Here's a look at all the lunar lander missions planned for 2026

Eric Lagatta, USA TODAY

Updated Wed, March 18, 2026 at 5:19 PM UTC

4 min read

Before humans even step foot on the surface of the moon in the years ahead, a fleet of lunar landers are due to beat them there .

Already, three landers manufactured by two different Texas companies have made it to the moon since 2024. And in 2026 alone, another four uncrewed lunar spacecraft could touch down on different regions of Earth's only natural satellite .

Why all the sudden interest in the moon?

The missions would help lay the groundwork for American astronauts to return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years under NASA's Artemis program. In fact, the space agency is in the midst of preparing for a mission known as Artemis 2 , which as early as April would send three Americans and one Canadian on a 10-day trip around the moon to set the stage for a 2028 landing .

In the years ahead, NASA has a bold vision of establishing a permanent lunar base from which the first astronauts could set out for Mars. And the slew of privately-managed lunar missions ahead, contracted under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, are integral for making that happen.

Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander captures its shadow on the moon's surface after completing a successful landing March 2 near a volcanic feature on the moon called Mons Latreille. The vehicle became the first of two landers manufactured by a U.S. company to reach the moon is 2025 in crucial missions to lay the groundwork for NASA to return humans to the lunar surface in the years ahead.

Athena, the lunar lander on Intuitive Machines' IM-2 mission, captured this image of the moon's surface with Earth seen in the distance ahead of a March 6 landing attempt. While the lander was the second U.S. vehicle to reach the moon within a week, it ultimately landed on its side, which hindered much of its mission.

NASA astronaut Suni Williams is helped out of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft March 18 following a return to Earth after a nine-month stay at the International Space Station. She and NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore crewed the Boeing Starliner, which had launched in June 2024 on a failed test flight that was meant to return them to Earth a few days later.

Butch Wilmore reacts after he and Suni Williams and two other astronauts splashed down March 18 in a Crew Dragon space capsule following their return to earth from the International Space Station off the coast of Florida. The astronauts' extended stay at the orbital outpost dominated the news cycle for months.

A SpaceX support team member is seen airborne while working to lift the SpaceX Dragon capsule that returned the Starliner astronauts and two others onto a recovery vehicle following its landing off the coast of Florida.

This picture shows the crew of a privately-funded mission known as Fram2, from left to right, mission specialist and medical officer Eric Philips, mission commander Chun Wang, pilot Rabea Rogge and vehicle commander Jannicke Mikkelsen on March 19, 2025 in Hawthorne, California. Launched March 31 from Florida using a SpaceX Dragon capsule, the mission became t first ever human spaceflight over the Earth's polar regions.

Pop musician Katy Perry emerges April 14 from Blue Origin's New Shepard capsule in West Texas following a brief flight to the edge of space. Perry was part of an all-women crew that also included broadcast journalist Gayle King that took the ride from Blue Origin's facility called Launch Site One. The high-profile launch attracted plenty of headlines and even drew some backlash from those who viewed the mission as a wasteful publicity stunt.

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket carrying astronauts Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, Kerianne Flynn, Gayle King, Katy Perry, and Lauren Sanchez lifts off April 14 from Launch Site One near Van Horn, Texas. Blue Origin has since launched five more human spaceflights on the New Shepard in 2025.

This photo depicts a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the latest batch of Amazon's broadband satellites on Dec. 16 to low-Earth orbit after launching from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Formerly called Project Kuiper, the venture has since been renamed Amazon Leo. Since its debut April launch, Amazon Leo has deployed 180 of 3,000 satellites planned for its first constellation, which could challenge SpaceX's Starlink.

A group of Blue Origin employees with their friends and families gather on the beach in Cape Canaveral for the launch of Blue Origin's second New Glenn rocket in 2025. Following its January debut, the rocket launched for the second time Nov. 13 from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft on their trek to Mars.

