Which commercial explorer will be the next to land on the moon?

Amid an important election, natural disasters and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, the exploration of the moon is proceeding apace. Three companies  — two of them American and associated with NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Systems program, and one Japanese — are preparing to land on the lunar surface within the next few months. “

The planned moon landing missions are the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost, the Intuitive Machines IM-2 Nova C and the iSpace Hakuto-R Mission 2.

Firefly Aerospace intends to send its Blue Ghost vehicle to the lunar surface sometime in the fourth quarter of 2024. It will spend 45 days flying to the moon and is to land on the Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille on the lunar near side.

Some of the instruments that Blue Ghost will deploy have been provided by Blue Origin and “will help advance lunar research and conduct several first-of-its-kind demonstrations, including testing regolith sample collection, Global Navigation Satellite System abilities, radiation tolerant computing and lunar dust mitigation.” The probe will operate through a full lunar day.

Intuitive Machines, whose IM-1 mission landed its NOVA-C probe on its side while still achieving many of its objectives earlier this year, is set to make a second attempt as early as January. IM-2 is scheduled to launch along with a small-scale, low-budget lunar orbiter called the Lunar Trailblazer. The Nova-C will take about a week to travel to the moon.

The target for the Nova-C lander is a ridge near the Shackleton Crater on the lunar south pole. Its main goal will be to hunt for ice thought to be below the lunar surface, especially in shadowy craters such as Shackleton. It is presumed that billions of years of meteor impacts deposited water ice on the lunar surface. While most of the ice boiled off, some should remain in the shadowy craters.

While the Lunar Trailblazer will look for water from orbit, the Nova-C will look for it on the ground, the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) will look for ice at the landing site using a drill and a mass spectrometer. Meanwhile, the Micro-Nova Hopper will jump from place to place using a neutron spectrometer to look for hydrogen, an indication that water may be present.

Lunar water will be the key to long-term human habitation of the moon, The water can be used for drinking, agriculture and other purposes. It can be split into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. Oxygen from lunar water could be used for breathing. Recent findings suggest that lunar water is widespread.

A private Japanese company called iSpace plans to mount its second attempt to land on the moon in December 2024. Its previous attempt crashed into the moon in April 2023 because of a software glitch.

The Hakuto-R lander will, if all goes well, touch down on the Mare Frigoris on the near side of the moon after a month-long voyage. It will carry a micro rover developed by iSpace’s European subsidiary. The rover will scoop up a sample of lunar regolith that the company intends to sell to NASA, to be retrieved at a future date.

The lander will also carry several instruments, including a deep space radiation monitor and water electrolyzer equipment. A work of art called “Moon House” designed by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg will also go to the moon on top of the rover.

Each of these moon landing attempts will be launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The fact that the Falcon 9 has greatly lowered the cost of lifting things and astronauts into space has, more than any other factor, enabled the new age of private lunar exploration.

Which, if any, of these moon landing attempts will succeed is not a question that can be answered in advance. So far, the record has been spotty, at best. In a way, each attempt is a learning experience. Eventually, private companies will become better at landing things on the lunar surface and it will become routine.

Space exploration that is undertaken to make a profit, even without humans, is something relatively new. The moon has become the testing ground for the commercial approach to exploring space. This is likely to be the dominant model going forward.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of  “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner