Space exploration is difficult, and when things go wrong, they can go very wrong—as demonstrated by this light-hearted review of 2024’s less than glorious moments in going boldly where no man has gone before. From lunar landers landing every way up except the right way to cancelled missions, budget blow-outs and yet another demonstration of the fact that it’s not aliens—it’s never aliens!—here are 2024’s space-related mishaps in all their ignominious glory.
Florida man’s house hit by ISS debris
There’s a whole lot of junk orbiting Earth—and some of that junk is jettisoned deliberately from the ISS, on the expectation that it will burn up on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, in April, there was a rather spectacular demonstration that these pieces of detritus can prove more resilient than expected. Smash cut to one Alejandro Otero of Naples, FL, who was minding his own business when the remains of a cargo pallet that once carried batteries to the ISS ploughed straight through the roof of his house. Otero was understandably nonplussed: “[There] was a tremendous sound,” he told Florida’s WINK News, “and [the object] almost hit my son.”
SLIM lands on its back
As far as space exploration goes, 2024 was the Year of the Questionable Landing. The Japanese moon lander SLIM (an acronym for “Smart Lander Investigating Moon”) set the tone in January by landing upside down. SLIM made Japan the fifth nation to reach the moon’s surface, and it was able to deploy its two rovers successfully, but its rough landing meant the lander’s solar panels weren’t aligned to the sun. Despite its rough start, however, SLIM proved remarkably resilient. It was powered down for the lunar night in early February, which it was not expected to survive. (Lunar days and nights last for about two Earth weeks.) But SLIM didn’t just survive—it also managed to last through several more brutal lunar nights, far longer than anyone expected.
Odysseus lands on its side
In fairness to SLIM, it certainly wasn’t the only moon lander that had trouble with the whole landing thing in 2024. In February, the lander IM-1, built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines and named Odysseus (or “Odie”) made history as the first privately funded craft to reach the moon’s surface. It was also the first American craft to do so since 1972. Unfortunately, one of the lander’s six legs broke off as it skidded across the lunar surface after touching down. This left Odie lying on its side, an awkward position that limited the amount of data it could send back to Earth. The craft was powered down a week later as the lunar night began, and contact could not be re-established thereafter.
Peregrine doesn’t land at all…
At least SLIM and Odie both reached the moon. Not so Peregrine, which planned to steal Odie’s thunder as the first privately built spacecraft to reach the moon by touching down in early February. In the event, the unfortunate craft barely made it off the launch pad: several hours after its launch in January, Peregrine experienced a “critical loss of propellant”, leading to the plug being pulled on its mission a day later.
…and VIPER doesn’t even get launched in the first place
Of all the moon-related developments in 2024, though, perhaps the most disappointing was NASA’s announcement in July that it was cancelling the VIPER project. The mission was designed to look for water in the moon’s polar regions, and was originally scheduled to reach the moon in 2022. However, ongoing problems with the lander that was to convey VIPER—built by Pittsburgh company Astrobotic, which also built Peregrine—caused multiple delays, and were one of the reasons cited by NASA for the cancellation. The space agency promises that at least some of VIPER’s instruments will be reused in future projects.
NASA takes three months to open a container
One NASA mission that did go off as planned was Osiris-REx’s 2020 encounter with asteroid Bennu. The craft rendezvoused with the asteroid successfully and brought back soil and rock samples in a sealed container, which arrived safely on Earth in September 2023. The only problem? The container turned out to be very well-sealed—so much so that NASA’s scientists couldn’t get the damn thing open.
The agency documented the issue in an October 2023 blog post, and spent late 2023 figuring out how to pry open the container without contaminating its contents. And in January, three months after it arrived on Earth, the container was finally opened—and happily, the precious, pristine asteroid material therein was extracted successfully.
Boeing and the whole sorry Starliner saga
Did any company have a worse 2024 than Boeing? The problems with the company’s airplanes are well documented, and its space program also had a terrible year, largely because of Starliner. The craft has been plagued with problems ever since 2014, when Boeing won one of two contracts to build a replacement for the Space Shuttle to carry astronauts to the ISS. (The other went to SpaceX, whose Dragon craft launched successfully way back in 2020.)
After years of delays, Starliner finally launched in June, with Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun warning in advance that “the expectation from the media should not be perfection.” Yeah, about that: while Starliner did convey astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams successfully to the ISS, NASA was so concerned about the craft’s manifold technical problems that it decided Starliner wasn’t going to fly the astronauts back. This left Wilmore and Williams effectively stuck on the ISS, where they remain.
In September, Starliner returned home without Wilmore and Williams; they will remain on the ISS until February 2025, when they’ll finally be able to return to Earth… on the rival SpaceX Dragon. Look, no-one is saying that space travel is easy, but Starliner has been … well, it hasn’t been perfection, put it that way.
SpaceX and the whole sorry Boca Chica saga
Speaking of SpaceX, while the company did manage not to blow up any rockets this year—a welcome change, given that the September 2023 explosion of its Starship rocket literally blew a hole in the atmosphere—it didn’t have everything its own way in 2024. For a start, SpaceX remains under FAA investigation for various alleged regulatory and licensing violations, a state of affairs about which the company is not pleased.
It also continues to make a huge mess of Boca Chica, Texas, the remote region of south Texas that serves as its launch site. Locals have worried for years about the site’s effects on the environment, and not without cause—the launches are so loud that they can kill birds miles away and cause structural damage to buildings. There are also potential long-term effects on the local flora and fauna—and on that front, the EPA claimed in August that SpaceX has been illegally dumping mercury-contaminated wastewater from the site for years.
Russia tests “super weapon”, ends up with super crater
A large crater (approximately 62 meters wide) is visible at the launch silo and extensive damage in and around the launch pad can be seen which suggests that the missile exploded shortly after ignition or launch. pic.twitter.com/2a4l7YWf3m
— George Barros (@georgewbarros) September 22, 2024
Russia is one of eight countries known to have operational intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which can deliver warheads (including nuclear payloads) over a range exceeding 3,400 miles. With great power comes great danger, though, and when something goes wrong with an ICBM test, it can go very wrong. This appears to have been the case with a test launch of an RS-28 Sarmat missile—described by former Russian space agency head Dmitry Rogozin as a “super weapon”—in September. While Russia hasn’t acknowledged the incident, Ars Technica reported satellite imagery showing the before-and-after state of the launch silo near the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Before: trees, buildings, and missile silo. After: no trees, no buildings, and a large crater. Whoops.
“Alien signal” turns out to be a truck
There’s something about the large fireball that smashed through the atmosphere and into the ocean north of Papua New Guinea in 2014 that seems to attract theories about aliens. First there was speculation that the meteorite itself comprised extraterrestrial technology, and then there was speculation around the ground vibrations recorded by seismometers at nearby Manus Island. Were the vibrations an alien signal??? No, said a study published this March—they were most likely made by a truck. Driving. On a nearby road. Oh.
