Quote Originally Posted by Trafalgar View Post
So the recent failed attempt by to land a probe on the moon got me thinking, how hard is it? Off of Wikipedia, this is a list of landing attempts since 2020:

  • Chang'e 5 - PRC - Dec 16 2020 - Success
  • Omotenashi - Japan - Nov 21, 2022 - Fail
  • Hakuto-R - Japan - Apr 2023 - Fail
  • Chandrayaan-3 - India - Jul 14 2023 - Success
  • Luna 25 - Russia - Aug 10, 2023 - Fail
  • Peregrine - USA - Jan 8, 2024 - Fail
  • SLIM - Japan - Jan 19, 2024 - Success
  • IM-1 Odysseus - USA - Feb 22, 2024 - Fail


A few thoughts on this:
-Only 3 of 8 recent attempts to land on the moon have been successful. This is much lower than I would have thought.
-PRC, Japan, and India have been successful while Russia and USA have not. So your historical space exploration heavy weights are being outdone by relative newcomers.
-It's interesting to me that IM-1 has been treated as a partial success by the US media. Wikipedia even says "landed" instead of failure despite the craft toppling over onto its side. If this was a crewed mission it would be a disaster with the crew stranded.
-In January, NASA released a schedule for Artemis in January that planned a crewed moon landing for September 2026. They have contracted both SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop spacecraft for this. There is no way a reliable crewed lander can be developed and tested by then.
Peregrine was an abort, not a fail. A mechanical defect was detected and the decision was made to bring it back to Earth for analysis instead of continuing with the landing attempt. It is not certain that it would have failed to land, the Powers That Be merely decided that analyzing the fault was more important than making the attempt.

Odysseus was a perfect landing - until a mechanical defect in one of the landing struts caused it to not be fully upright, making it only partially operational.

The two failed Japanese missions failed due to apparent software bugs.

This means with the possible exception of Luna 25 (where there's no clear idea what happened - official statement is that there was an incorrect burn time, but the nature of the crash is preventing analysis as to why), none of them failed because the people who launched them don't know how to land on the Moon. Note that at least a couple of the failures were in "we're deliberately trying to see what corners we can cut to keep weight down, because every single gram we can save makes moon launches cheaper" situations.