 2 can provide advanced orbital data to help NASA better filter landing zones for the agency’s Artemis program to land humans on the Moon—especially as the 2009-launched LRO gracefully ages. While this has mostly remained an untapped opportunity, Amitabh says collaboration for the same has started. He adds that due to the rocky nature of the lunar south pole, knowing the height information of terrain features is as important as the imaging resolution. “We use OHRC stereo images to get four times better height point resolution than LRO,” which really helps safely plan a lander’s last leg of the journey.

At the last annual meeting of the NASA-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) in September 2023, LRO project scientist and Science Lead for Artemis III, Noah Petro, reaffirmed this collaborative value by saying:

The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter data is helping build on the LRO foundation by filling important needs, and we’re very much looking forward to more data from the mission!

Some such progress was also seen at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in 2023, where Wes Patterson of the LRO team collaborating with ISRO SAC scientists described how they’re using complementary radar data from LRO and the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to uniquely characterize the Artemis III candidate zones. This included getting valuable information on landing hazards within those sites, better seeing permanently shadowed regions than optical imagers, and gaining a better, broad sense of the physical states of the regions from inferred physical properties.

At the 55th LPSC last month, signs of such work continued to visible as lunar researchers presented their work of using Chandrayaan 2 orbiter data to help downselect areas within the Artemis III candidate zones via infrared and multi-band radar measurements, the former to help find spots with water ice and the latter to help reduce false positives from terrain with rough textures only seeming like water ice.

As a related tangent, the UK Space Agency announced in February that it’s funding Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) with £306,000 to develop software for the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to help its multi-band radar better detect underground water ice on the Moon’s south pole. UKSA, RHUL, and ISRO hope to use the same advancement for mapping Venus in high resolution using the radar on India’s upcoming Shukrayaan orbiter. [Note: Shukrayaan is not yet a commissioned mission from the Indian Government, and might not launch before end of decade.]

This story is partly excerpted, adapted, and enhanced from my article on precision Moon landings and the future.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, KaleidEO and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress report. If you love my work too, join them!

More Indian SpaceISRO slightly delayed three launches in 2023 to avoid an orbital collision. Source: ISRO Doubling down on space sustainability goals, ISRO Chief S. Somanath announced on April 16 at the annual meet of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) that India wants to achieve debris-free [new] space missions by 2030. Relatedly, ISRO released its 2023 space situational awareness report this month. I can’t locate the PDF publicly on the Web but ISRO has provided a good summary blog post. Relatedly, Bengaluru-based Digantara opened up Asia’s first dedicated center for space traffic monitoring on April 19. The center will also allow Digantara to assemble their upcoming satellite constellation dedicated to space-based tracking of orbital objects—a world first. The company raised $10 million in June 2023 for the same. * Hyderabad-based Dhruva Space raised $15 million, and will use the funds to begin setting up the previously announced 26,000 square-meter spacecraft manufacturing facility. On a related note, recall that in August 2023, New Space India Limited (NSIL)—a government company commercializing Indian space technologies—transferred the technology of ISRO’s IMS-1 small satellite bus to Dhruva Space and another private firm Alpha Design Technologies, marking the beginning of such satellite tech transfers to the private Indian space industry as part of a broader national push for commercializing space. ISRO has flown IMS-1 on three Earth observation missions. * KaleidEO, a subsidiary of Bengaluru-based SatSure (and an Indian Space Progress* sponsor), announced on April 18 successfully testing their in-house developed optical and multispectral imager on an aircraft to validate its performance. Recall that SatSure raised $15 million in August 2023 with an aim to build KaleidEO’s four 100-kilogram, Very Low Earth Orbit satellites touting these imagers. The company hopes to launch the satellites in Q3 2026. SatSure has many job openings right now.

🛰️*Better follow ISRO updates: *There’s still absolutely no way to follow official updates ISRO puts out on its website. I’ve thus created an RSS feed so you can easily follow these updates via a feed reader. Currently, the feed only notifies you of new posts instead of pulling in the full text due to a technical limitation. But you can click on the titles to visit the original pages.

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I’m delighted to share that The Orbital Index is continuing being a Moon Monday sponsor for the third year in a row! 🚀

Their crisp, technical archive of weekly space updates over the last five years is genuinely worth perusing, and searching within, because Andrew, Ben and Sarajane ensure it’s well curated and broad in perspectives—traits which partly inspired me to start Moon Monday in the first place.

Lastly, thank you everyone for your wishes; I’ve settled into Bengaluru. Welcome back to an action-packed edition of the world’s only newsletter dedicated to all things lunar, globally. On that note, I'm also glad to announce that Moon Monday now has more than 7,000 subscribers! 🌏🌙

VIPER, the lunar water hunter, coming togetherThe VIPER lunar rover in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with its mast installed. Image: NASA / Josh ValcarcelNASA’s upcoming VIPER rover, part of the agency’s CLPS program designed to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole, is progressing well in its assembly, with the latest hardware addition being its tall mast. The multipurpose mast hosts a pair of pan-able, steerable panoramic stereo navigation cameras, two LED headlights, and gimballing communications antennas which can maintain their orientation even as VIPER moves in various directions.

VIPER intends to explore areas in and around permanently shadowed regions for over four months to unravel the nature of lunar water ice deposits, assess their resource potential, and help determine how accessible they really are. This will help NASA plan crewed Artemis missions. While VIPER was nominally being planned for a November 2024 launch onboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, the company’s failed lunar mission last month might induce delays, and very likely more tests and associated costs/funds.

Also see: Astrobotic to fly its novel CubeRover on the Griffin lander after all

ispace doubles down on farside Moon missionIllustration of the APEX 1.0 lunar lander design by ispace US. Image: ispaceispace Japan is taking a bridge loan of $45 million from the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation to majorly continue work on Draper’s first CLPS Moon mission targeting a 2026 launch, wherein ispace’s US subsidiary is providing the APEX lander to touchdown on the Moon’s farside. Relatedly, Jeff Foust reported last month that the publicly traded company raised $53.5 million through a stock sale, $47 million of which will be used for the Draper-led mission. At 300 kilograms, APEX has 10 times more payload capacity than the compact Series 1 lander design, which ispace Japan flew on the company’s Mission 1 (M1) last year, and will do so again this year for M2.

In October 2023, ispace announced being awarded a $80 million Japanese government grant to develop and launch a lunar lander by 2027, which can carry more than 100 kilograms of payload to the Moon’s surface. Some amount of the bridge loan will also go towards the development of this mission.

To meet the Draper-led CLPS mission’s science goals, APEX will also deploy two Blue-Canyon-provided lunar satellites to relay communications between the lander and Earth. Post this primary mission, ispace will move the satellites into a polar orbit to provide commercial communications between Earth and hardware on the Moon’s south pole for several years.

As a tangent, recall that each of these satellite will also carry a NASA-grant-funded payload from Rhea Space called the Jervis Autonomy Module (JAM), which will let the satellites autonomously determine their orbits by imaging and identifying multiple celestial objects. As such, they won’t need to rely on terrestrial ground stations to know their positions. Rhea Space says they’re also adapting JAM to capture high-resolution images of the Moon’s surface for mapping purposes.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this community resource too, join them!

More Artemis updatesIllustration of a large vertical solar array on the Moon. Image: NASA* NASA is further funding Ceres Robotics to develop their 50-plus-kilowatt vertical solar arrays for potential deployment on maximally sunlit sites on the Moon’s south pole in support of future crewed Artemis missions. That’s a minimum five fold increase in power than the 10-kilowatt vertical arrays for which NASA made developmental awards to Astrobotic, Honeybee Robotics, and Lockheed Martin. Ceres says their 23.5-meter tall arrays called C-Towers—being prototyped in partnership with Voyager Space—can auto-deploy, retract for relocation, track the Sun, stay stable on steep terrain, and be resistant to abrasive lunar dust all while minimizing mass and stowed volume for easing their launch and delivery to Luna. * NASA published a source selection statement on April 9, providing details on how the agency selected teams led by Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab to mature their respective designs for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV). NASA intends to use this unpressurized rover on a firm, fixed price service basis across Artemis missions starting with Artemis V end of decade. The selection statement reveals that NASA ruled out proposals from Leidos, Astrobotic, and Blue Origin. Jeff Foust highlights more such notable points from the statement but what stood out to me is that Astrolab proposed delivering their LTV earlier than NASA asked for by flying aboard the SpaceX Starship lander that will carry crew for Artemis IV. * Eric Berger reports that NASA is privately considering modifying the upcoming Artemis III crewed Moon landing mission to an Earth or lunar orbiting one in order to gain confidence that the Orion spacecraft and Lunar Starship can safely dock with each other, and then to test out the latter’s habitability systems. If NASA decides to go ahead with this or another such non-lunar-landing plan, the mission might be called Artemis IIS in Apple style. * In the week of April 15, Switzerland, Sweden, and Slovenia signed the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration, bringing the total number of nation-signees to 39 globally and 17 in Europe.

🌗*Reminder: *There are now dedicated pages for NASA’s Artemis and CLPS programs on my blog so you can now browse my ongoing contextual coverage of both topics with ease.More Moon* Continuing to defy JAXA’s own expectations, the solar-powered SLIM lander survived the frigid lunar night for the third time and reestablished contact with Earth on April 23. SLIM has faced some hardware deterioration, which combined with hot temperatures around the near-equatorial-noon have sadly meant that JAXA has been unable to operate SLIM (other than limited use of the optical imager) to specifically continue some of its leftover science goals. * As part of the ongoing five-year, CAD $150 million lunar exploration program called LEAP, Canada is investing only CAD $8.6 million for the fiscal year 2024-25. The creation of a National Space Council as part of the budget announcement is welcome news though. * Laser Zentrum Hannover and TU Berlin, with €4.75 million in funding from the German Space Agency, aim to demonstrate laser-melted 3D printing on the Moon on Astrobotic’s third lunar mission, which aims for a south polar touchdown in 2026. Relatedly, NASA is awarding Astrobotic with $34.6 million to demonstrate power transmission on the Moon, which seems to be planned to take place as part of the same mission hosting the 3D printing demo. * Andrew Jones reports that on April 24, Nicaragua became the tenth country to join the upcoming China-led long-term scientific base on the Moon’s south pole called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Also, Ling Xin reports that Ethiopia’s Space Science and Geospatial Institute (SSGI) and the Kenya Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) signed intents to join ILRS as organizations. Per the Global Times, the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences seems to have joined ILRS as an organization as well.

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Life update: This week I’m *moving to Bengaluru, the space hub of India. Looking ahead, I’m excited to expand my space horizons and coverage by continually existing where the country’s space epicenter is.*

Announcement: With no Moon missions launching this month, and no major updates expected from ongoing missions, I’ve decided to take the coming Monday off for Moon Monday to help make my move to another city less hectic. Fear not though, as today’s Moon Monday is packed with updates and esoteric details 🤓. And, of course, the Moon Monday of April 29 will cover all updates between now and then so you’ll miss nothing. One last thing: the next Indian Space Progress edition will be published as usual, around end of month.

Illustration of Japan’s crewed, pressurized rover for NASA’s Artemis program. A large solar panel covers the other side. Astronaut added for (rough) scale. Image: JAXA / ToyotaTwo Japanese astronauts will land on the Moon via NASA ArtemisOn April 10, the US and Japan jointly announced that NASA will land two Japanese astronauts on the Moon as part of Artemis missions in return for JAXA providing NASA with a pressurized, habitable rover. A crew of two can live inside the rover, without spacesuits, and explore the lunar surface for up to an amazing 30 days—down from the originally intended 42 though.

