The Summary
- The year ahead is expected to be full of ambitious space missions.
- In the coming weeks or months, several robotic landers are expected to launch to the moon.
- China and India both hope to achieve milestones in space this year.
2025 is expected to be a year full of ambitious space exploration, from robotic missions to the moon to a new observatory in space to a run-in with an asteroid.
This year’s schedule of scheduled launches includes possible firsts for China, Japan, and India, so it’s not just NASA and commercial space businesses that will be active.
These are a few of the upcoming largest space missions.
Moon fever continues
In 2025, all eyes will be on the moon once more.
Two new missions to the lunar surface are scheduled to be launched by a SpaceX rocket later this month. One is the Blue Ghost lander, created by Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based business, which intends to spend roughly two weeks gathering scientific data on the moon. The second is a Japanese lunar lander that was constructed privately and has a small rover attached.
The area of the moon known as Mare Crisium, where Blue Ghost will try to land, is believed to be the location of an old asteroid collision.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program includes the project. Three private businesses, including Firefly Aerospace, were given contracts by the space agency to transport equipment, science experiments, and other items to the lunar surface. The project is part of NASA’s broader Artemis program, which intends to send people back to the moon in the future. Ten NASA research and technology experiments are anticipated to be carried on the Blue Ghost mission.
The Resilience lander and Tenacious mini rover, both created by the Japanese company ispace, will launch into orbit on the same rocket booster. They want to land on the moon approximately four or five months after launch, using a longer and less energy-intensive route than Blue Ghost.
The area known as Mare Frigoris, in the far north of the moon, is the intended landing site.
Its Hakuto lander unexpectedly accelerated during its descent and crashed on the lunar surface last year, ending iSpace’s hopes of being the first commercial business to land a spacecraft on the moon.
The corporation that became the first to land a privately made craft on the moon may also launch a third moon mission this month.
Additionally, a contract under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program was given to Texas-based Intuitive Machines. Its lander was the first American vehicle to set foot on the moon in over 50 years last year. In the upcoming weeks, the corporation hopes to launch its next-generation lander on a different SpaceX rocket to the lunar south pole.
A robot that will hop to a neighboring crater to take pictures and carry out scientific tests will be part of the mission, along with a drill to remove lunar dirt.
Investigating the origins of the universe
NASA’s SPHEREx mission, a space observatory intended to scan the whole sky in optical and near-infrared light, is scheduled to launch in late February.
The spacecraft will collect information on over 450 million additional galaxies and study over 100 million stars in the Milky Way.
As part of its two-year mission, the observatory will also search for organic molecules and water, two indicators of life as we know it, in the Milky Way. Experts anticipate that the mission will provide new information about the origins of the universe and how galaxies develop.
Two NASA astronauts will finally return home
It is anticipated that the two NASA astronauts who have been stranded on the ISS since their Boeing spacecraft encountered issues in June will eventually make their way back home in March.
On the first crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore took out for the International Space Station. Originally, the two were supposed to stay at the space station for roughly a week before taking the Starliner back to Earth. But the capsule encountered fuel leaks and thruster problems, so NASA opted to fly it back without anyone onboard, leaving Williams and Wilmore in orbit.
They will have spent more than nine months in space by the time they return to Earth in a SpaceX capsule, alongside two other space station crew members.
India s spaceflight ambitions
India is looking to make big strides in its human spaceflight program this year.
Shubhanshu Shukla, an astronaut with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is scheduled to travel to the International Space Station on a commercial mission operated by the Texas-based startupAxiom Space.
The launch, which is expected no earlier than spring, will also include government-sponsored crew members from Poland and Hungary. The crew will spend up to 14 days at the ISS.
Meanwhile, India is also working to develop its own crewed spacecraft, which the country hopes to launch for the first time in 2026.
A new private space station?
A California-based startup called Vast is expected to launch a first-of-its-kind commercial space station into orbit this year. The private outpost, dubbed Haven-1, is slated to launch no earlier than August aboard a SpaceX rocket.
Haven-1 is designed to house four astronauts on missions up to 30 days. The space station will at first function as an independent outpost, though Vast eventually intends to connect it to a larger module that is still under development.
In partnership with SpaceX, Vast intends to one day launch a crewed mission to the Haven-1 outpost, but the company has yet to announce a targeted launch date for that.
China s encounter with an asteroid
China’s space exploration shows no signs of slowing in 2025.
This spring, the country plans to launch a mission to collect samples of an asteroid its first such expedition.
The plan calls for a spacecraft called Tianwen-2 to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid named Kamo oalewa, which some scientists have suggestedcould be a piece of the moonthat got ejected during an ancient impact.
The mission aims to gather bits of the asteroid and then release a capsule with the samples to return to Earth in 2026. After that, the Tianwen-2 spacecraft is expected to swing around Earth and use our planet’s gravity as a slingshot to send it flying towards a comet known as 311P/PANSTARRS. The probe is expected to arrive at the comet in the mid-2030s.
If successful, China s asteroid sampling mission will be a major accomplishment for the country s space agency one that would come on the heels of several recent milestones. China has already become the first to collect andreturn samples from the far side of the moon, and it has also landed a rover on Mars and completed construction of its ownTiangong space station.
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