Moon missions that failed

The first crashes

The list starts in 1958 with launches that never reached the Moon. Pioneer 0's launch vehicle exploded, the first three Soviet attempts failed at launch, and Pioneer 2's third stage failed to ignite. In the early Rangers, Ranger 3 had trajectory and spacecraft faults, Ranger 5 lost power, and Ranger 6 hit the Moon with a television system that had failed, so no pictures came back. Ranger 7 worked.

NASA's landers failed too. Surveyor 2 lost control during a course correction in 1966, and contact with Surveyor 4 was lost during descent in 1967.

The Soviet attempts

The Soviet Union's early landers failed again and again. Luna 4 missed the Moon in 1963 after a failed course correction. Later, Luna 18 crash-landed in 1971 before it could collect a sample, and Luna 23's damaging touchdown in 1974 prevented drilling. In 1965, Luna 5, 7 and 8 crashed, and Luna 6's engine failed to shut down during a correction, so it missed. Only Luna 9, on February 3, 1966, put a lander down. The N1 rocket, built to send Soviet crews to the Moon, failed on every launch in the ledger.

Where they were lost

• Lost at launch27 (50.0%)
• Stranded in Earth orbit5 (9.3%)
• Lost on the way9 (16.7%)
• Lost on arrival1 (1.9%)
• Lost on landing12 (22.2%)

Lost at launch means the rocket failed before the craft reached Earth orbit. Stranded means it reached orbit but the stage that should send it to the Moon failed. Lost on the way covers anything between Earth and the Moon, such as a dead radio or a bad course correction. Lost on arrival is a failure at the Moon before landing. Lost on landing is a crash or loss during descent or after touchdown.

Then and now

All 27 launch failures came between 1958 and 1975. The 8 failures since 2000 were Beresheet, Lunar IceCube, HAKUTO-R Mission 1, Luna 25, Peregrine Mission One, EagleCam, HAKUTO-R Mission 2 and Lunar Trailblazer, and none of them failed at launch.

All 54

4 further early Soviet launches, named on the main Moon count, aren't here because sources don't agree they happened. Apollo 13 isn't here either: it didn't land, but it brought its crew home and is graded partial.

Luna 15, the crash that Apollo overshadowed

One failure came at an awkward moment. Luna 15 was a Soviet sample-return craft launched on July 13, 1969, three days before Apollo 11. It began its descent on July 21, 1969 after 52 orbits and crashed. No sample was collected, and it was one of several Soviet sample-return attempts that failed.

The recent crashes

Israel's Beresheet crashed in April 2019 after, in SpaceIL's preliminary findings, a command meant to fix an inertial measurement unit problem set off a chain reaction that shut its main engine down. Japan's ispace lost its first lander in April 2023 when its software treated an altitude jump over a crater rim as an error and discarded it, and its second in June 2025 when its laser rangefinder failed. Russia's Luna 25 crashed on August 19, 2023, the first Russian attempt since 1976.

Astrobotic's Peregrine was lost for a different reason. A single helium pressure control valve (PCV2) lost its seal and the oxidizer tank over-pressurized and ruptured, and the craft never landed. The landings that did work are on every Moon landing, and the overall rates are on the success rate page.

Why the pattern changed

The early failures were mostly rockets, and the recent ones are software, sensors and valves. The rocket problems were largely solved by the time the Moon was visited again after the pause. The new ones are the cost of new teams learning to land. Counting where each one was lost, 27 were lost at launch and 12 on landing. The distance a spacecraft has to cover is on the travel time page.

When they happened

By launch decade, the failures fall in the 1950s (7), 1960s (34), 1970s (5), 2010s (1) and 2020s (7). The early decades dominate. 32 of the 54 never got past Earth orbit, so the list says more about early rockets than about the Moon itself.

Rideshares that went quiet

Several recent failures were small spacecraft. 5 missions launched on the same day, November 16, 2022: Artemis I, EQUULEUS, LunaH-Map, Lunar IceCube and OMOTENASHI. They didn't share a fate. Lunar IceCube lost communications and never entered its planned orbit, and LunaH-Map and OMOTENASHI are graded partial. Lunar Trailblazer launched with IM-2 on February 27, 2025, and the ledger records that contact was lost after launch and the mission ended without lunar water mapping.

Landing is where the risk concentrates

For Moon missions that carried a lander, the final descent is the step with the least margin. The recent crashes of Beresheet, the two ispace landers and Luna 25 each trace to a different cause, a ground command, a discarded altitude reading, a rangefinder and a thruster burn, so there's no single cause to point at. The landings page sets the failures beside the successes.

The sample-return graveyard

One kind of mission failed more often than most: the robotic sample return. The ledger holds 8 sample-return attempts that failed and 11 that succeeded. The successes are Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Luna 16, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Luna 20, Apollo 16, Apollo 17, Luna 24, Chang'e-5 and Chang'e-6. The failed attempts include launch failures, stranded upper stages and crashes, and most were Soviet. The countries page covers the ones that worked.

Failures by program

Counted by the program that flew them, the 54 failures are the Soviet Union / Russia 36, the United States 15, Japan 2 and Israel 1. The N1 rocket accounts for 3 of the Soviet total.