Per the implementing agreement, NASA will arrange for the rover’s launch and delivery to the Moon’s south pole. As Marcia Smith reported, this might be done using a cargo variant of either a SpaceX Starship crewed lander or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon. NASA currently plans to use the Japanese rover starting with Artemis VII, with an aim to deliver it in 2031. It’s an optimistic schedule considering that Artemis V is unlikely to fly before 2030. It’s possible a Japanese astronaut will land on Luna via Artemis V. While the joint announcement states “a Japanese national to be the first non-American astronaut to land on the Moon”, it conveniently ignores China’s plans to land two astronauts on Luna end of decade.

Note that the Japanese rover—built by Toyota, JAXA, and Mitsubishi—will be even more capable and versatile than the unpressurized Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle. Both rovers will serve NASA’s Artemis Base Camp plan, which aims to build the infrastructure necessary for at least a few astronauts to live long-term on Luna. Both rovers will be remotely operable from Earth, and have some autonomous capabilities too, so as to ensure efficient scientific use when crewed missions aren’t ongoing, which will be at least 11 months a year per current planning of Artemis missions.

In emergency situations, such as astronauts losing access to their surface habitat, the Japanese rover’s seven square meters of cabin space can accommodate four astronauts for short periods until their pickup from lunar orbit arrives. The Japan Times previously reported that the rover will use solar energy and water to produce hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis during the day, and generate electricity using fuel cells at night. JAXA hopes to eventually use natively sourced lunar water and oxygen as supplies for the rover if feasible. We also know from JAXA’s presentation at the LEAG 2022 Annual Meeting that the rover can even enter small permanently shadowed regions if traverse routes involve slopes less than 20 degrees.

A collaborative GatewayAtsushi Nakajima, Project Manager of the Space Systems Division at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, says that work by Mitsubishi and Toyota in building JAXA’s upcoming LUPEX lunar rover, combined with engineering and scientific data from the mission, will contribute directly to the development of Japan’s pressurized rover for Artemis. JAXA has partnered with ISRO to land LUPEX by end of decade to directly study the nature, abundance, and accessibility of water ice at 89°S. Seeing that both Japan and India have signed the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration, it’s great to see some of its virtues in action with these positive US-Japan, Japan-India, and India-US collaborations.

Illustration of Japan’s HTV-X(G) cargo supply spacecraft approaching the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat. Image: JAXAWith the crewed, pressurized lunar rover, Japan has doubled down on its strategy to be a critical logistical supplier for NASA’s Artemis program. Previously, Japan got an astronaut seat aboard the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat in return for JAXA providing critical life support systems and infrastructure components for the station’s Lunar I-Hab crew module. Japan is also developing the advanced HTV-X(G) spacecraft to supply cargo to the Gateway starting 2030. These capabilities will allow the Gateway 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.

It’s intriguing though that ESA hasn’t already secured a single Artemis seat for a European astronaut to land on the Moon. That’s despite the agency having bagged three seats from NASA aboard the Gateway in return for contributing the Orion spacecraft’s critical service module, major parts of the Lunar I-Hab, the Lunar Link communications module, and the Lunar View refueling and cargo module!

Queqiao 2 ready to serve spacecraft at LunaChina announced that it successfully tested relaying communications between its Queqiao 2 lunar orbiter, launched last month, and the Chang’e 4 spacecraft lying on the Moon’s farside on April 6. Two days later, CNSA tested communications between Queqiao 2 and the currently Earthbound Chang’e 6 spacecraft, which China aims to launch on a Long March 5 rocket this May to bring about two kilograms of samples from the Apollo impact crater on the Moon’s farside. These samples should be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples as it would be our first tactile window into our Moon’s mysterious farside.

Illustration of the Chang’e 5 spacecraft on the Moon with its sample collector. Chang’e 6 has a similar spacecraft configuration. Image: CGTNRelatedly, Ling Xin reports that CNSA has invited 10 scientists from the US, Europe, and Asia to pitch their plans to study Chang’e 5 lunar samples on April 26. For the US, this opportunity comes shortly after NASA secured an exception from the Congress for US researchers to be able to apply for accessing China-brought lunar samples and get associated grants. The US scientists presenting their pitches on April 26 include lunar geochemist and Apollo sample curator Ryan Zeigler.

Many thanks to Epsilon3 for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this community resource too, join them!

A micro rover for the Moon passes terrestrial testsispace Europe’s micro rover and some humans. Image: ispaceispace Europe says it completed environmental testing of the qualification model of its micro rover, the flight model of which will be aboard ispace Japan’s second Moon mission launching end of 2024. With drive tests on simulated lunar terrain beds also previously done, the rover team will now build and test the flight model while ispace’s spacecraft integration team in Japan practice the rover’s integration into the lander using the qualification model.

The 5-kilogram micro-rover will explore the Moon’s surface with an HD camera on the both its front and back. The rover will also have a back-mounted shovel from Epiroc AB, using which it will collect lunar soil and transfer its ownership to NASA as part of the latter’s move to set precedence for future resource use under the US-led Artemis Accords. ispace Europe is developing the micro rover with funding aid from the Luxembourg Space Agency under an ESA contract.

Astrobotic to fly CubeRover on Griffin after allAn Astrobotic CubeRover prototype traverses in a simulated lunar terrain testbed developed by NASA. Image: NASA / Kim ShiflettSpeaking of micro rovers, Astrobotic—which was originally supposed to fly its versatile CubeRover on a Masten Space lander as part of NASA’s CLPS program—indirectly announced that the rover will fly on its own Griffin CLPS lander, whose primary task is to deliver NASA’s water-ice studying VIPER rover to the lunar south pole. While NASA and Astrobotic have been targeting the mission’s launch in November 2024, Astrobotic’s failed first lunar mission in January will certainly induce delays, and very likely more tests and associated costs/funds.

Recall that following Masten’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in September 2022, its CLPS mission came to an end. Shortly after, 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. There haven’t been any updates on that front thus far. But Astrobotic appears to have more liberty in manifesting its CubeRover, which is not a NASA payload in itself but is backed by NASA funding and has an agency-funded neutron spectrometer onboard.

In any case, Astrobotic’s announcement says the rover will be jointly operated with Canada-based Mission Control, who is providing the rover with its Spacefarer software platform, which uses autonomous feature detection and other smarts to enable faster commanding, drives, and data collection. Recall that Mission Control already flew an earlier version of this system for $3 million on UAE’s Rashid rover aboard ispace Japan’s first lunar lander, which though unfortunately crashed on Luna. These projects got funded through CSA’s LEAP initiative, which is investing CAD $150 million in lunar exploration over 5 years. Recently, CSA funded Mission Control with CAD $3.5 million for demonstrating classifying terrain features with an onboard AI system, which is likely where the Astrobotic partnership comes in.

On Astrobotic’s end, the CubeRover mission is critical to get right. NASA is awarding Astrobotic with $34.6 million to demonstrate power transmission, and one other award for lunar night survival, on future Moon missions.

More Moon NASA has started pre-launch testing the Orion spacecraft stack which will carry four astronauts around the Moon and back no earlier than September 2025 for the agency’s Artemis II mission. For better testing, NASA re-activated an Apollo-era facility, which will simulate vacuum environments for a wide range of altitudes to increase confidence in Orion for the crewed flight. * For astronauts to get a sense of how it will be like to live on the Gateway later this decade, and for project designers to better cater to the needs of astronauts, teams are now testing various setups of astronaut living quarter beginning with moving around in low-fidelity, life-sized mockups and performing tasks in virtual reality. * I had the opportunity to help explain a wider audience why the US White House recently asked NASA to create an independent time standard for the Moon; got quoted on the Indian Express to that end. ⏳... ⌛️ ... 🌙 * Job listing:* The Swedish Institute of Space Physics is hiring a postdoctoral researcher to work on how the solar wind interacts with the lunar exosphere, using particle data analysis from lunar landers and orbiters.

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Desired capabilities of the Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle. Image: NASAOn April 3, NASA selected teams led by Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab to mature their designs for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), one of which will be used on a firm, fixed price service basis by NASA across Artemis missions starting with Artemis V end of decade. The service order awards across 10 years have a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion. Eric Berger reports that for now NASA is awarding the selected teams a few tens of millions of dollars each to advance their rover designs.

Relatedly, in May 2023, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced soliciting industry proposals for the country’s first crewed lunar rover, which will be driven by the first two Chinese astronauts on the Moon end of decade.

LTV, a giant leap for rover-kindSince NASA intends to sustain its return to the Moon, the LTV will be far more capable—as NASA laid out in its solicitation—than the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) driven by Apollo astronauts, and more sophisticated than even the current crop of Mars rovers.

• The LTV will be an unenclosed, all-electric rover that two suited astronauts can drive on the Moon for up to 20 kilometers on an 8-hour roundtrip without having to recharge. That’s roughly thrice Apollo LRV’s range and twice its drive time.
• Unlike Apollo, the LTV will be used across multiple Artemis missions for at least 10 years. This means the LTV must survive frigid night-time temperatures on the Moon’s south pole every month, which can last from several hours up to at least 150 hours even in favorably selected high-altitude locations. That’s even better than NASA’s upcoming water-ice studying VIPER rover, which is being designed to survive complete darkness periods of about 96 hours by parking at pre-identified high-altitude spots during its mission.
• The LTV should be able to traverse 20-degree slopes, and in general navigate the challenging rugged terrain at the Moon’s south pole. Within this slope limit, the LTV should be able to spend up to two hours in permanently shadowed regions, where temperatures drop well below -180 degrees Celsius. Combined with the same requirement for Artemis spacesuits, this sets the stage for astronauts exploring and bringing cryogenic samples of pristine, precious lunar volatiles to Earth for meticulous lab studies, an identified key priority for Artemis science. To that end, NASA would also like the LTV to have a robotic manipulator arm for deploying science instruments and more. Exciting stuff!
• Given LTV’s criticality to astronauts being able to safely return to the lander or a future Artemis Base Camp after or during traverses, the rover’s mobility must be at least single-fault tolerant.
• NASA wants the LTV to be remotely operable from Earth, and that it should have sufficient autonomous capabilities. These requirements chiefly come from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate to ensure efficient scientific use of the rover when a crewed mission isn’t ongoing, which will be at least 11 months a year per current planning of Artemis missions.
• In addition to a carrying a suited crew of two weighing about 550 kilograms, the LTV must transport up to 250 kilograms of cargo, science instruments, lunar samples, and technology demonstration payloads between desired points on the Moon. For non-crew traverses, the LTV should be able to carry 1600 kilograms at reduced speeds.

Field testing of a terrestrial prototype of the FLEX lunar rover with two astronauts. Image: AstrolabUnlike concepts by Intuitive Machines (via Northrop Grumman) and Lunar Outpost (which switched sides from Northrop to Lockheed Martin for the LTV bid), only the Astrolab-led FLEX has a fully-functional terrestrial prototype as far as we know, and which has been tested for mobility, crewed, and remote operations, including test deployments of a variety of large payloads. Astrolab is also the only company to have publicly announced a plan to send a demonstration rover much before Artemis V, with one FLEX heading to the Moon on a 2026 Starship launch carrying at least eight customer payloads worth $160 million.

It should be noted that the LTV is just one of the two rover types part of NASA’s Artemis Base Camp, which aims to build the infrastructure necessary for at least a few astronauts to live long-term on the Moon. The other rover is a pressurized, habitable one, which would enable astronauts to explore the Moon’s south pole for up to 42 days at a time. NASA is expected to but hasn’t yet formally confirmed including the upcoming JAXA-Toyota autonomous crewed pressurized rover to said end. JAXA hopes to land a Japanese on the Moon via an Artemis mission in return for providing this advanced crewed pressurized rover.

