How Crucial is the Dismount of a Mission?

“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.” Said Frank Zappa, an American musician and composer. As has been seen with the recent failed Japanese Hakuto-R moon landing mission in 2023, and early last month with NASA’s failed Peregrine mission, the landing objective is the hardest within a mission, and it has certainly proved to be a challenge for our team when designing the parachute and our landing system.

The Japanese mission had a sensor software glitch and this caused a crucial difference between its actual and expected altitude, and after the craft’s fuel ran out, it plummeted the last 5 kilometres to crash land into the moon’s surface. NASA’s failed Peregrine mission is another reminder as to how hard it is to land perfectly, without complication, surely ruling out any hope of humans landing on the moon anytime soon. Between 1969 and 1972, NASA successfully landed 6 humans on the moon, with only 1 mission (Apollo 13) failing to land. For the first time in decades, NASA and commercial partner Astrorobotic, took a first leap towards achieving this feat once more, however, this failed, with the statement emerging that the craft had “no chance of a soft landing on the moon.” Because of this complication, NASA have had to delay the 2025 Artemis crewed mission by at least a year. If not to add further pressure on the US, China is aiming to land a crewed mission successfully on the moon by 2030. A key factor to the alarming number of failures is that the efficiency of rocket engines has only improved by 10-20%, which is a quite shocking statistic, considering this is a figure measured over the past 50 years. Even with all of the enhanced understanding, with the actual technology behind rocket engines advancing greatly, it is just the practical use of this knowledge being the real stumbling block to development.

A rare victory for successful landings emerged when India’s Chandrayaan-3 reached the moon’s South Pole, home to an abundance of valuable natural resource. This was just a week after Russia’s Luna-25 craft, which had attempted to reach the same place, but were unsuccessful, crashing into the moon, even after building up 10 years of information upon the region. This area of the moon is so lucrative due to its resources that can keeps humans sustained off of those natural substances.

There are an estimated 1.4 million known craters present on the moon. These craters often have a range from 1 to 8 kilometres in diameter, with other, much larger craters even being hundreds of kilometres in diameter. Oh, and that does not even include the number of boulders. These 2 factors are only mini hurdles in the ever-present challenge of landing on the moon, or any planetary surface. A key reason behind the higher frequency of crash landings is simply that we have more understanding of the moon, with more, higher-advanced technology, and therefore, a more miniscule margin for error. Where there is much more complexity involved in the inner workings of newer spacecraft, there is also a much greater, ever-present fear of missing the slightest error, overlooking the slightest difference, which can prove ever so crucial to the success of missions.

To conclude, with the Japanese steadying towards achieving space commercialisation and NASA very much prioritising privatised space exploration, the room for error has now become so sub-atomically small, with a single mistake possibly costing billions of dollars and can waste of years of work, which could be catastrophic for future planetary exploration missions. But with this funding, there is a much higher quantity of nations competing for space race glory, however, we are also seeing many more failures. But the ambition is still there, and Chandraayan-3’s success could mark the start to a new revolutionary space race.