The space industry started off 2025 with a bang. January brought the dual launch of lunar landers from the Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Japan’s iSpace. Sent into orbit on Jan. 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, Firefly is expected to land on the moon by March, while iSpace’s spacecraft will touch down on the lunar surface in four months.
One day after the lander missions hitched a ride together, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin hit a major milestone with the maiden launch of its 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket, marking the company’s first successful entry into orbit. January also saw the seventh test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which ended in a mishap with the explosion of its upper stage about nine minutes into the flight.
The rest of the year will likely be just as action-packed. Here’s a look at some of the most notable space missions to watch in February.
Here are four space missions to watch in February 2025:
Feb. 26: A second lunar landing from Intuitive Machines. The IM-2 lunar lander from Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based space company, is expected to head to the Moon as early as Feb. 26. It will be launched by a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center and carry various commercial payloads, such as tech and science investigations from NASA and a small data center from lunar data storage company Lonestar Data Holdings, to a lunar plateau near the Moon’s South Pole region. The mission follows the launch of Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander, IM-1, which took place a year ago.
Feb. 27: NASA’s PUNCH and SPHEREx missions share a ride to space. Both NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) and Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and ICES (SPHEREx) missions are expected to be launched into orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than Feb. 27. Taking off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, PUNCH—which consists of four satellites—will map out the Sun’s middle corona, while space telescope SPHEREx will map out the sky in infrared to search for water and carbon dioxide in the Milky Way and shed light on the universe’s formation and the collective glow of galaxies.
TBD: SpaceX’s eighth Starship flight test. Despite the mid-flight explosion during its last Starship test, SpaceX is still shooting for another test this month, Elon Musk said in an X post. Starship, the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket, lies at the center of Musk’s plans to create a fully reusable spacecraft that could one day take humans to Mars. Musk previously hinted that the eighth Starship flight, which will take off from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas site, could attempt to catch the rocket’s upper-stage capsule. But given the issues experienced during Starship’s most recent test, this feat likely won’t be attempted quite yet.
TBD: India moves closer towards sending astronauts to space. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), India’s national space agency, is preparing to test a spacecraft that will eventually fly Indian astronauts into orbit. Before launching crewed flights of its Gaganyaan capsule next year, uncrewed demonstrations will test key factors such as the spacecraft’s life support, navigation and re-entry capabilities. The first could take place as soon as February, launched by the ISRO’s Launch Vehicle Mark-3 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India. While real humans won’t be heading to orbit, the capsule will instead bring a humanoid robot onboard to test its conditions.