Relatedly, recall that last year Canada said it will invest $1.2 billion over 13 years to develop a “Lunar Utility Vehicle”, which aims to provide critical assistance to Artemis astronauts on future missions. 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, such a rover will enable a Canadian to walk on the Moon.

Many thanks to Epsilon3 and Off Planet Researchfor sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this community resource too, join them!

Renamed Gateway elements and redesigned RS-25sThe HALO habitat module, part of the NASA-led Gateway, is set to undergo a series of tests ahead of final outfitting and preparations for a late 2025 launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. HALO will be docked to the PPE propulsion module before launch. In the meanwhile, ESA decided to rename their Gateway contributions, the modules of which will be added to the HALO-PPE Gateway later this decade. The Gateway’s i-HAB habitation module is now called the Lunar I-Hab, the ESPRIT communications module the Lunar Link, and the ERM Gateway refueling and cargo module the Lunar View—owing to its windows which will surely provide breathtaking views of space, our Moon, and Earth to astronauts.

Also see: A gist of Gateway science

A RS-25 engine nozzle being lifted at a test stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center. Image: NASA / Danny NowlinOn April 3, NASA completed a second and final campaign of 12 hot fire tests of the redesigned RS-25 engine. This means contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne can now produce such RS-25s for NASA to power future SLS rocket flights starting with Artemis V end of decade. The agency has awarded the company contracts to provide 24 new engines, supporting SLS launches up to Artemis IX.

The hot fire tests included eight 500-second firings—the same amount of time as required during an SLS mission—and four longer burns for ensuring margins. Engineers and operators also test flight-like gimbaling of the engine, which during a mission helps stabilize the rocket as well as keep it on its intended trajectory. Like the engine used in the first test campaign, the second one also features new components like a nozzle, hydraulic actuators, flex ducts, and turbo pumps. The aim with the second set of hot fires though was to test production reliability by validating the performance of a second set of hardware.

NASA says the new RS-25 engines should cost over 30% less to produce, from the current $100 million+, but a scathing May 2023 report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General pointed out that this projected figure excludes project management and overhead costs.

Thailand and China collaborate on lunar explorationA delegation led by Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of the Kingdom of Thailand visits CNSA for cooperation on lunar and space exploration. Image: CNSAOn April 5, Thailand joined the upcoming China-led long-term scientific base on the Moon’s south pole called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), becoming the ninth country to do so. This move comes after Thailand’s largest space research organization, the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT), joined the ILRS project in September 2023.

As Ling Xin reported previously, NARIT has a 3-kilogram instrument duo onboard China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 orbiter to study solar storms and cosmic rays respectively. China is aiming to launch the orbiter in 2026 alongside the namesake lander. NARIT also operates the Thai National Radio Telescope, which could be used to monitor spacecraft trajectories of ILRS missions in the future.

🛰️*Aside: *There’s no good way to follow official news from CNSA. And so I’ve created an RSS feed so you can easily follow such updates via a feed reader.More Moon* The US White House has asked NASA to develop a strategy by the end of 2026 for creating an independent time standard for the Moon, a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) that ties back in to Earth’s UTC. Rather than the White House’s policy document though, it’s Elizabeth Gibney’s article from last year which better explains why an independent lunar time is desirable, how ESA and NASA have already been working towards the same, and how it would enable swarms of spacecraft to better operate at Luna. * Alan Stern has joined ispace US as a scientific advisor. His scientific accomplishments in space exploration are well recognized but less known is that he was also the principal investigator of the LAMP instrument aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. LAMP has helped indicate potential water ice deposits within lunar polar permanently shadowed regions. * You can now browse my ongoing contextual coverage of NASA’s Artemis and CLPS programs via dedicated pages for those topics on my blog:

🧑🏽‍🚀 Artemis coverage by Jatan Mehta🌖 CLPS coverage by Jatan Mehta

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Look, I hate social networks. I’m not active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and the ilk. And that’s despite the fact that I’m an independent space writer who needs to promote my work because no one else will do it for me. But trust me, it all works fine without social media.

Even if we look at the more ethical socials like Mastodon and Bluesky, I find them to be so damn noisy. Besides, microblogging of any sort is a terribly contextually deprived way to create and consume things. And so I’ve embraced a no-social-media life for the most part. My longform blogs on space exploration and everything else is where I share the best of my public thoughts, which you can follow via email or RSS.

But humans insist on using social media for some reason. And so I exist minimally on the open, interoperable social network called the Fediverse, via the stat-less Micro.blog, which is the only sane way I can do this. If you have an account on Mastodon, Micro.blog, or any such Fediverse-compatible social network, I hereby invite your human self to follow, interact, and hangout with me here:

• moonmehta@micro.blog

I get that the Fediverse may seem too novel or daunting to use and figure out at first. And so if you don’t want to exist there, that’s fine. It’s not a high priority for me anyway. But at the same time, I can’t justify sacrificing my time and efforts on other social networks which degrade my thinking, mental health, and sanity.

But fear not, I have a magical solution that works for the both of us regardless of what happens to the world of social media. Nothing beats email for deep digital connections and conversations.

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Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin beside the solar-powered seismic experiment he just deployed. The experiment’s antenna is pointed at Earth. Image: NASANASA selects science instruments to be deployed on the Moon by Artemis III astronautsIn a historic return since Apollo, NASA aims to land astronauts on our Moon again in late 2026 with Artemis III. What science instruments will they carry to deploy on the lunar south pole for advancing our understanding of the Moon much like Apollo did? Following a competitive request for instrument proposals that NASA issued last May for the same, the agency announced on March 26 the first three payloads to be part of Artemis III. These will be deployed by astronauts on the lunar surface during their moonwalks. The experiments are:

1. The Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS), which contains compact, autonomous seismometers designed to monitor local lunar shakes for at least three months. With LEMS data, scientists will try to characterize the structure of the local crust and mantle. Combined with data from the two distinct lunar-night-surviving seismometers on the Draper-led lunar farside mission in 2026 part of NASA’s CLPS program, LEMS will help us better understand the Moon’s internal structure and how it evolved. LEMS will also help us know the rate of seismic activity and amount of micrometeorite impacts on the Moon’s south pole, which will help safely plan future, lengthier crewed missions in the region.
2. The Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF), which will investigate how well plants photosynthesize, grow, and adapt in the intense radiation environment on the Moon’s surface, and how the low lunar gravity affects it all. Also see: China’s Chang’e 4 biological experiment and Plants grow in Apollo lunar soil, but barely like it.
3. The Lunar Dielectric Analyzer (LDA), which is a JAXA payload to measure exactly how the lunar soil propagates electric fields, which in turn will help scientists better search for and locate water ice and other volatiles crucial to future mission planning.

The 13 candidate landing zones for NASA’s Artemis III crewed Moon mission on the Moon’s south pole. Image: NASA / LRO / GSFC / ASU | Browse them on a mapTimeline of NASA’s Artemis science planningWhile the agency’s selection of the SpaceX Lunar Starship lander in 2021 and Axiom spacesuits in 2022—over and above the standard SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft part of every Artemis mission—largely represent the technology stack to be used for Artemis III, the science end has been catching up to it lately. Below is the timeline for all major milestones in Artemis science planning.

• December 2020: The mission’s Science Definition Team laid out their priorities.
• March 2022: NASA revealed the Artemis science structure, comprising an internal Artemis Science Team, an external Geology Team, ~10 Participating Scientists (which will include international researchers), and an Instruments Team.
• August 2022: NASA announced 13 candidate landing zones for Artemis III. The agency has since been soliciting community input to filter said sites but hasn’t yet down-selected a subset.
• March 2023: NASA announced Noah Petro as the mission’s Science Lead.
• May 2023: NASA solicits competing proposals for instruments to be deployed on Artemis III, and with it the selection of the Instruments Team.
• August 2023: NASA announced the 12-personArtemis III Geology Team led by Brett Denevi. The competitively selected team, with a $5.1 million budget, will specify the mission’s science objectives, help plan and optimize the crew’s activities and traverses, and provide sampling strategies for water ice and more lunar materials of interest. The team will also be involved in pre- and post-mission activities such as astronaut training, initial studies of returned samples, and writing preliminary mission science reports.
• March 2024: Where we’re now—NASA announced the first set of experiments to be deployed on Artemis III. Members of these teams will become part of the Artemis III Instruments Team. In Moon Monday #130, I provided more context on NASA’s payload selection criteria for Artemis III.

Note that the Artemis Science Team comprises several NASA researchers common across all Artemis missions to ensure that high-level lunar science goals of the US scientific community are being kept in mind at every stage of Artemis planning. They also interface between each Artemis Geology Team and the rest of NASA.

Many thanks to Epsilon3 and Open Lunar Foundationfor sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this community resource too, join them!

ispace Japan sells stock to continue work on NASA CLPS Moon landingIllustration of the APEX 1.0 lunar lander design by ispace US. Image: ispaceJeff Foust reports that the publicly traded ispace Japan raised $53.5 million through a stock sale to fund development of an upcoming mission as the company continues to face operating losses from the resource intensive nature of Moon missions. About $47 million of said money will be used for Draper’s first Moon mission part of NASA’s CLPS program targeting a 2026 launch, wherein ispace’s US subsidiary is providing the lander called APEX to land on the lunar farside.

In September 2023, ispace US announced a new HQ in Denver, Colorado where the company will manufacture the APEX lander—previously called Series 2. APEX is larger and more capable than the compact Series 1 lander design, which ispace Japan flew on the company’s Mission 1 (M1) last year, and will do so again this year for M2. APEX features 300 kilograms of payload capacity, ten times more than Series 1. Jeff Foust reported in September 2023 that APEX’s structure had to be redesigned primarily to meet the vibrational requirements of the NASA payloads onboard the Draper-led CLPS mission. ispace’s share of the CLPS contract is supposedly $55 million out of $73 million, though the latter is an old number that may have gone up like was the case with CLPS flights of Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines.

In October 2023, ispace Japan announced being awarded a $80 million Japanese government grant to develop and launch a large lunar lander by 2027. It can carry more than 100 kilograms of payload to the Moon’s surface. More details are unclear but ispace calls the new lander design Series 3, which based on its mass class and provided descriptions seems similar to or derived from APEX.

In any case, ispace seems to be on track to launch its second Moon mission (M2) by end of 2024, which is aptly named “RESILIENCE” to reflect the spirited reattempt after M1’s crash.

More MoonEarth and our Moon as seen from beyond the lunar farside by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft on October 28, 2014. Image: CAST Defying JAXA’s own expectations once again, the solar-powered SLIM lander managed to reestablish contact with Earth on March 27, surviving the frigid lunar night for a second time. But since conditions around the near-equatorial-noon continue to prove too hot, JAXA is unable to operate scientific equipment on SLIM to continue with some of its leftover mission goals. * Andrew Jones reports that China raised the orbit of at least one twin satellite last week—whose March 13 launch on a Long March 2C rocket had come as a surprise. It was reported that an upper rocket stage malfunction meant the satellites, called DRO-A and DRO-B, weren’t injected into the intended trajectories to the Moon. China supposedly launched the satellites to demonstrate some autonomous lunar navigation technologies, thus complementing the Queqiao 2 mission launched on March 20. Well, I keep complaining about communications issues with space programs, usually with India and the US, but China is obviously opaque on another level. * Between December 2023 and March 2024, three more organizations have joined the upcoming China-led long-term scientific base on the Moon’s south pole called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS): 1) PT Universal Satelit Indonesia (UniSat), 2) the Asociación de Astronomía de Colombia (ASASAC), and 3) Kyrgyzstan’s Arabaev Kyrgyz State University. Andrew Jones helpfully lists all 17 organizations part of ILRS. * Sponsored listing:* Companies building for the Moon can now leverage Epsilon3’s new Automation capability, purpose-built to safely streamline complex spacecraft assembly, integration, testing, and operational procedures. Epsilon3’s web-based platform is used by Blue Origin, Astrobotic, Redwire, Firefly, ispace, and more organizations creating for Luna.

