China's About to Attempt the Most Ambitious Moon Mission Ever

0:01 Anna: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Astronomy AstroDailyPod. And it's Saturday, so that means one thing. Avery: The weekend wrap today's news update. Then we run back to the week's biggest news. In case you missed any of it, Anna: it's Saturday, August 22nd. Series 5 Episode 174 and honestly, this might be the hardware heaviest week we've ever had to wrap up. A rocket recovered from the ocean, a rocket that hit the moon, a rocket that landed itself in China, and a rescue mission that didn' quite make it.

0:33 Avery: Four spacecraft storeys, basically none of them simple. We're going to need the full recap today. Anna: But first, China's about to attempt what one lunar scientist is calling the most ambitious robotic lunar mission any nation has ever flown. Avery: And it's not some far off someday mission. The rocket's already on the pad. Anna: Let's get into it. Avery: Okay. Most ambitious lunar mission ever attempted by any nation is a big claim. Who's saying that? Anna: James Head, a, uh, planetary scientist at Brown University who's been studying the moon since Apollo.

1:08 So it's not marketing copy, it's a genuine expert assessment. His exact quote, Chang' E7 is the most ambitious, comprehensive and complex robotic lunar mission any nation or entity has ever attempted. Avery: So what is it and um, when's it actually going? Anna: China's Chang' e 7 mission rolled its long March 5 rocket out to the pad at Wencheng on Hainan island on August 19. A two and three quarter kilometre crawl from the assembly building. The launch window opens Monday, August 24th and runs through the 31st.

1:43 So this could go up any day in that stretch? Potentially as soon as Monday morning China time. Avery: So by the time next week's episodes air, this thing could already be on its way? Anna: Very possibly. And once it launches, it's roughly six to eight days to reach lunar orbit, then a couple of months of mapping and prep work before the lander actually touches down. Which they're targeting for around the end of the year. Avery: Where's it landing? Anna: Right on the rim of Shackleton Crater at the lunar south pole.

2:13 A 21 kilometre wide crater whose interior never sees sunlight. That's the whole point of this mission. Water ice. Avery: We've talked about lunar water ice before. Isn't that already a settled question? Anna: Genuinely not. And that's the part people get wrong. Planetary scientist Norbert Schorkhofer put it plainly. There has never been a landed mission to find water on the moon. We've got decades of orbital and remote evidence, hydrogen signatures, permanently shadowed regions that are cold enough to trap ice but nobody has actually landed at the South Pole and directly confirmed it, measured how deep it is or worked out whether it's accessible enough to actually use.

2:56 Avery: And that's what makes it, uh, the most ambitious one. It's not just one lander, it's a whole toolkit for answering that specific question. Anna: Exactly. Four separate vehicles working together. There's an orbiter which does communications relay and mapping support and sticks around for years. There's a lander built for up to eight years of surface operations. There's a rover kitted out with cameras, ground penetrating radar and soil analysis gear. And then there's the one everyone's actually excited about, a six legged hopper.

3:28 Avery: A hopper, as in it jumps, as in it jumps. Anna: Using its own rocket thrusters, it can leap up to 15 kilometres across the surface in a single bound. That makes it only the second multi flight vehicle to ever operate on another world, after NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. Avery: Why do you need something that hops instead of just driving down into the crater? Anna: Because you genuinely can't drive into Shackleton Crater. The walls are brutally steep and the interior is in permanent darkness with no solar power and temperatures cold to make wheeled exploration essentially impossible.

4:05 A hopper can leap in, use its own systems to survive the dark for a short window, drill for ice with an onboard probe and leap back out. It's the only realistic way to physically sample the coldest, most permanently shadowed parts of that crater. Avery: That's a genuinely clever engineering answer to a nasty problem. Anna: It is. And Chang' e 7 isn't going it alone either. This is a heavily international mission. It's carrying instruments from Russia, Italy, Thailand, Switzerland, Bahrain and Egypt, plus a small US linked payload, a 1.5 kilogramme telescope built by the University of Hong Kong with the International Lunar Observatory association.

4:44 Designed to capture panoramic images of the Milky Way from the lunar surface. Avery: A telescope riding along on a Chinese moon lander with an American research partnership attached. That's not the geopolitical picture most people have in their head of the current moon race. Anna: It's more collaborative at the instrument level than the headlines usually suggest. Even while the two countries crewed programmes are very much racing each other, which is worth mentioning, this mission sits inside a much bigger plan.

