Rush hour at the moon?

By Cat Hofacker|February 26, 2025

An app for that might not be crazy

Tonight’s planned launch of an Intuitive Machines lunar lander will, if all goes as intended, bring to three the number of commercial landers that will attempt to land on the moon in the coming days and weeks.

That sounds like a small number, but it’s a veritable rush hour considering that since 1966, 17 spacecraft from four countries have succeeded at soft landings on the lunar surface.

As of now, there’s no FlightAware app that permits you to follow the progress of these landers (see bullet points below), but the growing traffic raises the question of whether there should be something like that, and maybe sooner than many thought.

“This is just the beginning,” says astrophysicist Laura Forczyk, who runs the Astralytical consulting firm in Florida. NASA alone contracted 10 commercial landers through 2027 under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, and awarded Blue Origin and SpaceX a combined $8.4 billion for larger landers that would ferry astronauts and larger amounts of cargo to the surface under the Artemis program.

If there were interest in setting up something like a “FlightAware for the moon,” that wouldn’t be possible right now. Unlike Earth, there aren’t antennas on the moon and in orbit around it to track spacecraft coming and someday going. That could change, based on NASA’s plans to augment its Near Space Network of relay satellites and Earth-based ground antennas that commercial and government mission controllers rely on to communicate with spacecraft traveling within 2 million kilometers of Earth. The agency in December contracted with four companies for additional ground stations and satellites to expand the NSN’s capacity. Intuitive Machines was one of them, and in a press release the company described its plans to create a satellite network around the moon “capable of delivering 4K resolution video data and navigation services.”

Under that model, Forczyk says she could easily envision NASA or a constellation operator making an app like FlightAware to share spacecraft locations — although she notes that the U.S. Defense Department and other governments “may not want to share the details about the movements of their satellites and spacecraft near the moon.”

An additional complication might arise if traffic around the moon increases to the thousands: “When you get to that number, it becomes much more complex to track and identify which satellite is which and who’s maneuvering,” she says. “A public app might not be aware of those movements.”

But if it could, it’d be a much more efficient way of tracking all these spacecraft than checking each company’s website.

Track the missions:

• Intuitive Machine’s Athena lander: The 30-minute launch window opens at 7:16 p.m. Eastern today (Feb. 26) at Cape Canaveral. Landing is scheduled for March 6 or 7 near the Shackleton Crater in the south polar region. Website: https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2
• Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander: Launched from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15 along with ispace’s Resilience lander (see next bullet). Scheduled to land no earlier than 3:34 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday, March 2 in the Mare Crisium basin in the northern hemisphere. Website: https://fireflyspace.com/news/blue-ghost-mission-1-live-updates/
• ispace’s Resilience lander: Launched Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15 with Firefly’s Blue Ghost. Scheduled to land in the Mare Frigoris basin in the northern hemisphere in late May or early June. Website: https://ispace-inc.com/news-en