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An update about the last Indian Space Progress edition before we begin this one: My review of India’s Gaganyaan mission to send astronauts to space has been republished on Jeff Foust’s revered community blog The Space Review! ^_^

How ISRO is building a reusable spaceplaneISRO’s spaceplane test vehicle autonomously lands on a runway. Image: ISROAlmost a year after ISRO successfully landed an uncrewed, autonomous spaceplane prototype on a runway at Chitradurga, India, the space agency conducted another such landing test on March 22. The winged vehicle is internally called the Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator (RLV-TD), and was recently officially named Pushpak by the Indian Prime Minister—after the flying chariot in Hindu mythology.

Like in the previous test, Pushpak was dropped from a height of 4.5 kilometers by an Indian Air Force helicopter such that its descent simulates an approach from space. But unlike the last time, as Chethan Kumar reports, the plane was dropped away from the runway—which lay four kilometers downrange. Pushpak then course-corrected on its own and maneuvered itself to the runway, where it deployed a parachute to kill much of its velocity of 350 kilometers per hour and steadily came to a halt. ISRO says engineers strengthened the airframe structure and landing gear for this test so it could tolerate higher landing loads.

Aiming for orbitISRO is planning a third landing test of the spaceplane later this year with more stringent drop conditions. If it goes well too, in its next flight Pushpak will attempt an orbital re-entry after being launched on a modified GSLV rocket. In 2016, ISRO had launched a heat-shield-enabled Pushpak to an altitude of 65 kilometers and hypersonic speeds. It successfully steered itself 450 kilometers downrange to a sea splashdown in a targeted zone.

When operational, a 60% larger Pushpak will comprise the second stage or equivalent of an Indian reusable launch vehicle (RLV). In fact, it’s to this aspirational end that the winged body and all flight systems from the 2023 test were reused in the flight last week, after being re-certified.

ISRO envisions the orbital Pushpak to spend up to a month in space, autonomously operate onboard payloads and experiments, and then de-orbit itself for atmospheric reentry leading to a runway landing. At some point, ISRO has also intended to test air-breathing propulsion on a future flight to assess its viability as part of Pushpak’s ongoing design ideation.

What India’s spaceplane isn’t: Media outlets have frequently compared the RLV-TD/Pushpak to NASA’s retired Space Shuttle. But ISRO is neither designing Pushpak to carry humans to space nor is it intended to be a heavy-lift launch vehicle. As a highly autonomous platform, Pushpak will be much more akin to the flying Boeing X-37B and Sierra Space’s upcoming Dream Chaser.

Note that the RLV is also different from ISRO’s other upcoming partially reusable rocket called the Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), which is much bigger. It recently got a formal project team but ISRO expects the NGLV to take about a decade to launch. Both the NGLV and RLV are exciting projects that could boost India’s rocket fleet but are a low priority as ISRO remains focused on its Gaganyaan program to indigenously send humans to space this decade.

Lunar and space science updatesThe most plausible locations of water ice within the polar Peary crater, as mapped by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s radar. Image: ISRO* The POLIX polarimeter on India’s recently launched second space telescope called XPoSat has begun scientific observations. Over the next few years, POLIX will study the polarization of X-rays emitted by various cosmic objects, which uniquely informs scientists about the physical nature of those objects—such as the strength and distribution of their magnetic fields. NASA launched the IXPE space telescope on a similar mission in December 2021. IXPE and XPoSat are the world’s only telescopes dedicated for said purpose. When scientists are able to utilize and combine unique data from both these telescopes, we’ll get new insights into many bright X-ray sources, including pulsars, binary stars, and galactic cores. XPoSat’s other instrument XSPECT began observations in January. * In an interview with Chethan Kumar for the Times of India, ISRO Chief S. Somanath said that work is progressing slowly on new throttle-able engines needed for the 6,000-kilogram ISRO lander which will deliver JAXA’s LUPEX rover to the Moon’s south pole by end of decade to study water ice and other volatiles. Somanath added that ISRO is preparing a funding proposal for the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission now that preliminary studies are done. * At the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) this month, several Indian lunar researchers presented their recent work. I found the following of note for this blog & newsletter: + Initial elemental composition measurements from the Chandrayaan 3 rover + ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter data helping NASA downselect areas within the Artemis landing zones using infrared and radar measurements, the former to help find spots with water ice and the latter to help reduce false positives from terrain having rough textures. * On February 14, the UK Space Agency announced that it will fund Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) with £306,000 to develop software for ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to help its multi-band radar better detect underground water ice on the Moon’s south pole. UKSA, RHUL, and ISRO hope to use the same advancement for mapping Venus in high resolution using the radar on India’s upcoming Shukrayaan orbiter. Note: Shukrayaan is not yet a commissioned mission from the Indian Government, and might not launch before end of decade.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, KaleidEO, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress report. If you love my work too, join them!

More Indian space updatesFiring of the Kalam-250 second stage rocket motor (video) part of the upcoming orbital launch vehicle Vikram-I. Image: Skyroot The new INSAT-3DS meteorological satellite, which ISRO launched on February 17, has begun imaging Earth. * US-based Loft Orbital and India-based SkyServe have partnered to utilize the former’s YAM-6 satellite—launched on a Falcon 9 Transporter mission on March 4—with SkyServe’s edge computing platform so as to enable analyzing Earth observation images in near real-time and power more analytics from it. * With help from ISRO, Hyderabad-based Skyroot successfully test fired the Kalam-250 second stage motor part of its upcoming orbital rocket Vikram-I. The company recently raised $27.5 million, hoping to launch Vikram-I by end of year. 2025 remains more likely though. Skyroot previously launched suborbital test missionPrarambh*in November 2022, becoming India’s first such privately developed rocket. Other recent milestones for Skyroot in the lead up to launch of Vikram-I include flight qualifying its Raman-I engine, which will provide roll attitude control, hot firing the Raman-II engine powering Vikram-I’s fourth stage, and the Vikram-I first stage passing pressure testing.

Some key perspectives on Indian spaceCasey Dreier of The Planetary Societyhas an excellent interview of Gurbir Singh (a sponsor of Indian Space Progress) on the unique origin, paths, and motivations of India’s space program.

Casey Dreier: You write that, unlike the space programs being established at the time in the U.S. and Soviet Union, India’s program from the outset was wholly non-military and built to meet the social needs of its huge population. It was really almost inwardly directed as a modernizing force rather than a demonstration of technological competition or global hegemony.

Gurbir Singh: Having lived under suppression, under the control of another nation, was seen as a national humiliation. India did not want to return to that. There was a desire for self-sufficiency rather than some sort of hegemony or sense of superiority over other countries. India is probably the only country with a space program which had entirely non-military foundations, although since then, it has grown to include military aspects.

This is worth highlighting also because something as basic as the origin of the Indian space program is what the New York Times misrepresents, among other things fundamental to how Indian space functions.

Jayant Murthy, a renowned astrophysicist who just had an asteroid named after him by the International Astronomical Union for his contributions, encapsulated his critique of the current direction of Indian space in a new interview for The Hindu:

Preeti Zachariah:What do you think of India’s current space program?

Jayant Murthy: I think the space program has done very well. There are many places where we can do better. For instance, the Chinese space program used to be well behind us, but now, in 20 years, it is far ahead.

But the current revamp is good for ISRO. It was always supposed to be the Indian Space Research Organization, but they ended up getting into routine things. How is your 100th PSLV ( Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) going to be different from your 99th?

It is good that they are getting into private industry, but the main problem, I see, with the revamp is that the government has still not realized that space is still driven by government money. They are expecting private investors to come in, and that is not realistic. They have projected a lot of money being put into the system, but I think it may be difficult.

When many Indian startups have failed to explicitly talk about customers even during the highs of their marketing & communications tied to engineering milestones, it’s hard to disagree with Jayant Murthy’s take.

For more such perspectives on Indian space, I also recommend checking out Memory Monologues and Perspectives from Spaceport SARABHAI, India’s first space think tank.

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China doubles down on lunar infrastructure with the launch and orbital insertion of Queqiao 2The March 20, 2024 launch of the Queqiao 2 lunar orbiter on a Long March 8 rocket. Image: CNSAOn March 20 at 00:31 UTC, China’s Long March 8 rocket launched the 1200-kilogram Queqiao 2 lunar communications relay satellite on a Moon-ward trajectory with an orbit of 200 by 420,000 kilometers. Andrew Jones reports that Queqiao 2 entered an elliptical orbit around the Moon on March 24. With its 4.2-meter wide parabolic antenna, Queqiao 2 will relay communications between Earth and China’s upcoming Chang’e 6 sample return craft on the Moon’s farside.

The four key modules of the 8200-kilogram Chang’e 6 Mooncraft arrived at China’s Wenchang spaceport in January, with CNSA aiming for launch on a Long March 5 rocket this May to bring about two kilograms of samples from the Apollo impact crater on the Moon’s farside. These samples should be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples as it would be our first tactile window into our Moon’s mysterious farside.

In contrast, the first Queqiao relay satellite has been halo-orbiting the Earth-Moon Lagrangian point #2 and relaying communications for the farside Chang’e 4 mission since 2018. With Queqiao aging, China will utilize Queqiao 2 for Chang’e 4 as needed. CNSA expects Queqiao 2 to orbit the Moon stably for eight years. It will also relay communications for the upcoming Change’e 7 & 8 landers, currently targeting launch in 2026 and 2028 respectively. As Zhang Tong reported previously, the Queqiao 2 launch also carried two experimental Tiandu CubeSats. They entered lunar orbit too, and will soon test and verify technologies to feed into the Queqiao constellation, China’s upcoming lunar navigation & communications service similar to ESA’s Moonlight project.

Queqiao 2 could also provide communications support for China’s first crewed Moon landing, currently targeting a launch by 2030, as well as to other Moonbound spacecraft from international partners. Chang’e 7, Chang’e 8, and the first Chinese crewed Moon mission are all part of the first phase of the upcoming China-led long-term scientific Moonbase called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). It’s been rumored that Chang’e 7 or 8 will deploy another navcom orbiter to join Queqiao 2 and begin expanding the constellation.

The Planetary Society notes that Queqiao 2 also has some key science goals too:

Queqiao-2 will also carry three science payloads. These will play a part in the overall science goals of the multi-spacecraft Chang’e-7 mission. The Energetic Neutral Atom Imager for Earth’s magnetotail imaging (GENA) and the Extreme Ultraviolet Camera for Earth’s plasmasphere observation (EUC) will study Earth's magnetotail and plasmasphere, and how the solar wind interacts with the Earth's magnetosphere and the ionosphere.

A Moon-Earth very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) measurement and observation experiment (LOVEX) is also included, designed to improve the accuracy of determining the orbits of spacecraft in deep space. It will create a 400,000-kilometer (250,000-mile) baseline between Queqiao-2 and radio telescopes on Earth. The experiment will also carry out radio astronomical observations and test capabilities for astrophysics and astrometry, making precise measurements of stars’ locations in the sky.

Earth and our Moon as seen from beyond the lunar farside by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft on October 28, 2014. Image: CAST

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Joseph Biernat and Dany Waller for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love this community resource too, join them!

