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Lander

A spacecraft built to descend to the surface of another body and survive the arrival, whether or not it moves afterwards.

Why it matters

Landing is the phase where planetary missions most often fail, because it cannot be rehearsed under the real conditions and it must work autonomously - the signal delay makes intervention from Earth impossible. A lander must shed almost all of its orbital speed in minutes, navigate terrain it can only partly see in advance, and touch down within a target ellipse. Recent commercial lunar attempts have repeatedly proved that the manoeuvre remains genuinely hard.

In our data

Lunar landers are a growing share of our upcoming manifest: several of the 5 lunar missions in our tracker are commercial landers rather than government programmes, and they are riding on commercial launch vehicles rather than purpose-built government rockets.

Missions we track

2026-12-31 Falcon 9 Block 5 | Blue Ghost Lunar Lander Mission 2 To Be Determined
2026-12-31 Falcon 9 Block 5 | Nova-C IM-3 To Be Determined
2026-11-30 Falcon Heavy | Griffin Mission One To Be Determined

Where we use it

Not to be confused with

A rover, which is a lander that drives away afterwards, and an orbiter, which studies a body without ever touching it. Many missions carry both a lander and a rover, and press coverage tends to name only one.