¶The Moon. 🌙 - JAXA’s SLIM landed precisely, but sideways, on the Moon, making Japan the fifth country to successfully soft land on our nearest neighbor. SLIM surprised everyone, lasting 3 lunar nights without radioisotope heaters, and its two rovers (the hopping LEV-1 and the photographer LEV-2) worked successfully.
- Astrobotic’s first lunar mission, technically the first US lunar commercial lander to operate in space, failed to reach the Moon due to a propellant leak, but the company will be trying again this year.
- Intuitive Machines made commercial space history when its IM-1 Nova-C Odysseus landed, albeit breaking a landing leg and tipping over, on the Moon. It was the first successful non-governmental lunar lander in history and the US’s first lunar lander in 52 years. Odysseus was also the first spacecraft to use cryogenic (in this case, methalox) propulsion in deep space.
- China’s Chang’e-6 landed on the Moon and then returned the first samples from the lunar far side, communicating with the Queqiao-2 relay satellite. China is now four for four on Moon landings.
- NASA’s Artemis II and Artemis III were delayed to 2026 and mid-2027, respectively, due to Orion heat shield issues.
- To the dismay of much of the space science community, despite being finished, NASA’s VIPER was canceled due to congressional budget limitations (unless someone else steps up to launch it). 🤞
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 | 2024 was a tipsy year on the Moon, but despite this, SLIM hit the Moon like a bullseye… and then tipped over. |
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¶Government Space. 🏛️- The Artemis Accords reached 52 national signatories, and China’s ILRS reached 13.
- The NRO’s proliferated small spy satellite constellation reached 100 satellites. China has also launched numerous small spy satellites.
- The ISS and Tiangong both received multiple crewed rotations, with a recent 9-hour Tiangong spacewalk breaking world records.
- SpaceX received a $843M contract to deorbit the ISS in the early 2030s.
- Russia vetoed a UN resolution on nuclear weapons in space and is pursuing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon system (pdf). 🤦
- Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko broke the world record for cumulative time spent in space at 1,111 days.
- Debris: Seven debris events generated ~1,500 new trackable pieces of space debris. Three were Long March 6A upper stages (concerning since 6A is a modern rocket that first launched in 2022), the others were the Russian Resurs-P No.1 satellite, Intelsat 33E (endangering other sats in the GEO band), an Atlas Centaur V, and, just last week, DMSP 5D-2/F14 (the latest in a series of break ups for that family of DoD weather satellites launched in the 80s and 90s).
- Other: For a period in September, there were 19 people in space, a new world record; NASA’s ACS3 solar sail demonstration mission launched (with a bent boom and tumbling, of unclear status at the moment); and, there were multiple rounds of layoffs at JPL.
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 | SpaceX’s ISS deorbit vehicle, sometime after 2030. |
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¶Launch. 🚀- In 2024, orbital launches set a new record for the fourth year straight. Humanity launched 261 times in 2024 (with 253 of those reaching orbit). The US led with 156 launches (predominantly SpaceX), China at 68 (breaking their 2023 record of 67 launches but not approaching their 100 launch target), Russia with 17 launches, Japan at 7, India at 5, and Iran with 4, Europe with 3, and North Korea with 1.
- 2024 saw the first successful launches of Vulcan Centaur, Orienspace's Gravity-1, Long March 6C, Long March 12, Zhuque-2E, Kuaizhou 1A Pro, and Ariane 6.
- SpaceX launched 138 times, managing a 2.72-day launch cadence (with one failed flight and lost payload), including 4 Starship launches, with successful soft water landings of both Ship and Booster, and one stunning chopstick Booster tower catch. Starship continues to be poised to completely change the dynamics of the space industry, likely dropping the price per kg to LEO sufficiently to change how satellites and other space infrastructure are designed and optimized. Falcon 9’s life-leading booster has now launched 24 times.
- Rocket Lab launched Electron 14 times, a record for the company, but delayed Neutron to 2025. Galactic Energy launched 5 times; Space One launched twice (but neither successfully); and, Firefly, Orienspace, i-Space, and Landspace launched just once. ULA launched 5 times, with Vulcan reaching orbit twice in 2024 on national security qualification flights (the latter of which saw a solid rocket booster’s engine nozzle fall off but still reached orbit).
- Meanwhile, Starliner’s crewed flight to the ISS resulted in drama and its crew staying in orbit (six months now, and it will likely be nine before Butch and Suni come home).
- Ariane 6 went into service, and Vega-C successfully returned to flight, completing its replacement of Vega.
- Delta IV-Heavy, the last Delta, was retired.
- New Glenn didn’t quite make a 2024 launch (it did hotfire on the 27th), but we expect it very early in 2025.
- Astra went private, ABL Space had a pad fire and pivoted to being a missile defense test system, and Relativity appears to be struggling.
