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What makes a Moon landing mission “successful”?

Jatan Mehta
Predict
Published in
6 min readJan 15, 2025

Landers from Firefly and ispace are now in space. Both will reach for the Moon. One thing that is notable about both ispace’s and Firefly’s public communications is that they have clearly laid out the milestones and success criteria of their respective missions — (ispace, Firefly) — in terms of specific events.

Mission milestones and success criteria as stated by ispace Japan for its second Moon landing mission. Image: ispace
Mission milestones and success criteria set by ispace for the rover on its second Moon mission. Image: ispace
Mission milestones defined by Firefly for its Blue Ghost CLPS Moon landing mission. Image: Firefly

Note that ispace even went ahead and included a table which lists specific actions or criteria to be met for each of those milestones:

Specific actions or criteria ispace desires to achieve against all major milestones of its second Moon mission. Image: ispace

This exercise is something the publicly traded company also did during its first Moon mission. It respectfully stuck to its success criteria despite the outcome of a failed landing. But this wasn’t the case when the Odysseus spacecraft from US-based Intuitive Machines attempted its first Moon landing as part of NASA CLPS, wherein the publicly traded company as well as NASA retrospectively skewed

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Jatan Mehta
Jatan Mehta

Written by Jatan Mehta

Independent Space Writer & Journalist ~ Author of Moon Monday ~ Invited Speaker ~ Slow thinker ~ Human | Just read my blog: https://jatan.space 🌗

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