In 2024, the world’s space agencies are shooting for the moon. More than 10 missions are headed to Earth’s satellite, most of them intending to land on its surface and all paving the way for human lunar exploration.
“It is the year of the moon,” says at the California Institute of Technology. “The number of moon missions in 2024 is really a reflection and a realisation of the momentum from the last five years or so – it’s a big global push.”
The barrage is set to begin in January, with the planned landing of Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) craft, the country’s first lunar lander. Around the same time, a lander developed by the US company Intuitive Machines will launch. This lunar craft, along with most of the others launching in 2024, is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, in which the agency funds commercial craft going to the moon to foster future exploration and build industry partnerships.
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Over the course of the year, the CLPS missions will investigate and attempt to mine ice on the moon, test technology designed for future missions, work on how to deal with the sticky lunar dust and demonstrate a wide variety of new types of rover.
One such mission, called Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE), will include three rovers and a base station, all operating autonomously to take measurements at different locations across the lunar surface, working from a general mission plan.
“The autonomy aboard the robots takes that high-level objective and computes what each needs to do individually to achieve that objective without any further instruction,” says at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. If it works, this set-up could drastically boost the productivity of robots on future missions.
It isn’t just landers headed to the moon – new orbiters will also support them. The Lunar Trailblazer orbiter, which is part of the CLPS programme, will be particularly important to future human explorers, who will need to extract water from lunar ice. “This will provide the first maps of water at the surface that are truly actionable – you land on the surface and you know if you drive left or you drive right,” says Ehlmann. “Our data will basically provide signposts that say ‘go here next’.”
Not all of 2024’s moon missions will be sent up by NASA, of course. Along with Japan’s SLIM, orbiters are being sent from Canada, Germany and Singapore, and even the Finnish electronics company Nokia is sending a rover. In May, China plans to launch the Chang’e 6 mission to return the world’s first samples from the far side of the moon.
Rounding off the year, NASA’s Artemis II mission is planned for November, along with two important flights of SpaceX’s Starship craft near the end of 2024 – one an uncrewed moon landing and the other the dearMoon flight, which will send several artists on a flyby.
All of these missions – especially Artemis II, which will see four astronauts flying near the moon and back over the course of 10 days – are ramping up to increasingly sophisticated human lunar exploration in the coming decades. “Seeing the moon up close will really bring that perspective that, no kidding, it is a real and separate body in open space,” says Christina Koch, one of those four astronauts. “Getting to be a part of that mission, doing something we haven’t done in over 50 years, is just absolutely phenomenal.”
