Moon flyby

Lore & Background

The Apollo 13 spacecraft had an exploded oxygen tank, and therefore had to flyby around the Moon. This lunar flyby was an unplanned emergency maneuver that allowed the crew to return to Earth. The Artemis II mission is planned to include a lunar flyby as part of its trajectory.

Reader's Guide

Lunar flybys are a specific application of the flyby maneuver, where a spacecraft passes near Earth's Moon. The source article notes two key examples: the Apollo 13 spacecraft, which performed an emergency lunar flyby after an oxygen tank explosion, and the Artemis II mission, which included a lunar flyby as part of its planned operations. These maneuvers demonstrate both the contingency use of flybys in spaceflight and their role in planned exploration. Lunar flybys can serve as gravity assists or as part of a trajectory to other destinations, though the article does not specify such uses for these examples. The term 'lunar flyby' is distinct from planetary flybys, such as those of Mars or Earth, and is categorized under spacecraft flybys of natural satellites.

The 1959 Breakthrough

In January 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 1 became the first artificial object to break free of Earth's gravitational pull and execute a flyby of another celestial body, passing in the vicinity of the Moon. Though the mission was only partially successful, it marked the opening chapter of continuous lunar exploration. Just weeks later, on 14 September 1959, Luna 2 deliberately crashed into the lunar surface, achieving the first landing on any extraterrestrial body in history. Then, on 7 October 1959, Luna 3 accomplished something no human eye had ever witnessed: it photographed the far side of the Moon, the hemisphere permanently turned away from Earth by tidal locking. In a single, remarkable year, humanity went from merely flying past the Moon to touching it and seeing its hidden face. These three missions established the fundamental categories of lunar exploration—flyby, impact, and remote imaging—that would structure every subsequent decade of effort. The pace was staggering, and the fact that all three milestones arrived within ten months of one another underscores how rapidly the frontier was being pushed back.

The Space Race Pinnacle

Throughout the 1960s, lunar exploration accelerated dramatically. In 1966, Luna 9 achieved the first controlled soft landing on the Moon, and later that same year Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to enter lunar orbit. That year also saw Zond 5 carry tortoises on a circumlunar trajectory, returning them safely to Earth and demonstrating that biological life could survive a deep-space journey. The United States then pushed into the crewed era. In December 1968, Apollo 8 became the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon. On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 delivered Neil Armstrong and his crewmates to the lunar surface for the first crewed landing in history. Remarkably, the Soviet Luna 15 robotic mission was simultaneously orbiting the Moon, creating the first known instance of two nations operating in extraterrestrial space at the same time. Between 1969 and 1972, the United States completed six successful Apollo landings, while the Soviet Union continued deploying uncrewed probes, including the Lunokhod rovers—the first extraterrestrial rovers—and sample-return missions that persisted through 1976.

The Modern Renaissance

After the Soviet sample-return program ended in 1976, a gap of more than a decade passed before the next dedicated lunar mission launched in 1990. Since then, the lunar landscape has been transformed by a far wider cast of explorers. Beyond the original Soviet and American efforts, the Moon has been visited by the European Space Agency, Japan's JAXA, China's CNSA, India's ISRO, Italy's ASI, Korea's KASA, the United Arab Emirates' UAESA, and Pakistan's SUPARCO. In 2014, the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission (4M), developed by LuxSpace as a subsidiary of German aerospace firm OHB AG, became the first commercial lunar mission, flying as a secondary payload on China's Chang'e 5-T1. The far side of the Moon, long invisible to Earth-based observers, finally received a dedicated landing when China's Chang'e 4 touched down in the Aitken basin on 3 January 2019, deploying the Yutu-2 rover. Five years later, Chang'e 6 landed in Apollo crater on 1 June 2024 and retrieved the first-ever samples from the Moon's far hemisphere.

Beyond the Obvious

Not every spacecraft that encounters the Moon is there to study it. Four probes have used the Moon purely as a gravitational slingshot, executing flyby manoeuvres to alter their interplanetary trajectories toward other destinations. The radio astronomy satellite Explorer 49, launched by the United States in 1973, took a different unconventional approach: it was placed into selenocentric orbit specifically so the Moon could serve as a physical shield against terrestrial radio interference, enabling clean observations of deep-space radio signals. The broader record is impressive in scale—145 missions have been attempted, spanning flybys, impact probes, orbiters, landers, rovers, and crewed flights. As of March 2025, twenty-eight successful soft landings have been achieved by five nations: China, India, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Not all ambitions survived. The Soviet Union's crewed lunar programs, built around the N1 rocket, were cancelled in 1970 and 1976 after repeated launch failures, while three additional Apollo missions beyond Apollo 17 were scrapped due to budget constraints and hardware delays.

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