China stuck its moon landing this year. Others weren’t as lucky
Lunar-landing missions are back in vogue. After decades with almost no traffic to the moon, space agencies clamored to send spacecraft to Earth’s nearest neighbor in 2019. While the China National Space Administration parked the first spacecraft on the lunar farside, other missions met less-satisfying ends. Two probes, flown by the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL and the Indian Space Research Organization, crash-landed on the moon and haven’t been heard from since. 92019 Top 10See full list The moonshot renaissance is just getting started. China plans to launch another lunar lander next year. The European Space Agency is working on a series of moon landing missions with the Russian space agency Roscosmos. And NASA hopes to use several trips to the moon in the 2020s as a springboard for sending astronauts to Mars. And “it’s not just a government superpower that can achieve a lunar landing now,” says planetary scientist Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Advances in navigation technology and...