Moon Monday
Moon Monday #217: Red A-CLPS 🔥💍
Also drills, flying regolith, a hard landing, Moonlight, and many more mission updates to quench the lunatic in you.
CLPS
By Jatan Mehta | Coverage, with context, of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Services Program to send the agency’s science & technology payloads to the Moon on privately owned landers.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #216: Firefly Blue Ghost brings precision landing and lunar sci-tech bounties
Plus: Contextualizing the failure of Intuitive Machines’ second Moon mission and that of Lunar Trailblazer as grave losses for NASA.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #215: Firefly performs first actual soft lunar landing for the US in the 21st century, bags key firsts
Plus: Intuitive Machines and Lunar Trailblazer launch for Luna while KASA plans the same. And, maybe nobody should “dominate” space.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #214: Blue Ghost preps for lunar landing, gets its fix in lunar orbit
Plus: Intuitive Machines set to launch second Moon lander, Australia continues lunar tech investments, and more.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #213: Mission updates from the US, Japan, China, and this Indian
CLPS and Artemis updates * On February 13, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program successfully fired its engines for 4 minutes and 15 seconds to enter an elliptical orbit around Luna. Over the rest of February, Blue Ghost will fire its engines multiple times
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #212: UNO Skip, then UNO Flip, ft. VIPER and Artemis
Plus: Scientific archives as your Wild Card, a Draw Four for Boeing, UNO Reverse with Japan, and a stack of Artemis updates.
Indian Space
ISRO provided ground tracking support for Intuitive Machines’ NASA CLPS Moon landing
Last week I wrote how 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, the NSIL report doesn’t specify the mission name.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #210: Mission updates from Japan, the US, China, South Korea, India, and Finland
Read to the end to know how I avoid (Artemis) hot takes on Moon Monday.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #209: Let’s be high on launch and low on provocation
Updates on CLPS, ispace, Artemis, Chandrayaan 4, and more. Read to the end for a fact check on an op-ed.
Guides
How to follow CLPS Moon mission updates
With a fleet of NASA-supported robotic Moon landers part of the agency’s CLPS program launching throughout this decade, I’ve compiled an exhaustive rundown for you to be up to speed on these novel missions: All about CLPS Moon landing missions 🌗 I update this page every month or two.
Articles
Everything you need to know about NASA CLPS Moon landing missions
A look at the armada of robotic landers NASA is riding to the Moon this decade.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #208: What makes a lunar landing mission “successful”?
Before we begin, a note that my thoughts are with everyone affected by the fires in southern California as well as by last week’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake in Xizang, China. The Moon lander duo from ispace Japan and US-based Firefly Aerospace are being targeted for launch by SpaceX on