Darkness falls Nov. 9 as a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket is prepped for its second-ever launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin is developing the towering rocket for heavy-lift missions that could see Jeff Bezos' company compete with Elon Musk and SpaceX.

The SpaceX Starship spacecraft sits Oct. 12, 2025 atop the Super Heavy booster before sunrise as preparations continue for its 11th test flight from the company's complex in Starbase, Texas.

A SpaceX Super Heavy booster carrying the Starship spacecraft lifts off Oct. 13, 2025, on its 11th ever test flight at the company's launch pad in Starbase, Texas. The launch was Starship's fifth of 2025, and second consecutive successful test flight following a year that was early on marked by explosive failures. SpaceX is developing the rocket for future missions that would help NASA astronauts land on the moon and also potentially transport the first humans to Mars.

2025 spaceflight in photos. See images of Blue Origin, SpaceX missions

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Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander captures its shadow on the moon's surface after completing a successful landing March 2 near a volcanic feature on the moon called Mons Latreille. The vehicle became the first of two landers manufactured by a U.S. company to reach the moon is 2025 in crucial missions to lay the groundwork for NASA to return humans to the lunar surface in the years ahead.

Here's a look at four uncrewed U.S. lunar landing missions targeted for 2026.

Moon landings: 2 US landers made it to moon in 2025 to set stage for Artemis landings

Astrobotic Griffin-1

After a failed lunar landing attempt in January 2024, Pittsburgh-based aerospace company Astrobotic is aiming to try again.

The company's Griffin-1 mission is scheduled to deliver science and technology – including at least two rovers – to the lunar south pole following a 2026 launch .

The impending mission comes after Astrobotic's Peregrine lander fell short of its destination more than two years ago when it began leaking a "critical" amount of propellant – instead burning up in Earth's atmosphere shortly after launch.

Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 will deliver science and technology to the lunar South Pole.

Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has been developing its Blue Moon lunar lander for both cargo and crewed missions.

Launching atop Blue Origin's 322-foot New Glenn rocket , the Mark 1 variant of the lander, designed for cargo transport, could land on the lunar south pole in 2026 without a crew.

Blue Origin and billionaire Elon Musk 's SpaceX are both under pressure to develop lunar landers ahead of a targeted human surface mission in 2028 now known as Artemis 4. NASA's revamped lunar program includes a new mission that involves Artemis 3 astronauts aboard an Orion capsule meeting and docking in 2027 in Earth orbit with one or both of those landers.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope last observed come 3I/ATLAS on Nov. 30, about four months after Hubble's first look at the interstellar comet. 3I/ATLAS became one of the biggest cosmic stories of the year when astronomers deemed it to be the third-ever discovered interstellar object in our solar system originating from an entirely different part of the galaxy.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on Oct. 2, 2025. At the time it was imaged, the comet was about 19 million miles from the spacecraft. The comet didn't come nearly as close to Earth, when it reached a distance of 170 million miles from our planet on Dec. 19.

This image shows the 3I/ATLAS interstellar comet as a bright, fuzzy orb in the center. Traveling through our solar system at 130,000 miles per hour, 3I/ATLAS was made visible by using a series of colorized stacked images from Sept. 11-25, using the Heliocentric Imager-1 (H1) instrument, a visible-light imager on the STEREO-A (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft. The colorization was applied to differentiate the image from other observing spacecraft images.

Because it's big enough to be deemed a "city killer," asteroid 2024 YR4 became a source of alarm due to the uncommonly high risk it had of colliding with Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. For a time, it was the only object among more than 37,000 known large space rocks with any chance of hitting Earth anytime soon – with its probability of impact even rising to a record level of 3.1%.That began to change in late February as more precise observations allowed scientists to effectively winnow down the asteroid's odds of impact to a number so low, it might as well be zero.

