On February 26, 2025, a NASA probe called Lunar Trailblazer lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its mission was to map the water on the moon. But a day after launch, mission managers lost contact with the spacecraft, and it was never heard from again.
One year later, NPR has learned exactly why the $72 million dollar mission failed.
A report by a review panel convened by NASA to explore what went wrong contains the explanation. Software that was supposed to point the spacecraft solar panels toward the sun instead pointed them 180 degrees away from the sun.
In addition, the panel found "many erroneous on-board fault management actions" that, taken together with the solar panel pointing error, "caused the Lunar Trailblazer failure."
NASA provided the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
"When a complicated system fails, it's usually more than one thing that takes it down," says Timothy Cook, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
In 1999, Cook was project manager for Terriers, a failed mission to study Earth's ionosphere. Terriers also suffered a pointing problem with its solar panels. But like Lunar Trailblazer, it had other problems as well.
"You get a cascading series of a couple of different failures that result in, ultimately, the bad outcome that you're investigating to start with," Cook says.
Lockheed Martin built the low-cost Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft. The NASA panel says the company did not properly test the solar panel pointing software before launch. Mission managers might have been able to fix that problem, but other software issues made it at first difficult, and ultimately impossible, to fix the pointing error.
Neither Lockheed Martin nor NASA would provide a spokesperson for comment on this story.. But in separate statements, both said they had learned from the Lunar Trailblazer failure.
"While the loss was disappointing," the NASA statement said, "it provides powerful lessons that can be applied to future lower-cost missions."
Cheap failure is no good for anybody.Scott Hubbard, former director, NASA's Ames Research Center
Lockheed Martin's statement also suggested that lower-cost missions are inherently riskier.
"Our teams are enhancing core principles across three areas — fault management architecture, flight software implementation and pre-launch testing — to ensure mission success," the statement said, "while balancing risk acceptance when it comes to programs that have less management and funding and move faster by design."
Scott Hubbard is a NASA veteran now at Stanford University. He says yes, NASA accepts higher risks with lower cost, or so-called class D, missions.
"What class D was supposed to mean is that you were taking a big risk of not getting the science that was as high precision as you were planning on," Hubbard says. "It didn't mean the whole darn thing wouldn't work."
Hubbard says you can take risks. "But take mitigated, understood risk. Don't take foolish risk," he says. "The way I characterize it is that cheap failure is no good for anybody."
Hubbard says these kinds of losses are particularly hard for scientists who committed their careers to a mission, which can take many years to get off the ground.
"It was gutting that the spacecraft failed to reach the Moon to accomplish Lunar Trailblazer's water-mapping science mission," says planetary scientist Bethany Ehlmann, principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer. At the time of launch she was a professor at Caltech. She says she and her team are "grateful for the efforts of the extended community who helped in the spacecraft recovery attempt after loss of contact."
She says the review board report highlights how important it is "to align institutional objectives, contracting, and technical approaches to focus tightly on mission success," and she's pleased NASA is sharing the findings of the failure report so other missions can learn from the mistakes that were made.
One of the potential beneficiaries is Robert Lillis. He's at UC Berkeley and principal investigator for another Class D mission called Escapade. Escapade is actually a pair of spacecraft headed to Mars to study how the solar wind affects the Martian atmosphere.
Lillis says the Lunar Trailblazer experience prompted NASA to give Escapade extra scrutiny before it left Earth last November. Even so, there were nervous moments in the control room after launch.
"We were supposed to hear from the spacecraft within one hour, and possibly as many as three hours," he says.
Instead, silence.
"My mind immediately went to Trailblazer," he recalls. "I had this sinking dread in the pit of my stomach."
Then mission managers found a small error in the direction ground antennas meant to communicate with the probe were pointing.
"Six hours after launch, we looked in the right place, boom, there they were, and the relief was like nothing I felt in my whole life," Lillis says.
The Escapade probes won't reach Mars until September next year, so it'll be a while before he knows the lessons of Lunar Trailblazer have truly been learned.
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