CAPSTONE continues extended Moon missionIllustration of the CAPSTONE spacecraft approaching the Moon. Image: Advanced SpaceThe NASA-funded and Advanced Space-led CAPSTONE lunar orbiter continues its extended mission. Earlier this month, the spacecraft demonstrated—with simulated data sent by the mission team—an advanced ability to detect and classify system anomalies using machine learning. These tests are part of a broader push for autonomous operations of spacecraft in lunar orbit.

This year CAPSTONE has continued to cross-communicate with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to demonstrate autonomous navigation in lunar orbit, that is, without relying on Earthly ground stations. Being able to autonomously determine position and navigation states means future lunar satellites can operate more efficiently by not blocking as much of the precious but limited bandwidth of NASA’s Deep Space Network or other such ground stations.

Relatedly, NASA funded Advanced Space last year to develop a mission design and planning tool which will increase the autonomy and safety of lunarbound spacecraft along various trajectories. This tool would also benefit crewed missions such as those under Artemis. Another way CAPSTONE is proving useful to NASA is it’s test-flying the same fuel-efficient Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit to be flown by the NASA-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat later this decade. The CAPSTONE team has published some papers to that end.

South Korea leaps for the MoonA spectacular view of the Tsiolkovskiy crater on our Moon’s farside, as imaged by South Korea’s KPLO spacecraft. Image: KARICelestial Citizen notes that South Korea is ramping up its space funding with an eye on landing a robotic spacecraft on the Moon in 2032 using indigenous technologies. This move comes as the country is finally forming a dedicated space agency in May called the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA), which will be distinct from the already existing Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) leading the country’s first lunar orbiter KPLO.

As Kim Na-young previously reported, South Korea’s Moon lander project passed a preliminary feasibility study last October, and will officially begin this year with a budget of $393 million. The tentative plan is to make an ~1800-kilogram robotic lander. A rover will be onboard the lander alongside other instruments. KPLO has been capturing beautiful high resolution images—see Tsiolkovskiy and Szilard M—and South Korea will use these along with LRO ones to help identify good landing site candidates for the Moon landing mission.

South Korea has also developed a full-scale dirty thermovac chamber that accurately simulates the dynamic electrostatic environment on the Moon’s surface. Such facilities are not only let you test the functioning of full-scale hardware in lunar-like environments but understand how to mitigate long term damage to lunar hardware and astronaut suits from notorious moondust. Relatedly, China opened up a Lunar Simulation Chamber last month.

More mission updates* Jeff Foust reports that Intuitive Machines’ second Moon mission part of NASA’s CLPS program could slip from its November launch to next year due to the agency considering moving the landing location further down south in hopes of accessing water ice—the primary goal of the mission for NASA. * Late last year ESA released a call for proposals for small Moon missions under €50 million to fly before end of decade to meet parts of ESA’s exploration and science goals. Evan Gough reports one proposal that came in is a small lunar leaper bot that will jump around and explore lunar lava tubes. Previously, ESA was considering a 2033 mission to explore a lunar pit that has an opening to a lava tube but with no updates in over a year, the project seems to be on a halt. * Astrobotic hired four former leading NASA figures in key engineering and advisory roles ahead of its critical Griffin lander launch contracted by NASA to deliver the agency’s water-studying VIPER rover to the Moon’s south pole. Astrobotic’s failed first lunar mission in January will certainly induce delays in VIPER’s launch.

More MoonIllustration of ICON’s lunar construction technology in action on the Moon. Image: ICON / BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group Eric Berger reports that following DARPA’s selection of 14 companies in December 2023 to conduct lunar infrastructure studies as part of the 10-year Lunar Architecture study (LunA-10) on how best to build key commercial infrastructure pieces for sustaining human presence on the Moon, the defense organization now seeks more information from companies in six key technology areas: centralized heating and cooling hubs, efficient bulk lunar regolith processing to extract low abundance minerals, low-altitude satellites for better resource prospecting, silicon wafer manufacturing that taps into ISRU infrastructure, microbial biomanufacturing and recycling, and a GPS-like lunar positioning system. Related tangent: Northrop Grumman says DARPA is further funding their LunA-10 study of a lunar railroad network to transport humans, supplies, and resources. * Apollo 10 commander and peacemaker in the Apollo-Soyuz mission Thomas Stafford passed away at 93. * Sponsored listing:* Open Lunar Foundation is hiring a Program Coordinator to schedule and administer the organization’s many project pipelines, liaison with Open Lunar fellows and project leads, support the community, and aid with research and documentation. Apply here by April 18.

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Techno-scenic launch of the third fully integrated Starship Super Heavy launch-and-landing vehicle. Image: SpaceXNASA’s road to Luna advances through StarshipSpaceX’s third launch of its fully integrated Starship Super Heavy rocket on March 14 achieved orbital velocity, clearing a major milestone of the long path to putting humans on the Moon again since NASA has selected Starship’s lunar variant to land crew for the Artemis III mission. The flight wasn’t wholly successful as SpaceX lost both the Starship stages during their respective descents but I like how Peter Hague captured the test’s essence on his blog Planetocracy:

Despite the fact that there is obvious work to do, it is worth noting that all the issues remaining with Starship and Superheavy are in phases of flight exclusive to its reuse. As an expendable vehicle, it would have had a successful flight.

SpaceX also tested transferring cryogenic fuel between the upper stage Starship’s tanks as part of a Tipping Point award demonstration for NASA. It’s something SpaceX might need to perform at least 10 times between Starships for each crewed Artemis Moon landing attempt. Engineers are reviewing the test data to understand how the transfer went, including how super-chilled liquids moved within the tanks during flight, and how that affected Starship’s stability. SpaceX and NASA are still figuring out how many refueling launches will a typical Artemis landing need.

Again, the larger perspective to consider is the huge deal that is Artemis IV, for the crewed landing of which NASA chose an upgraded Lunar Starship as a critical mission element. If successful, in just one mission after Artemis III’s crewed landing demonstration, NASA will have upgraded its entire lunar transportation stack—from improving payload capacity to lunar orbit by 10,000 kilograms with the SLS rocket’s Block 1B variant to sending the first astronauts to the US-led Gateway orbital habitat to having an upgraded crewed (Starship) lander enabling an extended surface mission of up to 33 days instead of Artemis III’s 6.5-day stay.

Artemis IV’s architecture, to be reinforced with Artemis V via Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander instead of Starship, is the template NASA hopes to keep using in future missions leading to an Artemis Moonbase. It’s thus far more important to get all Artemis IV and V elements right—including Starship—than to worry about crewed Moon landings being delayed a bit more due to this not-fully-successful Starship flight. We have waited decades for a return to our Moon, and just as long for a fully reusable space launch system. We can wait a few years more.

China set to launch Queqiao 2Earth and our Moon as seen from beyond the lunar farside by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft on October 28, 2014. Image: CASTChina seems all set to launch its 1200-kilogram Queqiao 2 communications relay satellite on a Long March 8 rocket tomorrow, March 19, reports Andrew Jones. Queqiao 2’s 4.2-meter wide parabolic antenna will relay communications between Earth and CNSA’s upcoming lunar missions, including the Chang’e 6 sample return craft and the Change’e 7 & 8 landers. As Zhang Tong reported previously, Queqiao 2 will also deploy two experimental Tiandu CubeSats to test and verify technologies to feed into the Queqiao constellation, China’s upcoming lunar navigation & communications service similar to ESA’s Moonlight project.

Relatedly, the four key modules of the 8200-kilogram Chang’e 6 Mooncraft arrived at China’s Wenchang spaceport in January, with CNSA aiming for launch on a Long March 5 rocket this May to bring about two kilograms of samples from the Apollo impact crater on the Moon’s farside. These samples should be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples as it would be our first tactile window into our Moon’s mysterious farside.

Related tangent: Andrew Jones reports that after a surprise March 13 launch of a Long March 2C rocket, China may have lost the two small satellites onboard called DRO-A and DRO-B. The satellites, supposedly launched with the objective of demonstrating autonomous lunar navigation, now seem lost due to the rocket not inserting them into the intended trajectory to the Moon.

Many thanks to Epsilon3 and Off Planet Research for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them.

More mission updates* NASA’s FY2025 Presidential budget request essentially remains flat with an ask of $25.4 billion from the US Congress. Said Congress is providing NASA with $24.9 billion for FY2024—two billion less than the FY2024 Presidential request and half a billion less than FY2023. However, just like how the US Congress prioritized and maintained funding for the Artemis program for FY2024, it’s expected to do the same for FY2025. * In an interview with Chethan Kumar for Times of India, ISRO Chief S. Somanath said that work is progressing slowly on new throttle-able engines needed for the 6,000-kilogram ISRO lander, which will deliver JAXA’s LUPEX rover to the Moon’s south pole by end of decade to study water ice and other volatiles. Somanath added that ISRO is preparing a funding proposal for the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission now that preliminary studies are done. * Interlune, which raised $15.6 million last month, says it wants to mine Helium-3 on the Moon.

Welcome to the era of precision Moon landingsWith the SLIM Moon mission, Japan has brought us into a whole new regime of precision landings. One with big implications for the future of lunar exploration and science, including NASA’s Artemis program. To piece together this story, I spoke to experts from JAXA, NASA, and ISRO. The article has been published as a feature on Scientific American:

🌖 Read: Precision Moon landings and the future 📌Lunar research from LPSCDistribution of Uranium, Potassium, and Thorium on the Moon as measured by KPLO’s Gamma ray spectrometer (left), compared to maps from JAXA SELENE, CNSA Chang’e 2, and NASA Lunar Prospector respectively (right, top to bottom). Image: K. J. Kim, et al.At the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) last week, lunar researchers from several countries presented their recent work. I thought it would be interesting to highlight some new results based on data from recent Moon missions as that’ll be apt for the broader lunar community reading this blog.

• Preliminary lunar maps of Uranium, Potassium, And Thorium by KPLO’s gamma ray spectrometer. Related: NASA’s ultra-sensitive ShadowCam imager aboard KPLO helps scientists better study the LCROSS impact site.
• Five years of lunar farside radiation measurements from Chang’e 4’s Lunar Lander Neutron And Dosimetry Experiment
• Landing site assessment for Australia’s first lunar rover, Roo-ver
• Initial elemental composition measurements from the Chandrayaan 3 rover, and laser-ranging the retroreflector on the Chandrayaan 3 lander with LRO
• ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter data helping NASA downselect areas within the Artemis landing zones using infrared and radar measurements, the former to help find spots with water ice and the latter to help reduce false positives from terrain having rough textures.
  • Related: How India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped Japan nail SLIM’s Moon landing, and where Artemis comes in

Also at LPSC, and as part of NASA’s Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program, the agency announced that it is granting about $3 million each to five researchers for developing advanced instruments to fly on upcoming Artemis or CLPS missions by end of decade.

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JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image: NASA / GSFC / ASUOn January 19, the Japanese space agency JAXA’s SLIM lander touched down on the Moon merely 55 meters away from the center of its target spot, making it the most precise robotic planetary landing in history. A key part of how it achieved this feat is a tale of collaboration between JAXA and ISRO.

At the heart of SLIM’s precision landing ability is a technology JAXA calls “vision-based navigation”. During its descent, SLIM snapped images of the Moon and compared them to preloaded onboard orbital maps within just a few seconds to determine where it is and where it needs to go. These maps come from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, and JAXA’s own SELENE craft, each uniquely useful at various heights.

