2025 is poised to enchant with a plethora of thrilling and remarkable space endeavors.
Here’s a glance at some of the most captivating space occurrences anticipated in the upcoming year.
January alone is expected to be extraordinary for spaceflight, with the year commencing with a fleet of robotic lunar lander missions.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is set to take off from Florida in mid-January aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Transporting 10 NASA payloads, Blue Ghost’s mission will last 60 days, targeting a landing in the Mare Crisium impact basin, where it aims to conduct scientific studies for nearly two weeks. On the same rocket will be the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander from Japanese space exploration firm ispace. This mission will adopt a low-energy trajectory to the moon, with a landing anticipated in the Mare Frigoris area four to five months post-launch. The ispace lander also carries a minirover called Tenacious .
Intuitive Machines, which successfully landed on the moon with its robotic IM-1 mission in February 2024, is preparing to launch IM-2 as soon as January, also on a Falcon 9. This mission is targeted at the lunar south pole — including a payload to search for water — and will aim to land in the Shackleton Connecting Ridge area.
IM-2 additionally transports rovers and hoppers from U.S., Japanese, and Finnish collaborators, along with payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. IM-3, yet another Nova-C lander from Intuitive Machines, may launch later in 2025. Blue Origin could also conduct its MK1 Lunar Lander pathfinder mission in 2025, while Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission 1 is expected to occur in 2025, following its unsuccessful attempt with the Peregrine lunar lander in 2024.
Related: Intuitive Machines achieves a lunar landing in a thrilling descent of its private Odysseus lander, the first for the US since 1972
2) Tests of Starship
Even though it is still part of a testing and demonstration initiative, Starship launches are among the most significant, spectacular, and most attended space events today.
With SpaceX likely to receive authorization for up to 25 Starship launches in 2025, the largest, most powerful rocket ever constructed will be a focal point. The flight program may even involve docking two Starships in orbit to showcase propellant transfer and an uncrewed demonstration of the Starship Human Landing System , a lunar variant of Starship, designed for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission planned for mid-2027.
3) Haven-1 journeying to orbit
As the era of the International Space Station nears its conclusion, commercial space stations are primed to rise. A California-based startup, Vast, is set to launch Haven-1 on a Falcon 9 no earlier than August, with the outpost designed to accommodate a crew of four for a period of up to 30 days. The private station will serve as a precursor to a larger, modular private space station named Haven-2 . It is expected to provide a glimpse into the future of crewed spaceflight within low Earth orbit.
4) The end of Juno
Launched in 2011, NASA’s Juno mission has been in orbit around Jupiter since July 2016, studying the gas giant and returning stunning images, unveiling storms and detecting active volcanoes during flybys of its moons. However, the spacecraft is now approaching the conclusion of its extended mission, which commenced in 2021.
Juno is scheduled to be directed into the Jovian atmosphere in September, concluding the mission and preventing the spacecraft from contaminating a moon, like Europa , that might support life. This moment will echo the end of Cassini , which disintegrated in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017.
Related: Jupiter: An overview of the largest planet in the solar system
5) The deployment of a formidable new celestial surveyor
The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (or SPHEREx) is a NASA observatory aimed at executing a comprehensive survey of the sky in near-infrared wavelengths to create a 3D representation of over 450 million galaxies, along with 100 million stars in our own Milky Way . The conical, vehicle-sized spacecraft is slated 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 achieved several significant milestones recently, establishing its own space station , acquiring the first samples from the far side of the moon , and successfully landing on Mars, among other feats. The nation aims to conduct its first asteroid sampling endeavor in 2025, with the Tianwen 2 mission projected for launch around May using a Long March 3B rocket.
Tianwen 2 will explore the near-Earth asteroid Kamo’oalewa and utilize two distinct types of landing and sampling technologies. It will then deliver a return capsule to Earth in 2026 before the main spacecraft embarks on a prolonged journey to investigate a main-belt comet. This mission could reveal whether the asteroid is actually a fragment of the moon ejected by a meteoric impact, thus paving the way for future Chinese sample-return projects targeting deep space objects.
7) India enhancing its Gaganyaan human spaceflight program
India is endeavoring to join Russia (and the former Soviet Union), the United States, and China in establishing autonomous human spaceflight capabilities with its Gaganyaan initiative. The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) plans for a first crewed flight in 2026 , but critical test flights will take place in 2025 as part of this plan. These will encompass the G1 uncrewed test flight carrying a humanoid robot named Vyomitra (Sanskrit for “space companion”).
8) Flybys, innovative rockets and more
In addition to these thrilling missions anticipated to launch (or conclude) in 2025, there will also be several flybys of planetary bodies by ongoing missions, including BepiColombo (Mercury), Europa Clipper , and Hera (Mars), Lucy (asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson) and JUICE (Venus), allowing opportunities to capture stunning imagery and test scientific instruments.
The year is also set to witness the inaugural flights of various rockets from across the globe — featuring Rocket Lab’s Neutron , RFA One from Rocket Factory Augsburg in Germany, Zhuque-3 from Landspace in China, and potentially Stoke Space’s Nova — alongside regular human spaceflight operations at the ISS and Tiangong space station.