- Launch failures: Japan's first privately funded orbital-class rocket, Space One’s Kairos, failed twice this year; North Korea’s new carrier rocket; Chinese solid-fueled rockets Hyperbola-1 and Kinetica-1; and, one SpaceX Falcon 9 when the second-stage engine failed to re-ignite due to a liquid oxygen leak.
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 | Starship Booster 12, mid-catch. 🥢 |
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¶Commercial Space. 🛰️- The 10 largest space company fundings in 2024 (care of Payload), which highlight China’s continued commercial space renaissance, were: Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Tech (the Thousand Sails 12,000-satellite Starlink competitor, China, $943M), Space Pioneer (launch, China, $207M), Astranis (small GEO comsats, USA, $200M), Firefly (launch, USA, $175M), D-Orbit (in-space transportation, Italy, $166M), The Exploration Company (reusable space capsule, Germany, $160M), Impulse Space (in-space transportation, USA, $150M), MinoSpace (satellite manufacturing, China, $137M), Fleet Space (IoT/mining, Australia, $100M), and i-Space (launch, China, $99M).
- Jared Isaacman—now also the proposed new head of NASA—and his crew performed the first commercial space walk and reached the highest crewed altitude since the Apollo era.
- Space SPACs boomed again, with Intuitive Machines, Redwire, Rocket Lab, AST SpaceMobile, and SatixFy all up 200% or more.
- China started launching not one, but two, commsat mega-constellations. Meanwhile, SpaceX deployed about 2,000 additional Starlink satellites from 80+ launches in 2024 (bringing the total number in orbit to 6,906), plus more than 100 Starshield satellites for the US government. Amazon Kuiper's first operational sats didn’t launch in 2024, but we expect multiple in 2025.
- Varda undertook the first full-commercial landing of a spacecraft on U.S. soil. (Dragon currently lands on the water, F9 boosters are suborbital, Starliner was under government contract, etc.) Here’s a video from Varda going from space to Earth.
- Astroscale became the first private company to closely approach some unsuspecting space debris, when their ADRAS-J came within 15 meters of an abandoned Japanese rocket upper stage.
- Astranis launched 4 small GEO sats (on Dec 29th) as the trend of satellite miniaturization in LEO starts to reach GEO (although with Starship’s economics, this trend may eventually reverse).
- As the ISS ages, commercial space stations are making progress, with multiple announcements from Vast (Haven-1 internal design, Haven-2 plans, ISS missions), Starlab, Orbital Reef, and Axiom. Axiom recently announced an updated plan for their free-flying station, now with only a brief ISS stop for the first module, followed by becoming a free-flying two-module station in 2028, instead of detaching from the ISS in 2030 as originally planned.
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 | Jared Isaacman, soon to be NASA Administrator, during the first commercial space walk. |
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¶Space & Earth Science. 🪐- On Mars, Perseverance reached Jezero Crater’s rim, continuing to gather science along the way, and Ingenuity flew its 72nd and last flight (a recent analysis suggests that ‘bland’ featureless terrain resulted in ground tracking errors and a faster horizontal landing speed than tolerable, something that will presumably be fixed in its proposed successor, Mars Chopper). NASA continued to reevaluate their Mars sample return plans in collaboration with ESA, with a possible announcement coming soon.
- Europa Clipper launched toward Jupiter for a 2030 arrival (prospects for life now seem low, with new analysis suggesting Europa’s ice might be thicker than previously thought).
- A Falcon 9 sent ESA’s Hera toward Didymos, to arrive in 2026 for a survey of DART's impact.
- ISRO launched ESA’s Proba-3 duo to test a formation flying solar coronagraph and also their Aditya-L1 Earth-Sun L1 Sun observatory and X-ray polarization-studying XPoSat missions.
- A Long March-2C carried the Einstein Probe X-ray space telescope to orbit, a collaboration between CAS, ESA, and the MPE.
- Some notable Earth observation missions include NASA’s PACE and GOES-U, ESA’s EarthCARE, JAXA’s ALOS-4, and commercial/non-profit missions Carbon Mapper and MethaneSAT.
- The Earth Observation AI world also saw the release of several new foundation models for EO, namely an updated NASA-sponsored Prithvi Geospatial Model, Microsoft’s Aurora atmospheric model, and the non-profit Clay model.
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 | Ingenuity in its final resting place, on Mars. You did real good. |
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¶2025. 🔮- To the Moon! Ispace’s M2/RESILIENCE, Astrobotic’s next landing attempt, Firefly’s Blue Ghost, and Intuitive Machines’s IM-2 (carrying multiple rovers) will all likely vie to be the second commercial lander on the Moon.
- AstroForge's 100 kg Odin, the world’s first commercial deep space and asteroid prospecting mission, will launch as a secondary payload on IM-2.