In a post-landing media release, SLIM’s Project Manager Shinichiro Sakai mentioned that the mission team used Chandrayaan 2’s imagery not just for the lander’s final descent phase but also to select the final target landing area pre-launch. This is because Chandrayaan 2’s Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) boasts an imaging resolution of 0.25-0.30 meters/pixel, which is roughly twice LRO’s finest.

“JAXA sent us a request in 2021 to image SLIM’s landing site, and so we planned an orbital passover of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to acquire OHRC images for them,” says Amitabh Singh, head of ISRO’s Planetary and Space Science Data Processing Division and a lead scientist on the OHRC team. Later in 2023, ISRO provided JAXA with more images of the landing site from different sun angles, which helped engineers tune SLIM’s algorithms to instantly identify boulders and other hazards.

This image shows pictures of the Moon taken by Japan’s SLIM lander (blue boxes) when it was at about 50-meter altitudes. They are superimposed on the background view previously snapped by ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. The red frame shows the safe landing zone that SLIM autonomously selected based on hazards it detected. Image: ISRO / JAXA / SLIMEven though most modern robotic landers, including most recently India’s own Chandrayaan 3 and the US-based Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander, can find a good landing spot on their own during the final phase of a landing, the lack of an apt last-mile map affects the landing precision.

When SLIM was roughly 50 meters above the Moon’s surface, it hovered and identified touchdown hazards below it using vision-based navigation with Chandrayaan-2 imagery. But at this point one of its two main engine nozzles mysteriously detached, and off-center thrust made SLIM go sideways. SLIM’s guidance system identified this anomaly and descended using the hover-phase imagery while continually trying to stabilize its orientation with the other main engine and smaller thrusters. While SLIM’s vertical velocity of 1.4 meters per second on touchdown was well within acceptable bounds, the eastward lateral motion and touchdown orientation weren’t nominal, causing it to flip on the surface with its solar panels facing away from the sun. Even when afflicted, SLIM could see and target a safe spot to touch down upon and manage to avoid a crash.

A helping hand for ArtemisThe 13 candidate landing zones for NASA’s Artemis III crewed Moon mission on the Moon’s south pole. Image: NASA / LRO / GSFC / ASU | Browse them on a mapFor ISRO, SLIM’s case highlights how Chandrayaan 2 can provide advanced orbital data to help NASA better filter landing zones for the agency’s Artemis program to land humans on the Moon—especially as the 2009-launched LRO gracefully ages. While this has mostly remained an untapped opportunity, Amitabh says collaboration for the same has started. He adds that due to the rocky lunar south pole, knowing the height information of terrain features is as important as the imaging resolution. “We use OHRC stereo images to get four times better height point resolution than LRO,” which really helps safely plan a lander’s last leg of the journey.

At the last annual meeting of the NASA-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) in September 2023, LRO project scientist and Science Lead for Artemis III, Noah Petro, reaffirmed this collaborative value by saying:

The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter data is helping build on the LRO foundation by filling important needs, and we’re very much looking forward to more data from the mission!

Some progress was also seen at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in 2023, where Wes Patterson of the LRO team collaborating with ISRO SAC scientists described how they’re using complementary radar data from LRO and the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to uniquely characterize the Artemis III candidate zones. This included getting valuable information on landing hazards within those sites, better access to their permanently shadowed regions than optical imagers, and gaining a broad sense of the physical states of the regions from inferred physical properties.

At the 55th LPSC last week, signs of such work continued as lunar researchers presented use of Chandrayaan 2 orbiter data to help downselect areas within the Artemis III candidate zones via infrared and radar measurements, the former to help find spots with water ice and the latter to help reduce false positives from terrain having rough textures.

This story is excerpted and adapted from my article on precision Moon landings and the future.

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A dramatic view of the Odysseus lunar lander still firing its main engine after making contact with the Moon. Image: Intuitive MachinesIn Moon Monday #166, I wrote how Intuitive Machines and NASA skewed the success criteria of the former’s first Moon landing mission. I did not think the article would be taken as well as it was:

Celestial Citizen, in their latest Continuum newsletter:

While a private endeavor like Intuitive Machines may not have the same transparency obligations that a government agency does, shouldn’t they still be honest about their weak points in addition to their triumphs? Fellow space writer Jatan Mehta perfectly summarizes these questions in his newsletter, Jatan’s Space, with “why is it not enough to celebrate the genuine feats Intuitive Machines did achieve?” Is partial success not enough (to America)?

The Orbital Index (a Moon Monday sponsor) in Issue #259:

Jatan has a well-articulated piece on his discomfort with NASA and Intuitive Machines calling IM-1 an “unqualified success,” especially given that LRO spotted its landing location 1.5 km from its original target and the limited data that was able to be downlinked from its payloads. It is a success, certainly, but perhaps with some qualifications.

Science Writer and Editor Mukunth, in his blog post To the Moon – or the stock market?:

Even if Intuitive Machines isn't implicitly required to follow NASA's communications policies, NASA needs to ensure the companies it contracts to fly its payloads – to ease its own path to the moon in future – do. As Jatan also pointed out, the onus to communicate lies with NASA: CLPS is publicly funded and without it missions like Odysseus wouldn't happen. We need explicit policies to streamline these companies' communications expectations to follow NASA's rather than their share prices.

I’ll be honest. I was surprised by the uptake, especially because at the time of writing my article, most publishers and public reactions I had come across were on nothing but a blanket hail spree.

In any case, I laid out quite a few specific questions in my article. They remain unanswered, and so if you have an informed perspective that my global audience can benefit from, do reach out. Even if you write a public rebuttal on your site, and I encourage that, I’m happy to link to it on my Moon Monday newsletter in the interest of the public conversation. Ultimately, I believe rooting for the Moon does not mean being only a cheerleader.

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JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image: NASA / GSFC / ASUWith the SLIM Moon mission, Japan has brought us into a whole new regime of precision landings. One with big implications for the future of lunar exploration and science, including NASA’s Artemis program to send humans to Luna. To piece together this story, I spoke to experts from JAXA, NASA, and ISRO. The article has been published as a feature on Scientific American:

🌖 Read: Precision Moon landings and the future 📌

Related articles I’ve written previously:

• Our two-faced Moon
• How NASA decides where to land on Mars

→ Commission an article

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Illustrations of SpaceX’s Lunar Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar landers respectively. NASA has contracted these to land Artemis astronauts on the Moon this decade and next. Images: SpaceX / Blue OriginNASA’s FY2024 budget for LunaThe US Congress will provide NASA with $24.9 billion for FY2024, a budget two billion less than the Presidential request and half a billion less than FY2023. Accounting for inflation only makes the cut deeper. However, the US Congress has prioritized and maintained similar levels of funding for Artemis, which not only includes sustaining development and production of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft architecturally required for astronauts to reach lunar orbit but also the full requested $1.9 billion for the crewed lunar landing providers SpaceX and Blue Origin. As Marcia Smith notes, NASA also gets the requested $380 million for continued development of advanced lunar spacesuits for which the agency chose Axiom Space and Collins in 2022.

What isn’t clear yet is what ensued of the $459 million budget request for NASA’s Lunar Discovery and Exploration (LDEP) program, particularly to ensure full funding for the CLPS lunar landings necessary to enable diverse surface science and technology demonstrations. Quite a lot of CLPS feeds forward into Artemis planning since LDEP is the organizational unit chiefly integrating and coordinating Artemis science efforts across NASA as well as with the agency’s commercial and international partners.

Today, March 11, at 1PM ET, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will deliver his annual “State of NASA” address, which will include the agency’s Presidential budget request for FY2025. This will be followed by a media teleconference at 2:30 PM ET.

Mission updatesMembers of the NASA CADRE team pose in a JPL clean room with the Moonbound CADRE rover. Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech* NASA JPL completed building and testing the three shoebox-sized CADRE rovers, which will fly to the Moon aboard Intuitive Machines’ third Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program sometime next year. The rovers passed the standard suite of environmental tests every spacecraft is supposed to go through before launch. Engineers also tested CADRE’s cooperative autonomous driving abilities in JPL’s Mars Yard with full-scale engineering models because during the mission the solar-powered rovers aim to autonomously navigate the landed region in the magnetic swirl of Reiner Gamma to demonstrate collective mapping. The rovers will have multistatic ground penetrating radars to create 3D images of the subsurface structure with a depth of up to 10 meters. * Draper’s first Moon mission part of NASA’s CLPS program targeting a 2026 launch will see the ispace-provided APEX lander also deploy two lunar satellites whose job will be to relay communications between the lander and Earth. This is similar to how China’s Queqiao spacecraft provides a connection to Chang’e 4 operating on the Moon’s farside. Jeff Foust reports that each Draper-mission satellite will carry a NASA-grant-funded payload from Rhea Space called the Jervis Autonomy Module, or JAM, which will let the satellites autonomously determine their orbits by imaging and identifying multiple celestial objects. As such, they won’t need to rely on terrestrial ground stations to know their positions. Rhea Space says they’re also adapting JAM to capture high-resolution images of the Moon’s surface for mapping purposes.

Illustration of the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander. Image: Blue Origin* Blue Origin says it will launch its Blue Moon Mark 1 robotic lander to Luna next year. With two self-funded Mark 1 flights, Blue Origin wants to test and refine critical landing systems before graduating them to the Mark II lander, which will land astronauts on the Moon for NASA with Artemis V end of decade. Since Blue Origin is also a NASA-approved lander provider for the CLPS program, the company intends to pitch and fly more Mark 1 landers to carry the agency’s science & technology payloads to the Moon. Mark 1’s payload capacity of 3,000 kilograms surpasses all current CLPS landers but SpaceX’s Lunar Starship, whose crew variant is currently targeting landing astronauts for NASA with Artemis III and Artemis IV in late 2026 and 2028 respectively. Note that NASA requires both Blue Origin and SpaceX’s crewed landers to touchdown within 100 meters of the targeted spots on the Moon’s rocky south pole. This is something the robotic Mark 1 will attempt. It’s also precisely what JAXA’s robotic SLIM lander achieved earlier this year.

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Open Lunar Foundation and Gurbir Singhfor sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them.

More Moon* Andrew Jones reports on a recent document submitted by China to the UN COPUOS concerning the legality of extracting and using lunar resources, which seems to suggest that China sees such activities as permissible under current international law in much the same way the US-led Artemis Accords does. Western experts are seeing China’s submission and tone as a positive development since it can now, in principle, enable a mutual dialogue on space resource governance in a cooperative way amid a decidely international fora. * GITAI—which recently moved its headquarters to the US from Japan and won funding from DARPA for the LUNA-10 lunar infrastructure project—has made an impressive terrestrial demonstration of constructing and deconstructing a five-meter communications tower using its under-development lunar rover and three inchworm robotic arms. The video is fascinating. GITAI has previously raised $61 million for their rover’s development with an aim to launch in 2026—though it might take longer. * Scott Manley provides a very good overview of NASA’s Surveyor program, which robotically landed spacecraft on the Moon in the late 1960s before the agency sent astronauts on Apollo. Related: The time NASA figured our Moon is cratered all the way down.

A follow-up on my critique of IM-1’s narrativeI did not think my critique of Intuitive Machines and NASA skewing the success criteria of the former’s first Moon landing mission would be taken as well as it was:

Celestial Citizen, in their latest Continuum newsletter:

While a private endeavor like Intuitive Machines may not have the same transparency obligations that a government agency does, shouldn’t they still be honest about their weak points in addition to their triumphs? Fellow space writer Jatan Mehta perfectly summarizes these questions in his newsletter, Jatan’s Space, with “why is it not enough to celebrate the genuine feats Intuitive Machines did achieve?” Is partial success not enough (to America)?