5:12 Changa E8 follows around 2028 to test habitat building technology. And China's stated goal is a crewed lunar landing by 2030. Avery: Same um, target window NASA's chasing with Artemis. Anna: Same window and water ice is exactly why both programmes care so much about the South Pole. Specifically if there's accessible ice down there, that's drinking water, breathable oxygen and rocket propellant without hauling it up from Earth. Whichever programme nails down the real answer first has a serious head start on actually building something that stays.

5:45 Avery: So this isn't really a did they find ice yes or no storey yet? Anna: Not yet. That's still months away after landing. Right now this is a watch the launch window storey. But given what's riding on the answer, and given that nobody's ever tried anything quite like this hopper drill combination before, this is very much a mission worth having on your radar. Starting Monday. Avery: Rocket's literally on the pad. We'll be watching. Anna: Alright, onto the recap. And like we said up top, this was a genuinely stacked week for hardware.

6:16 Let's go roughly in the order it happened. Avery: Thory won. And it's actually had two chapters just this week. Quick reset. For anyone who missed the earlier saga, this goes back to Flight 13 on July 24, when Starship's upper stage ship 40 did something no starship had ever done. Survived the soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia completely intact, which Anna: kicked off a genuinely dramatic recovery effort. Covessles battling rough seas for weeks. Elon Musk saying on August 7 that ship recovery is not looking good right now.

6:51 Prediction markets giving it about an 18% chance of ever making it to shore. Avery: And then, um, Tuesday we told you had actually worked. Recovery vessels got ship 40 secured and towed toward Western Australia. Anna: We did, and that was accurate as far as it went. But the fuller picture that emerged the very next day was that recover didn't mean home. What actually happened is ship 40 was towed much further than first reported, arriving on August 18th in sheltered waters off Christmas island out in the eastern Indian Ocean after 24 days adrift and more than 400 kilometres of drift in total.

7:27 Avery: So not a mainland port, a, uh, calmer spot to regroup. Anna: Exactly that. SpaceX set up a 500 metre exclusion zone around it and sent engineers out to do a proper close up inspection before figuring out the next leg. Getting a 170 foot stainless steel rocket all the way back to Starbase in Texas. Avery: And um, how's that going a few Anna: days on, still unresolved. Genuinely. As of the most recent reporting, ship 40 is still sitting off Christmas island and nobody's actually announced how they're going to move it.

7:58 One detail that puts the scale of the problem in perspective. Getting it back to Texas by sea at the pace it's been moving so far would take over a year. So they're clearly going to need a different method, whether that's a faster ship, an alternate route, or something else entirely. And SpaceX hasn't said yet. Avery: What does the intact recovery actually buy them beyond bragging rights? Anna: Real engineering value, Close up hands on inspection of the heat shield and engine sections instead of just working from drone photos, Busk has said it strengthens the case for eventually catching a returning ship with the launch tower's arms the way boosters already get caught.

8:38 Avery: Speaking of which, there's actually a fresh update on that specific plan this week too. Anna: There is, and it's a bit of a step back from where things stood a couple of weeks ago. Back on August 4th, on UM, SpaceX's first earnings call as a public company, Musk sounded optimistic that they'd attempt the tower catch on Flight 14, which was tentatively pencilled in for the end of August. But on August 20th he posted that we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months, though that specific milestone has slipped.

9:09 Avery: Any word on why the reporting points Anna: to regulatory sign off rather than a technical setback. A tower catch of the ship needs its own FAA approval separate from the booster catches. SpaceX already has clearance for Flight 14 itself is still very much happening now, targeted no earlier than August 28, and it's still a big deal in its own right. Musk says Starship will go fully orbital on that flight for the first time ever. The catch attempt is just being decoupled from it. Avery: So ship recovered, sort of still marooned off an island transport plan unknown and the next big milestone got its own ass.

9:46 *2 this one keeps giving us corrections, it really does. Anna: We'll keep tracking it properly this time. Avery: Storey 2 and this is a much cleaner win. Thursday's main storey in case you're catching up, China's private space sector landed an orbital class rocket booster for the first time. Anna: The company is Land Space, founded back in 2015, and the rocket is Zhuque 3. Stainless steel construction, methane fueled and at 76.6 metres, actually taller than a Falcon 9. Their first flight back in December reached orbit successfully, but the landing attempt ended in a fireball.

10:25 The booster lost an engine during its landing burn and came down hard, even though it hit remarkably close to its target zone. Avery: So this was a do over. Anna: This was the do over. And on August 19th they nailed it. Liftoff from the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone in northwestern China, and about eight minutes later the first stage came down on four legs, roughly 390 kilometres downrange in Ganshu Province landing close to dead centre on its pad. Avery: First time. Any private Chinese companies pulled that off.