- NASA, under Trump and Isaacman, could go in many different directions. (SLS seems highly at risk, and at something like $3B per launch, we can’t say we’d completely miss it.)
- Lots of new launch vehicles! Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Rocket Factory Augsburg’s RFA One, maybe HyImpulse’s SL1, Gilmour Space Technologies’s Eris Block 1, Orbex’s Prime, Skyrora’s Skyrora XL, and Stoke Space’s Nova. And so many new Chinese launch vehicles too, including LandSpace’s Zhuque-3, Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3, Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1, Orienspace’s Gravity-2, i-Space’s Hyperbola-3, and CAS Space’s Kinetica 2.
- Vast’s Haven-1 is targeting a 2025 launch to become the world’s first commercial space station.
- SpaceX’s privately financed Fram2 mission could take humans into polar orbit for the first time.
- Sierra Space’s cargo Dream Chaser, the ‘world’s only commercial spaceplane,’ should finally launch in 2025 on a Vulcan rocket. The vehicle arrived in Florida for launch preparation last May.
- A bunch more Starship flights—as many as 25 (but this number seems unlikely)—including a Ship catch, a second launch tower, a first orbital flight trajectory, a likely in-space propellant transfer demonstration between two Starships, more consistent Booster catch attempts… along with, of course, many, many more Falcon 9 launches.
- Tianwen-2 will launch NET May to attempt a sample return from near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, followed by a visit to a comet.
- Continued ramping of mega constellation launches from China (Thousand Sails, Guowang) and the US (Starlink, Kuiper).
- NASA’s near-IR SPHEREx will launch to collect data on more than 450 million galaxies and many millions of stars in the Milky Way. NASA’s PUNCH will send four LEO smallsats to orbit to make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s corona. NISAR, the joint ISRO-NASA SAR mission, will launch to provide 6-day revisit SAR data for much of the planet’s surface at 5-10 meter resolution. Lunar Trailblazer and the joint ESA-NASA Lunar Pathfinder (as a rideshare on Blue Ghost) will study lunar water and provide lunar mission comms support, respectively.
- Maybe: ESA’s Space Rider uncrewed space plane, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Pathfinder mission, NASA’s EscaPADE if a launch window and launch vehicle can be nailed down (the big question is whether New Glenn can launch multiple times in 2025).
- Others: Hera will fly by Mars in March; Lucy will fly by asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20th; Butch and Sunni will finally return from the ISS; Juice will fly by Venus at the end of August; and, 2025 might see the demise of Juno unless it can survive Jupiter’s intense radiation longer than planned.
- Whew. Here’s to an exciting year in space!
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 | New Glenn stands on its launch pad, ready to become the first new launch vehicle of 2025. |
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| ¶News in brief. Tokyo-based Space One’s Kairo rocket autonomously self-destructed 3 minutes into its second launch attempt, maybe due to an issue with the nozzle and/or attitude control system (the root cause is still unknown) ● The homecoming for ISS astronauts Butch and Suni was further pushed back by a month due to delays with the Crew Dragon capsule ● Vast signed a deal with SpaceX for two private astronaut missions to the ISS to help develop their Haven-2 space station ● China launched the first group of satellites for their Guowang (“national net”) mega constellation that aims to provide global communications coverage with 13,000 satellites in LEO ● In its continued move away from TDRS, NASA selected four companies to provide LEO and cislunar communications services (Intuitive Machines, KSAT, SSC Space, and Viasat) ● NASA awarded Firefly Aerospace its third lunar lander mission via a $179.6M task order that aims to bring six payloads and rover to the near side of the Moon in 2028 ● Chinese launch startup Landspace received $123M from a state-backed investment initiative to continue developing their reusable methalox launch vehicles ● China launched a CERES-1 Y4 carrier rocket from the sea, delivering an experimental communications satellite ● China also launched 4 SAR satellites to orbit ● Unfortunately, the country suffered a failure on their record-breaking 68th launch attempt of the year after a commercial Kinetica-1 solid rocket lost attitude control seconds after ignition of its third stage ● Rocket Lab launched the sixth radar imaging satellite for Synspective, who also went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and raised $60M+ ● A defunct military weather satellite broke up in orbit (like multiple of its sibling spacecraft have), creating 50+ pieces of debris ● Liechtenstein and Thailand signed the Artemis Accords (Thailand was the first nation to do so who is also a signatory in China’s International Lunar Research Station) ● India launched two spacecraft that will attempt autonomous docking as part of their Space Docking Experiment mission (aka SpaDeX) ● Blue Origin secured an FAA launch license for New Glenn’s debut and then conducted a 24-second static fire of the first stage’s seven BE-4 engines, positioning the rocket for its potential first launch next week, just missing its 2024 debut ● Parker Solar Probe flew within 6.1 million kilometers of the Sun, the closest approach by any spacecraft, and then phoned home three days later to report its success. |
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