The Orbital Index (a Moon Monday sponsor) in Issue #259:

Jatan has a well-articulated piece on his discomfort with NASA and Intuitive Machines calling IM-1 an “unqualified success,” especially given that LRO spotted its landing location 1.5 km from its original target and the limited data that was able to be downlinked from its payloads. It is a success, certainly, but perhaps with some qualifications.

Science Writer and Editor Mukunth, in his blog post To the Moon – or the stock market?:

Even if Intuitive Machines isn't implicitly required to follow NASA's communications policies, NASA needs to ensure the companies it contracts to fly its payloads – to ease its own path to the moon in future – do. As Jatan also pointed out, the onus to communicate lies with NASA: CLPS is publicly funded and without it missions like Odysseus wouldn't happen. We need explicit policies to streamline these companies' communications expectations to follow NASA's rather than their share prices.

I’ll be honest. I was surprised by the uptake, especially because at the time of writing my article crticizing the mission’s communications, most publishers and public reactions I had come across were on nothing but a blanket hail spree.

In any case, I laid out quite a few specific questions in my article. They remain unanswered, and so if you have an informed perspective that my global audience can benefit from, do reach out. Even if you write a public rebuttal on your site, and I encourage that, I’m happy to link to it on Moon Monday in the interest of the public conversation. Ultimately, I believe rooting for the Moon does not mean being only a cheerleader.

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The selected Gaganyaan astronauts at the inaugural ceremony at ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. Image: ISROIndia selects first set of Gaganyaan astronautsUnveiling four years of secrecy, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on February 27 the first four astronauts selected to fly on the country’s initial set of human spaceflight missions mid-decade via ISRO’s ambitious Gaganyaan program. The selectees are all test pilots and Group Captains, namely Prashanth Nair, Angad Prathap, Ajit Krishnan and Shubhanshu Shukla. They have received extensive training in India and Russia, and at least one of them will receive advanced training in the US at NASA facilities sometime this year.

The announcement of Gaganyaan astronauts is a great time to review India’s progress in putting people in space. Let’s do that with this human spaceflight special of my Indian Space Progress newsletter! 🧑🏽‍🚀

But first, where are the women astronauts? When asked, ISRO says women aren’t in this astronaut batch because being a test pilot was a key requirement, which India had none of in females at the time of selection. Well, that might be true but India does have the highest global percentage of female airline pilots. The fighter pilot number is increasing too. More firmly, Susmita Mohanty convincingly argues in a piece for The Print how the arbitrary selection criteria doesn’t hold water when compared to initial female astronaut selections worldwide. I agree when Mohanty says: “We have missed a great opportunity as a nation. We could have created history.”

Aside: For the benefit of my global readers, here’s a brief para on Indians that have already been to space: Rakesh Sharma was the first Indian to visit Earth orbit, where he spent seven days in 1984 aboard a Soviet Salyut 7 space station. Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman in space, held a US citizenship when she flew in 1997 on the Space Shuttle Columbia, the same vehicle Chawla was aboard in 2003 too but which got *destroyed during atmospheric reentry, killing Chawla and her crewmates. Sunita Williams is an Indian origin but US-born astronaut who is set to fly to the International Space Station again this year aboard the first crewed Starliner flight by Boeing as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program.*

With Gaganyaan, India aims to send its people to space using its own rockets, capsules, and associated technologies. The first crewed Gaganyaan flight will carry no more than two of the four aforementioned astronauts to a 400-kilometer low Earth orbit, where they will spend three days in the Crew Module. If successful, India will then be only the world’s fourth nation to indigenously send humans to space, after Russia, the US, and China. India hopes to clinch this Yuri Gagarin moment of its own by end of 2025 but delays are expected.

India’s crawls and leaps toward indigenous human spaceflightFor well over a decade, ISRO had been inching towards some baseline technologies necessary to even plan such a massive feat despite roadblocks and delayed funding. The Indian government finally formally green-lit the human spaceflight program in 2018. Progress on technological components has been faster ever since, with 2022 bagging a successful integrated parachute test demonstrating safe capsule splashdown in the event one of the three main chutes fail to open. More parachute tests followed last year, including tests specific to drogue chutes.

In February 2023, ISRO began practicing sea recovery trials with a representative crew module, which simulates the mass, center of gravity, size, and externals of the actual Crew Module. In April 2023, ISRO completed human-rating the liquid-fueled Vikas engine after an extensive test period of three years, demonstrating higher structural margins, better health monitoring, off-nominal recoveries, and redundancy in many of its associated systems. Two Vikas engines power the core stage of the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), India’s most powerful rocket and the vehicle of choice for sending astronauts to space. Likewise in February 2024, ISRO completed human-rating LVM3’s CE-20 cryogenic upper stage after a comprehensive set of 39 engine tests.

In May 2023, ISRO qualified the Crew Module’s propulsion system, which will provide controlled atmospheric descent to complete each Gaganyaan flight and bring astronauts back home. In case of an abnormal launch, the same system will keep the crew module stable between a height of 3 to 70 kilometers. In July 2023, ISRO successfully tested the Service Module’s propulsion system (video), which features five 440-newton engines and sixteen 100-newton reaction control thrusters. During Gaganyaan missions, it’s the service module that will inject astronauts in the Crew Module into orbit, circularize it to a 400-kilometer altitude and maintain it, and eventually provide the de-boost maneuver for the crew module before separating from it.

Launch of a representative Gaganyaan crew module and its attached escape system on October 21, 2023 for an abort test. Image: ISROISRO then conducted a successful abort test in October 2023, which means the crew escape system can safely carry astronauts away from the launch vehicle in the case of an emergency. S. V. Krishna Chaitanya has reported that next up ISRO will better test aspects of the crew module’s parachute system by dropping a representative module from a 4-kilometer altitude using a heavy-lift helicopter. This will be followed by another abort test, where the escape system will lift the module away while the rocket is on the launchpad itself to simulate pad emergencies. ISRO did conduct one such test in 2018 but this redo is necessary because there have been substantial design changes to Gaganyaan since.

Growing scope and international interest: As part of an unprecedented set of broad-sweeping India-US agreements in 2023 centered around collaborative science & technology advancements, NASA will carry one of the four aforementioned Indian astronauts to the International Space Station later this year. NASA and private US companies have also shown interest in leveraging parts of Gaganyaan’s technology stack for a post-ISS future. Chethan Kumar reported last year that Blue Origin and ISRO are keen on using LVM3 to launch crew capsules to service Blue’s upcoming commercial space station called Orbital Reef. Voyager Space announced similar intentions last year for its upcoming Starlab commercial space station for which it has partnered with Airbus.

The Indian government directed ISRO in October 2023 to create an Indian Space Station in Earth orbit by 2035, and even send the first Indian to the Moon by 2040. To realize these ambitions, the Indian Department of Space (DOS) and ISRO are developing a roadmap for crewed and lunar exploration, which will comprise an orbital module before the space station, a series of Chandrayaan missions, the development of a partially reusable Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), and more.

Screengrab of a notional integrated lunar and crewed exploration roadmap for India. Image: S. Somanath / ISRO

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, SkyServe, KaleidEO and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress report. If you love my work too, join them.

India’s space budget mismatch its ambitionsDespite India’s increasingly complex human spaceflight and planetary exploration ambitions for later this decade and early next, the FY 2024-25 budget for its Department of Space (DOS)—which includes ISRO’s activities—improved marginally from $1.51 billion last year to $1.58 billion; even if it may be the interim budget with the national election coming up.

dos-isro-2024-25-interim-budget.pdf302 KBdownload-circleNotably, DOS underutilized its space technology budget in FY 2023-2024 by about $150 million, a trait the country’s Ministry of Science & Technology as a whole suffers from. As Mukunth points out in a post, this is but the latest example illustrating that increasing ISRO’s budget alone isn’t a solution in itself for continuing advances in space. Separately, as part of the broader national budget announcement, India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the availability of $12 billion dollars in interest-free loans over 50 years for Indian tech startups, including space ones, to tap into.

More mission updatesA GSLV Mk II rocket heading to space on February 17, carrying the INSAT-3DS satellite. Image: ISRO* On February 17, a GSLV Mk II rocket successfully launched and deployed ISRO’s 2274-kilogram INSAT-3DS meteorological satellite into its intended geosynchronous transfer orbit. Combined with the previous successful Mk II launch in May 2023, ISRO has now satisfied the launch criteria to finally push the $1.5 billion high-profile NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Earth observation satellite to space later this year. * ISRO intentionally deorbited the 17-year old Cartosat-2 Earth imager to avoid creating space debris. It burned up in our atmosphere on February 14. * Relatedly, following the release of India’s much-awaited new space policy early last year, in December ISRO opened up access to 5-meter resolution remote sensing data from 44 of its satellites, making it among the highest resolution datasets of its kind in the world available to the public.

More Indian Space Following the release of India’s much-awaited new space policy early last year, the government has now formally opened up approval-less foreign direct investments (FDI) in the Indian private space sector. Companies can now seek up to 74% FDI for satellite-related businesses, 49% for launch vehicles, and 100% for components and subsystems. Shyam Upadhyay has a good report gathering reactions from startups and industry veterans. * ISRO started work on a dedicated 8 square-kilometer spaceport at Kulasekarapattinam in Tamil Nadu. While Sriharikota will remain India’s primary spaceport, this one will be used to launch ISRO’s new SSLV rocket and small-lift private launchers starting 2026. The new spaceport will enhance the performance of these rockets for sun-synchronous polar orbits because now they won’t need to follow a less fuel efficient curved path in order to avoid flying over Sri Lanka. * Following Amazon Web Services signing an MoU with ISRO and IN-SPACe last year to offer some free cloud computing services to startups and research institutes under the AWS Activate program, the trio is now offering an accelerator program for Indian startups. * Sponsored listing: Space author and Indian Space Progress sponsor Gurbir Singh is offering all his books and audiobooks on space exploration at 50% discount for my readers. Use the coupon JMS50*. Not sponsored: I found Gurbir’s book The Indian Space Programme to be a great overview of the country’s road to space.

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An FYI before we begin: If you follow me on social media—especially LinkedIn, Twitter, the Fediverse or Bluesky—read this life update from my other blog: Embracing a simple but effective digital life.

An intuitive success criteria?A dramatic view of the Odysseus lunar lander still firing its main engine after making contact with the Moon. Image: Intuitive MachinesIt turns out more retrospective corrections are needed for the February 22 oblique Moon landing of Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft part of NASA’s CLPS program. Previously, the publicly traded company prematurely stated post-landing that Odysseus is “upright”, only to correct it in a media briefing timed to the closing of the stock market an entire day later. Now it turns out even the NASA LiDAR onboard, which Intuitive Machines and NASA were prompt to praise for its last-minute role as a mission savior, actually did not assist Odysseus’ landing in the last 15 kilometers of descent due to a delay in processing its data.

It’s incredible that Odysseus even rough-landed, as it was relying purely on its inertial measurement unit (IMU) and optical navigation data. But it also means the LiDAR didn’t contribute for essentially the entire descent. Are we supposed to believe that descent telemetry on Mission Control screens—which wasn’t shown or visualized on the web stream unlike Chandrayaan 3 or SLIM—never made it clear to the company and NASA that the LiDAR readings weren’t coming through to the lander’s navigation system? Or that it wasn’t clear in the following few days either?

In any case, with the Sun no longer illuminating the panel that was keeping Odysseus alive in its fallen position on the Moon, Intuitive Machines put the spacecraft in sleep mode on February 29. As Jeff Foust has summarized, NASA and Intuitive Machines declared the IM-1 mission an “unqualified success”, one that “met very high level mission objectives to touch down softly on the Moon—softly and safely—and return scientific data.” Is it okay to call a visibly rough landing a soft and safe one?

