Exploring the Challenges of Space: Why Do So Many Moon Missions Fail?

After leaving a kilometres-long trail of debris on the Moon’s desolate surface during a failed attempt in 2019, India’s triumphant return has come with the successful landing of the Chandrayaan-3 lander near the south pole of our planet’s rocky companion.

India’s success came just days after Russia’s spectacular failure when the Luna 25 mission tried to land nearby and “ceased to exist as a result of impact with the lunar surface”.

These dual missions remind us that nearly 60 years after the first successful “soft landing” on the Moon, spaceflight is still difficult and dangerous. Moon missions in particular are still a coin toss, and we’ve seen several high-profile failures in recent years.

Why did these missions fail and why did they fail? Is there a secret to the success of the countries and agencies that have achieved victory in the space mission?

An exclusive club

The moon is the only heavenly place humans have visited (so far). It makes sense to go there first: it is the closest planetary body to us, at a distance of about 400,000 kilometers.

Still, only four countries have achieved successful “soft landings”—landings that a spacecraft can survive—on the lunar surface.

The Soviet Union was the first. The Luna 9 mission landed safely on the Moon nearly 60 years ago, in February 1966. The United States followed suit a few months later, in June 1996, with the Surveyor 1 mission.

China was the next country to join the club, with the Chang’e 3 mission in 2013. And now India has also arrived with Chandrayaan-3.

Missions from Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Russia, the European Space Agency, Luxembourg, South Korea, and Italy have also had some success with lunar flybys, orbits, and collisions (whether intentional or not).

Crashes are not uncommon

On August 19, 2023, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that “communications with the Luna 25 spacecraft were interrupted” when the spacecraft was sent an impulse command to lower its orbit around the Moon. Attempts to contact the spacecraft on August 20 failed, and Roscosmos determined that Luna 25 had crashed.

Despite more than 60 years of spaceflight experience from the Soviet Union to present-day Russia, this mission failed. We don’t know exactly what happened – but the current situation in Russia, where resources are scarce and tensions are high due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, may have played a role.

Luna 25’s failure was reminiscent of two high-profile lunar impacts in 2019.

In April of that year, an Israeli Beresheet landing craft crashed when a gyroscope failed during a braking procedure, and ground control personnel were unable to reset the component due to a loss of communication. It was later reported that the capsule, which contained microscopic creatures called tardigrades, dormant in a “cryptobiotic” state, may have survived the collision.

And in September, India sent its own Vikram lander down to the surface of the moon – but it didn’t survive the landing. NASA later released a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image showing the impact site of the Vikram lander. Garbage was scattered in almost twenty places several kilometers away.

Space is still risky

Space missions are risky business. A little over 50 percent of the moon’s tasks are successful. Even small satellite flights in Earth orbit do not have a perfect record, with success rates ranging from 40 to 70 percent.

We could compare unmanned missions: about 98 percent of the latter succeed because people invest more in people. Ground personnel working to support the crew’s mission are more focused, management invests more resources, and delays are accepted to prioritize crew safety.

We could talk about the details of why so many unmanned missions fail. We could talk about technological difficulties, lack of experience and even the political landscapes of individual countries.

But perhaps it’s better to step back from the details of individual tasks and look at the averages to see the bigger picture more clearly.

The overall picture

Rocket launches and space launches are not very common. There are about 1.5 billion cars and maybe 40,000 airplanes in the world. In contrast, there have been less than 20,000 launches into space throughout history.

Many things still go wrong with cars, and problems occur even in the more regulated world of airplanes, from loose rivets to computers that override the pilot’s inputs. And we have over a century of experience with these vehicles in every country on the planet.

So perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect that spaceflight—whether it’s the rocket-launching stage or the even rarer stage of trying to land on an alien world—has solved all its problems.

We are still living in the early days of space exploration.

Monumental challenges remain

If humanity is ever to create a full-fledged spacefaring civilization, we must overcome enormous challenges.

To make long-duration and long-distance space travel possible, a huge number of problems must be solved. Some of them work within the limits of possibility, such as better radiation protection, self-sustaining ecosystems, autonomous robots, removing air and water from raw materials, and zero-gravity production. Others are still speculative wishes, such as faster-than-light travel, instant communication, and artificial gravity.

Progress happens little by little, a small step a little bigger step. Engineers and space enthusiasts are constantly putting their brainpower, time and energy into space missions, and they are gradually becoming more reliable.

And maybe one day we’ll see a time when riding a spaceship is as safe as getting into a car.