11:00 Anna: First time. And Landspace themselves are framing it as the shift towards the engineering application phase of reusability. In other words, the step from can this work at all? To how do we make this routine? It puts them on a genuinely short list of organisations on Earth that have landed an orbital class booster. And it's the clearest sign yet that China's commercial launch sector, not just the state programme, is closing in on the reusability playbook that made SpaceX what it is today. Avery: Good news for anyone hoping launch prices keep coming down.

11:31 Anna: Competition's good for that. This is one to watch. Avery: Storey 3, from Friday's episode. The case of the SpaceX rocket stage that hit the moon finally got closed. Anna: Right. On August 5th, a, uh, spent Falcon 9 upper stage, long dead and uncontrolled, struck the lunar surface. This wasn't SpaceX aiming for anything. It's leftover hardware whose orbit had finally decayed enough to come down. What made it a storey worth following is that astronomers had tracked it well enough in advance to predict roughly where and when it would hit.

12:03 Avery: And, um, this week we found out exactly how good that prediction was. Anna: Genuinely impressive. NASA's Centre for Near Earth Object Studies refined the tracking data and passed coordinates to South Korea's Danuri Orbiter, which imaged the site within hours and nailed the location to within about six tenths of a mile. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter then got its own detailed images on August 11th and 12th, which is the full analysis that came out this week. Avery: What does the crater actually look like?

12:34 Anna: Modest, about 60ft wide, less than 10ft deep. But the useful part is the ejecta rays. Darker streaks made of older space, weathered material dug up from about a foot and a half down, and brighter streaks of completely fresh material excavated from deeper still. Together, that's a free cross section of the lunar soil at two different depths, which helps scientists calibrate exactly how fast the moon's surface actually weathers over time. Avery: Um, an accidental science instrument. Anna: Exactly that.

13:05 For the record, the coordinates are 19.4759 degrees north, 266.7138 degrees east. A small, permanent, uninvited addition to the Moon. Avery: And Storey four, also from Friday, and the toughest one of the week, the rescue attempt for NASA's Swift observatory has failed. Anna: Swift's been watching gamma ray bursts since 2004, but it's been losing altitude faster than expected because of heightened solar activity puffing up the atmosphere. And adding drag without help, it was heading for an uncontrolled re entry before year's end.

13:42 So NASA gambled on a fast turnaround fix. A, uh, $30 million contract with Arizona's Catalyst Space Technologies to build a dedicated rescue craft called Link and dock with Swift to boost it to safety. Avery: Built and launched in under a year, if I remember right. Anna: Under a year designed to launch, link went up July 3rd on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, and for about three weeks it was tracking towards an actual rendezvous. Then Link itself developed an attitude control failure. Two of its three reaction wheels stopped working and its thruster system malfunctioned, sending it spinning uncontrollably.

14:22 A software patch clawed back partial control, but not enough for a safe capture attempt. NASA made the failure official on August 19th. Avery: So Swift's fate is sealed. Anna: It is uncontrolled reentry sometime later this year, with early reporting suggesting not before October. Though NASA hasn't committed to a firm date or said anything about where debris might come down. And there's no second rescue attempt planned, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman's line on it was about as honest as it gets.

14:54 This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. Avery: Any silver lining at all. Anna: A, uh, small one. Link is still going to attempt a close flyby of Swift just to gather proximity operations data that'll help whoever attempts the next satellite rescue mission. Satellite servicing is still a genuinely new capability. Nobody's got down to routine yet, so even a failed attempt teaches the next team something. Small comfort for a telescope that's about to become a very expensive shooting star.

15:29 But not nothing. Avery: A uh, rough note to end the week's recap on, but an honest one. Anna: That's the job, even when the news isn't great. Avery: Okay, that's the weekend wrap. China's Chang' E7 about to attempt the most ambitious moon mission any nation's ever flown. Plus a big week catching up on Starship's ship 40, still marooned off Christmas island with its transport plan. Unresolved landspace becoming the first private Chinese company to land an orbital class booster. NASA pinpointing exactly where a Falcon nine hit the moon.

16:00 And the rescue mission for NASA Swift Observatory coming up short. Anna: A ah, genuinely massive week for hardware and hopefully a useful way to catch up if you missed any of it as it happened. Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, the best thing you can do for us is leave a rating or review wherever you're listening and share it with a fellow space nerd. Full shown outs, sources and links for every storey we covered today are @astronomydaily IO and you can find us on social media. We're astrodaily pod pretty much everywhere.

16:28 Anna: We'll be back Monday with our regular weekday format. Until then, keep looking up. Avery: See you then. Clear skies, everyone.