Unfortunately, this whole narrative reminds me of when ISRO retrospectively called the Chandrayaan 2 mission a “98% success” despite the crashed lander. And so this lunar enthusiast now needs to do some hard reality checks. While yes, as I’ve said in the opaque victory of Odysseus, the IM-1 mission is a success for Intuitive Machines, and Eric Berger has a great overview of the many (previously undisclosed) hurdles the company’s persevering engineers crossed to get to the Moon, I also want to present some questions that not enough seem to be asking.

Firstly, JAXA’s SLIM lander was arguably in a worse situation than Odysseus after it also tipped over on reaching the Moon as it couldn’t even generate power until the Sun circled to the other side. And yet JAXA provided a press update within 2 hours of the landing which sincerely accepted SLIM’s mixed outcomes. In fact, JAXA had explicitly defined and distributed its various success criteria in the pre-launch press kit, which it honored. Can the same things be said for Odysseus? Now, sure, Intuitive Machines doesn’t have an obligation to be as transparent as a tax-funded agency. But so didn’t Astrobotic and ispace, who nevertheless showed greater transparency in their communications despite failure.

In any case, the NASA-funded payloads onboard Odysseus come from US taxpayers, where the communications onus remains. Here, the situation is that most NASA payloads collected or transmitted limited data, and whose specifics weren’t revealed initially. A payload called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies was flown on Odysseus to specifically study the lander’s engine plume effects on lunar soil during the final descent phase. NASA says the payload did not do said imaging. And yet the agency states in the same release that “the bottom line is every NASA instrument has met some level of their objectives.” A subsequent report by Eric Berger reads:

As of Wednesday [February 28], NASA had been able to download about 50MB of data. The baseline for success was a single bit of data.

Was this criteria for success made clear and public pre-launch?

Is collecting only some data acceptable to be qualified as a success? Would the Principal Investigators and scientists hoping for or relying on that data agree with that assessment beyond being thrilled to get to the Moon at all? And if those indeed are the goals—to acquire some data and excuse everything else by citing low costs, et al.—then maybe let’s also call India’s Mangalyaan Mars orbiter a massive scientific success rather than a technological one.

Why is it not enough to celebrate the genuine feats Intuitive Machines did achieve? Being the first to lunar land using cryogenic methalox engines is impressive. So is making it to the Moon alive using only optical navigation and an IMU! But is such partial but also modular success not enough to quench our enthusiasm for lunar exploration? Or do we believe only in binary outcomes now?

Should the fact that the main engine continued firing despite Odysseus having touched the Moon not be deemed a concern as it can damage the lander and its payloads? Yes, IM-1 was certainly a difficult mission to have undertaken. But so was every other Moon mission with various firsts. Space is hard for everyone.

Does a partial success of IM-1 halt the CLPS program? As I’ve already said, it’s quite the opposite! So why retrospectively shift goalposts? And if IM-1 is an “unqualified success” but also a “flight test”, should the “shots on goal” approach of CLPS count IM-1 as a wholly successful mission or a mission at all?

Edit on March 14, 2024: A follow-up on my critique of the IM-1 Moon mission’s narrative

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Artemis updatesA mosaic of the 21-kilometer wide Shackleton crater stitched from captures by the LRO and KPLO orbiters. The latter’s view is (distinctly) overlaid on the background LRO image. The crater is otherwise permanently shadowed. Image: NASA / KARI / ASU* NASA has released initial datasets from its ultra-sensitive ShadowCam imager onboard South Korea’s first lunar orbiter KPLO, which formally started studying the Moon from February 2022. ShadowCam’s unique observations of polar permanently shadowed regions are enabling planning of future resource prospecting missions and even crewed missions who will scout for water ice. BTW, there’s a cool web app to directly explore the delicate lunar views from ShadowCam. * Jeff Foust reports that a NASA safety panel has been studying a design issue with the Orion spacecraft since last year. It concerns the side hatch, which could fail to open in (unspecified) off-nominal situations and thus be a concern for astronaut safety. * In the meanwhile, SpaceX and NASA said that they conducted more than 200 terrestrial docking tests with full-scale Lunar Starship and Orion docking simulator hardware. The tests demonstrated that Starship should be able to perform a “soft capture” of crew-hosting Orion in lunar orbit for the Artemis III Moon landing mission later this decade. Starship’s docking system is based on Dragon 2, which is flight proven on missions to the International Space Station. * Relatedly, NASA, ESA, and Nikon are collaborating on a handheld camera for Artemis III astronauts to capture good low light images in the dark environment of the Moon’s south pole with ergonomic ease. The space agencies have been testing prototypes of these devices in ESA’s Pangaea campaign, which trains future lunar astronauts in geology and sample collection, and in NASA’s analog JETT 3 mission in Arizona. The camera will be flown to the International Space Station for testing before using it on Artemis missions.

More MoonRendering of China’s “Mengzhou Y” crewed spacecraft (left) and the “Lanyue" crewed Moon lander in lunar orbit . Image: CMS After the solar-powered SLIM lander reestablished contact with Earth on February 25 followed shortly by JAXA terminating it because of heat concerns, the space agency resumed imaging operations for a brief while. It was a short revival though, as on March 1, the Sun set at its landing site and SLIM was set to sleep again. * The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced the names of the two spacecraft modules that will carry Chinese astronauts to the Moon by 2030. Chosen from a pool of public proposals by Chinese citizens, the lunar orbital capsule is named “Mengzhou Y”—or “Dream Boat Moon”—and the lander is named “Lanyue”—from Mao’s poem “You can go to the nine heavens to catch the Moon”. China’s plan involves the upcoming Long March 10 rocket launching the ~26,000-kilogram Mengzhou Y with crew to lunar orbit, where it would dock with the similarly massive Lanyue lunar lander, itself launched by another Long March 10. Two astronauts will transfer to the lander for a lunar touchdown, and return to orbit after exploring the Moon for a few days. CMSA says all three of these mission elements are progressing well in their initial development stage. * The Lunar and Planetary Institute is seeking a Director. * Sponsored listing: Space author and Moon Monday sponsor Gurbir Singh is offering all his books and audiobooks on space exploration at 50% discount for my readers. Use the coupon JMS50*. Not sponsored: I think The Atlas of Space Rocket Launches might interest Moon Monday readers the most!

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I appeared on The Planetary Society’s podcast to talk about South Korea’s first Moon mission, and how it will inspire kids and students in the country.

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I give public talks to inform and inspire kids, students and people at large about space exploration. This page links to recorded podcasts and videos.

If you’d like me to speak at your event, school, college or institute, get in touch.

On Planetary RadioI appeared on The Planetary Society podcast to talk about South Korea’s first Moon mission.

NewSpace IndiaOutcomes of India’s Mars orbiter

Tech2Does India have a space exploration roadmap?

Chai and WhyWhy aren’t we living on the Moon already?

Mumbai UniversityTechnical careers in space exploration as a physics graduate

Asan VigyanWhy explore Space

Cosmic conversations with King Sidharth

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Physics graduates have plenty of opportunities to work at space organizations and companies as space exploration becomes popular by the day. This video from my talk to physics students at the University of Mumbai on December 3, organized by their Department of Physics, discusses such career prospects.

Topics discussed include:

• 00:32 Careers in space exploration
• 01:17 - Rockets
• 04:52 - Orbiters
• 06:56 - Landers
• 08:31 - Rovers
• 11:55 - Trajectory planning
• 15:44 - Thermals
• 16:48 - Communications
• 18:11 - Or do something crazy
• 19:09 - Avionics and software

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This is a tightened version of the talk I gave for Chai and Why, a series of popular science talks organized by Arnab Bhattacharya, a scientist and a science communicator based out of India.

Talk Description: It’s been 50 years since humans landed on the Moon, so why haven’t we established a human settlement there already? The answer lies in water. Chandrayaan 1 made headlines by discovering water on the Moon. But do we have the technology to extract it? Is there enough water to power human settlements? Chandrayaan 2 and NASA are finding out! Every so often there is a discovery of water on some part of the moon, what’s the deal with that? Let’s discuss the technological roadblocks that keep us from living on the Moon and beyond!

Talk Chapters:

• 02:11 – Talk intro
• 08:19 – Locations of past Moon landing missions
• 11:07 – What’s so special about the polar regions on the Moon?
• 15:28 – All about that water on the Moon
• 26:13 – How much water is there on the Moon exactly?
• 28:37 – Challenges in tapping the Moon water
• 38:11 – Q&A Brief

🌗 Learn about our Moon →

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In this podcast episode for NewSpace India, I talk about the scope of space science missions in India and how they can be broadened in the future. We deeply discuss India’s first Mars mission Mangalyaan, missing science from it, and potential lessons for the future.

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I was invited by Tech2/Firstpost on their science podcast alongside Narayan Prasad to talk about India's space exploration roadmap, or the lack thereof.

Topics discussed:

• 02:58 - Interesting destinations to explore in the inner Solar System
• 07:10 - What makes the Moon so significant for space exploration?
• 13:03 - Is there a strategy for India's space science missions?
• 16:27 - What is India's interest in exploring Mars?
• 19:13 - What do we not know about living in space?
• 26:00 - Why doesn't India become a part of the International Space Station?
• 28:56 - Are India's space missions comparable with China's?
• 33:40 - Is India aiming lower than China's in its space endeavors?
• 35:17 - Will militarization of space affect space exploration?
• 37:30 - What's stopping India from exploring the outer solar system?

You can watch the longer, original video on Tech2's channel.

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I was invited over by my friend and inspiration Sidharth for a livestream talk on all things space with his audience.

Topics discussed were:

• 00:30 - What do I do?
• 01:58 - Journey of science and writing
• 06:18 - China's rise in radio astronomy
• 10:48 - What is space?
• 15:52 - NASA's mission to study the Sun
• 19:37 - Does space occupy space?
• 23:17 - NASA Voyagers: The farthest we've been from home
• 28:10 - When will we go to Mars?
• 31:50 - Patreon

You can watch the original, unedited livestream if you prefer longer videos for some reason.

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Article version: blog.jatan.space/p/interviewing-tory-bruno-CEO-ula

Glued to the Apollo landings, an eight year Tory Bruno became fascinated with rocketry. After graduating as a mechanical engineer, he worked at Lockheed Martin for several years on increasingly complex projects, eventually making the transition from engineer to executive. Today he is CEO and President of United Launch Alliance (ULA)—the company whose rockets have launched every NASA mission to Mars.

Tory is one of my favorite space people and a big inspiration so I was thrilled to get to interview him! The interview was conducted for Supercluster just before ULA successfully launched NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. We talk about ULA’s unique capabilities and future plans to enable solar system exploration.

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Listen now (28 min)

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Podcasts I recommend* Planetary Radio * Gravity Assist * NewSpace India

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I gave this talk on June 27, 2020 to school kids for Asan Vigyan but enjoyable by anyone with an interest in space or science. The kids had a raft of amazing questions on every single topic! They deeply understood why space exploration is important and quintessential. 🚀

Topics discussed include:

• 00:51 - Telescopes of Earth
• 06:56 - Space telescopes
• 13:12 - Why study the Sun?
• 19:50 - Why explore the Moon?
• 35:57 - Threats to Earth and why we need to live in space
• 38:40 - Why study exoplanets?

Articles referred to in the session:

• Why explore the Moon
• How NASA and Chandrayaan discovered water on the Moon
• Are the Universe's smallest stars promising places for life?
• ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is creating the highest resolution map of the Moon
• A mission to touch the Sun, with the fastest spacecraft in history