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.