An exoplanet known as K2-18b achieved a degree of fame in April when a team of astronomers claimed to have found in its atmosphere "the strongest evidence yet" that life exists anywhere else besides Earth. Other scientists have since cast doubt on the findings – putting a damper on the notion that humanity finally had proof that we aren't alone in the cosmos.

This artist's concept shows what exoplanet K2-18b could look like based on scientific data. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has observed K2-18b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, revealing conditions that could support life on the exoplanet.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is seen in a "selfie" that it took over on Sept. 10, 2021. Perseverance rover, along with Curiosity, is one of the agency's two car-sized robots exploring the Martian surface for signs that the planet was once habitable. And in September, NASA officials confirmed that one of the rovers’ finds contained a potential biosignature.

A reddish rock nicknamed "Cheyava Falls", with features resembling leopard spots was discovered by NASA's Perseverance rover in Mars’ Jezero Crater in July 2024, in this handout photograph released on September 10, 2025.

The northern lights, also known as the aurora borealis, light up the night sky Nov. 11 east of Denver, Colorado. A powerful geomagnetic solar storm in November blasted Earth and created the conditions necessary to reveal the auroras much further south in the United States than is typical.

A group of friends take photos of the northern lights Nov. 11 as they appear over Clinton Lake in Lawrence, Kansas. After NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a "severe" geomagnetic storm watch in November, many people in the Northern Hemisphere, which includes the U.S., had an extraordinary opportunity to gaze upon some breathtaking red and green auroras in their own backyard.

In June, the state-of-the-art Vera C. Rubin ground telescope in Chile unveiled its first stunning images of the cosmos. This particular image combines 678 separate images taken by the observatory in just over seven hours of observing time. Combining many images in this way clearly reveals otherwise faint or invisible details, such as the clouds of gas and dust that comprise the Trifid nebula (top) and the Lagoon nebula, which are several thousand light-years away from Earth.

2025 was a year of cosmic discoveries. Here's a look back at 6

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope last observed come 3I/ATLAS on Nov. 30, about four months after Hubble's first look at the interstellar comet. 3I/ATLAS became one of the biggest cosmic stories of the year when astronomers deemed it to be the third-ever discovered interstellar object in our solar system originating from an entirely different part of the galaxy.

Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission 2

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 will deliver science and technology to the lunar far side.

After pulling off a major uncrewed lunar landing in March 2025, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace is due for a repeat of sorts toward the end of 2026.

The spaceflight company's Blue Ghost lunar lander is scheduled to return later this year back to the far side of the moon facing away from Earth. The mission, known as Blue Ghost Mission 2, would come after the same design of lander first made it to the moon's far side to conduct surface operations for the equivalent of 14 Earth days to test the lunar environment for NASA.

This mission is "bigger and bolder," Firefly said on its website , revealing that it will carry payloads not just for NASA, but international commercial customers. And this time around, the lander will be atop Firefly's Elytra Dark vehicle, which will remain in lunar orbit for five years to image the moon.

Intuitive Machines IM-3

Intuitive Machines, an aerospace company based in Houston, made history in February 2024 when its spacecraft named Odysseus became the first commercially built lunar lander to ever make it to the moon . The lunar mission also marked the United States' return to the moon for the first time in more than five decades since NASA's Apollo era came to an end.

The company's Athena lander returned in March 2025 to the largely unexplored lunar south pole. But like its predecessor, the lander tipped over when it made it to the surface – significantly hampering the objectives it was able to complete before powering down.

Will the company's third lunar lander mission, known as IM-3 , be the charm? For a landing targeted at the end of 2026 following a ride to orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Intuitive Machines six-legged lunar lander is aiming to touch down amid a strange geographical anomaly on the moon known as a lunar swirl.

The goal is to deliver a suite of robots, sensors and other scientific experiments to a feature known as Reiner Gamma .

Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@usatodayco.com

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 4 US lunar landers could make it to the moon this year. Here's a look

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Astrobotic Griffin-1

Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1

Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission 2

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