Launches, moon landings and more: Here's the top spaceflight missions to watch in 2025
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2025 is set to dazzle with a wide array of exciting and spectacular space missions.
On tap are a flurry of moon landing attempts, high-profile test launches of SpaceX's Starship megarocket, human spaceflight adventures and asteroid sampling missions.
Here’s a look at some of the most alluring space events expected in the coming year.
1) Many, many moon missions
January alone promises to be spectacular for spaceflight, as the year is set to kick off with an armada of robotic moon lander missions.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is set to launch from Florida in mid-January on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Carrying 10 NASA payloads, Blue Ghost's 60-day-long mission will target a landing in the Mare Crisium impact basin, where it aims to conduct science for nearly two weeks. Aboard the same rocket will be the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander for Japanese space exploration firm ispace. That mission will take a low-energy path to the moon, with a landing planned in the Mare Frigoris region four to five months after launch. The ispace lander also carries a minirover named Tenacious.
Intuitive Machines, which landed on the moon with its robotic IM-1 mission in February 2024, will be launching IM-2 as soon as January, also on a Falcon 9. The mission is optimized for the lunar south pole — including a payload to hunt for water — and will aim to set down in an area of Shackleton Connecting Ridge.
IM-2 also carries rovers and hoppers from U.S., Japanese and Finnish partners and payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. IM-3, a third Nova-C lander from Intuitive Machines, could launch later in 2025. Blue Origin could also launch its MK1 Lunar Lander pathfinder mission in 2025, while Astrobotic's Griffin Mission 1 is also slated for 2025, following its failed attempt with the Peregrine lunar lander in 2024.
2) Starship test flights
Despite still being part of a test and demonstration program, Starship launches are some of the biggest, most spectacular and most popular space events these days.
With SpaceX likely to gain approval for up to 25 Starship launches in 2025, the largest, most powerful rocket ever built will be a main event. The flight program could potentially even include docking two Starships in orbit to demonstrate propellant transfer, and even an uncrewed demo of the Starship Human Landing System, a lunar variant of Starship, that is to be used for NASA's Artemis 3 mission in mid-2027.
3) Haven-1 heading to orbit
As the age of the International Space Station comes to a close, commercial space stations are set to step up. California-based startup Vast plans to launch Haven-1 on a Falcon 9 no earlier than August, with the outpost designed to host a four-person crew for up to 30 days. The private station would be a stepping stone to a larger, modular private space station, named Haven-2. It promises to be a glimpse of the future of crewed spaceflight in low Earth orbit.
4) Juno's demise
Launched in 2011, NASA's Juno mission has been orbiting Jupiter since July 2016, investigating the gas giant and returning brilliant images, discovering storms and spotting active volcanoes during flybys of the gas giant's moons. However the spacecraft is now nearing the end of its extended mission, which began in 2021.
Juno is scheduled to be deorbited into the Jovian atmosphere in September, bringing the curtain down on the mission and preventing the spacecraft from contaminating a moon, such as Europa, which could harbor life of its own. The moment will echo the demise of Cassini, which burned up in Saturn's atmosphere back in 2017.
Related: Jupiter: A guide to the largest planet in the solar system
5) The launch of a powerful new sky surveyor
The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (or SPHEREx) is a NASA observatory designed to perform an all-sky survey in near-infrared wavelengths to create a 3D map of over 450 million galaxies, as well as 100 million stars in our own Milky Way. The conical, car-sized spacecraft is set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California in February.
6) China's Tianwen 2 asteroid-sampling mission
China has hit a number of major milestones in recent years, building its own space station, collecting the first samples from the far side of the moon, and landing on Mars to name but a few. The country will be aiming to pull off its first asteroid sampling project in 2025, with the Tianwen 2 mission planned to launch around May on a Long March 3B rocket.
Tianwen 2 will visit the near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa and use two different types of landing and sampling technologies. It will then drop off a return capsule to Earth in 2026 before the main spacecraft heads off on an extended journey to study a main-belt comet. The mission could determine if the asteroid is actually a piece of the moon blasted off by a meteor impact and open up possibilities for future Chinese sample-return missions to objects in deep space.
7) India ramping up its Gaganyaan human spaceflight program
India is bidding to join Russia (and the former Soviet Union), the United States and China as having independent human spaceflight capabilities, with its Gaganyaan program. The Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) is planning a first crewed flight in 2026, but 2025 will see crucial test flights as part of this roadmap. These will include the G1 uncrewed test flight carrying a humanoid robot named Vyomitra (Sanskrit for "space friend").
Related Stories:
— Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's deep-space transportation for the moon and Mars
— Juno: Taking a long look at Jupiter
— Double moon mission! SpaceX to launch 2 private lunar landers in January
8) Flybys, new rockets and more
Along with all of these exciting missions scheduled to launch (or end) in 2025, there will also be a number of flybys of planetary bodies by ongoing missions, including BepiColombo (Mercury), Europa Clipper and Hera (Mars), Lucy (asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson) and JUICE (Venus), providing chances to snap spectacular images and test out science instruments.
The year will also witness the debut flights of new rockets from around the world — including Rocket Lab's Neutron, RFA One from Rocket Factory Augsburg in Germany, Zhuque-3 from Landspace in China, and potentially Stoke Space's Nova — as well as regular human spaceflight activities at the ISS and Tiangong space station.
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