Moon Monday #210: Mission updates from Japan, the US, China, South Korea, India, and Finland

A note before we start: Jonathan McDowell doesn’t need an introduction for his globally revered Space Reports. To move his foundational space library to a new home, he’s seeking funds through GoFundMe. I’ve donated, and urge my dear readers to consider supporting him too to help meet the goal. The best part from his announcement is that post-retirement from his day job, Jonathan intends to do Space Report related work full-time. Can’t wait. 🚀

Two Moon landers working in space

• On January 21, the joint US-Italian LuGRE payload onboard Firefly’s Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program became the first experiment ever to get a GPS fix at approximately 331,000 kilometers away from Earth. That’s close to the average Earth-Moon distance of 384,000 kilometers, indicating that Earth-based GNSS satellite constellations could help spacecraft navigate at the Moon.
• On January 22, ispace Japan turned on the radiation monitoring payload aboard its second Moon lander Hakuto-R, which launched alongside Firefly’s lander on a shared SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15. The radiation payload on Hakuto-R is developed by the National Central University of Taiwan. It’s flying commercially, and represents the country’s first instrument flown to deep space. The payload’s data about the nature of radiation on and around the Moon will contribute to a larger effort to nail down on the same, which will inform us on how to adequately protect astronauts and critical hardware on future long term lunar missions.

More mission updates

• Andrew Jones reports that China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 Moon landing mission will carry two five-kilogram mobile robots developed by the private Chinese company ‘STAR.VISION’ in collaboration with universities from China and Turkey. This would make it the first payload from a Chinese company flying commercially on a Chang’e spacecraft. Targeting launch on a Long March 5 rocket in 2028, Chang’e 8 will explore the nature of local lunar polar resources like its soil and water ice and assess their utility with a comprehensive suite of payloads. It was recently revealed that the Chang’e 8 payloads will include a multi-purpose, 100-kilogram dextrous mobile robot from group of institutions in Hong Kong, and a 35-kilogram rover from Pakistan.
• Kim Na-young reports that South Korea’s recently formed space agency called the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA) is budgeting about $31 million this year towards the country’s goal of building a Moon lander. In an approach similar to what ISRO takes for its planetary missions like Chandrayaan 3, South Korea is also indigenously developing the rocket that will launch its Moon lander. The budget line for the rocket is separate. KASA will also send a lunar environment monitoring payload through NASA onboard Intuitive Machines’ third CLPS Moon lander for about $5 million. All of these investments are part of South Korea’s space budget of $562.5 million pushed with the aim of becoming a global space power in the coming decades. Kim Na-young has also reported that KASA seeks to strengthen partnerships with Japan and Europe other than the US, including through participation in NASA’s Artemis program.
• The annual report of NSIL, an Indian government arm tasked with commercializing ISRO’s space technologies, notes that ISRO provided commercial ground tracking support for a lunar mission by another country in 2023. For some reason, NSIL doesn’t mention which mission this was. Since the timeframe is 2023, the ground tracking support must have been for either Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft or JAXA’s SLIM. Although SLIM landed in January 2024, it launched in September 2023. India’s geography with respect to Japan and Europe would’ve made it a suitable gap-filler for continued communications. I’m excluding ispace Japan’s first Moon mission being the NSIL-ISRO customer on the assumed basis that ISRO doesn’t seem to have cooperation arrangements in place with ispace like they do with JAXA and Roscosmos. Thoughts?

Artemis updates

• NASA is awarding $24 million across nine companies to investigate and propose high autonomy logistics and mobility solutions for eventual use on the Artemis Moonbase. These will serve astronauts living on the Moon and exploring it for longer durations. Relatedly, as part of the latest round of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, the agency is funding the LUNGS proposal that will explore melting of glass compounds in lunar soil to create large spherical shell structures as potential astronaut habitats.
• Finland became the 53rd nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. Relatedly, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS Moon lander targeting a late February launch is slated to carry 4G/LTE communications systems from Nokia of America as a subsidiary of Nokia Finland. Jeff Foust noted in his coverage that while Finland has signed the Accords, the country continues to consider the United Nations as the primary forum for the development and compliance of international space law.

Also see: Artemis Accords strikes a chord

• After NASA transferred operations of two of its key lunar orbital imagers to Intuitive Machines, the company is now hiring someone who would support their remote sensing observations, derive its data products, and conduct scientific analyses on the same. This role is part of the company’s ‘Super Moon Science Operations Center’ in Phoenix, Arizona.

Many thanks to Off Planet Research, Henry Throop and Frank Genin for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to publish this curated community resource for free, support my independent writing. 🌙

Sharing Moon Monday’s approach to speculative (Artemis) coverage

Some of you have been wondering and asking why I haven’t covered potential Artemis changes in the new US administration on this Moon Monday blog+newsletter. So here’s the thing:

In the two months since the US electoral outcome, speculations on shifts in the Artemis program have come and gone, or even gotten superseded. As it is the space industry suffers from having more coverage of pre-launch and ongoing spaceflight than that of post spaceflight. As such, what many people and media outlets have been engaging in for the past two months is pre-pre-spaceflight and pre-policy!

I’ve generally kept an editorial rule that I don’t discuss or proliferate something on my blog that’s more speculation or more incomplete than not. I prefer to wait for a tangible aspect of something to move in the present, and then pull related threads and coverage to get a better sense of what’s happening and where things are really going. My goal with Moon Monday is to archive updates and efforts that actually transpired. This way it can provide more long term value rather than be tied to just the news cycle.

There can be good reasons to do speculative coverage, and I’ve done some in the past when I thought it was warranted or if it was something only I could’ve said. But for Artemis, there are so many doing and spreading the speculations already that I don’t feel the need to proliferate it all further. I’m quite tired of the transient way in which most space news is covered, and I’d like to keep Moon Monday away from all of that.

To be clear, I’m not implying other media outlets should take the same approach as Moon Monday. Unlike what seems to be broadly assumed by people at large, the media is not a monolith. Not all media publications and journalists cover the same topics, and to the same depth or on comparable timescales. It holds true even within science and space journalism. In fact, if it wasn’t for many outlets providing space communities with daily coverage, my weekly Moon Monday editions wouldn’t have been able to build on it to provide a broader context. But there’s a difference between daily updates on actual developments versus transient speculations.

Just as importantly, majority of the US-based and Europe-based media publications covering space have a strong western bias, which is something I explicitly try and avoid here. Moon Monday covers global lunar exploration. There are many other lunar developments happening right now in countries worldwide—and that doesn’t mean including only China—which don’t get covered well or enough. These developments are just as important too.

With Moon Monday, my goal has been to provide a larger global picture that complements the daily coverage in parts of the world, and use that to identify gaps and fill them if possible. In turn, this contextual coverage feeds back to journalists and daily reporters worldwide who are subscribed to Moon Monday.

And so that is why you haven’t seen me spread Artemis speculations vis-à-vis the new US administration on Moon Monday. Having explained these things, now that the new US presidential term has officially begun, let’s see what tangible things unfold for Artemis, and I will surely cover them as well as share my perspectives along the way.

Thoughts?

More Moon

• A new book Optics of the Moon is out for students and early career researchers in lunar and planetary science.
• Fun with Moon exploration headlines 🌝