Open Lunarians,

 

With Firefly’s touchdown in April, ispace’s RESILIENCE attempt this week, and Blue Origin’s plans later this year, commercial traffic continues to hold a steady pace. Each new footprint increases the risk of signal conflicts and navigation blind spots, which is why we’re investing heavily in—and accelerating—our lunar database this year.

 

There have been a lot of changes and activity lately, and we’re doing our best to keep up with them, and we hope the resources within this newsletter serve as a helpful lunar update. Below you’ll find further information on our database project, a PNT roundtable, a look at all past and planned lunar activities for 2025, and an analysis of NASA’s most recent funding proposals.

 

Happy reading.

 

Rachel Williams, Acting Executive Director

 

 

 

Formerly known as the Lunar Registry, the project is now officially titled Lunar Ledger: Global Lunar Database of Objects and Activities and is entering an exciting new phase. With development kicking off in early June and strong support from stakeholders across the ecosystem, we’re looking forward to welcoming our first beta users next month. Building on three years of collaborative contributions, we’re laying the groundwork for an open, comprehensive resource to track lunar missions, objects, and activities. If you or your organization is interested in contributing lunar mission data or becoming beta testers, please reach out to christine@openlunar.org.

 

 

July 3, 2025 | 9:00 am - 11:00 am PT

 

 

All are welcome to attend! We also encourage your participation. Your insights will help shape our research area in PNT, focused on developing an approach to interoperable lunar infrastructure.

 

 

 

 

This month, Mehak Sarang, Open Lunar’s Director of Industry Integration, went to the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) to represent the Lunar Ledger project and engage with industry actors that might be the first contributors to mission plans and data. During a dedicated lunch networking session, we convened a group of commercial lunar lander operators and validated the initial data fields we’re considering for the registry. 

 

 

2025 is almost halfway through, and we’ve already seen a raft of lunar exploration achievements and developments from organizations worldwide. Here’s a curated list of them all, each linked for understanding the context of its development. This is an abridged version of the full list on our blog. 🌗

 

 

 

 

This marks the Japanese company’s second attempt after errors in a software algorithm caused the first lander, Haukto-R, to miscalculate its altitude and crash somewhere in Atlas crater. This lander is aptly named RESILIENCE, and hosts a micro-rover from ispace’s Luxembourg team called TENACIOUS. After seeing the stunning videos from Firefly’s landing last month, we’ll be excited to see what kind of images (and hopefully videos!) will come from ispace’s landing attempt. It’s also worth noting that this is the third private lunar mission this year (check out the uptick in potential conjunction events in lunar orbit that a team out of JPL has been tracking).

 

 

 

Many of us are closely tracking changes in funding at NASA. In the most recent edition of Moon Monday, Jatan Mehta went through all NASA budget request documents, and have compiled and contextualized a rundown of the specific proposed cuts, cancellations, continuations, and changes to NASA’s Moon missions and their timelines.

 

 

 

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