Lunar Risk Register

NASA OIG (IG-26-004, March 2026) found lander development issues are on the critical path for planned Artemis missions; crew rescue capability gap also flagged as unresolved.

OIG IG-24-015 (August 2024) identified Boeing's ineffective quality management and inexperienced workforce as drivers of continued cost increases and schedule delays affecting the first crewed lunar landing.

Starship HLS architecture requires propellant-transfer refuelling before lunar descent; this has not been demonstrated at operational scale, creating technical risk on the Artemis IV critical path.

Artemis has survived multiple presidential transitions, but Moon vs. Mars prioritisation debates persist; out-year funding is subject to appropriations risk in each Congress.

The competing China-Russia International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) programme, targeting crewed operations by ~2030, reinforces bipartisan motivation to keep Artemis on schedule.

GAO-24-106256 flagged that co-manifested launch of PPE+HALO and subsequent autonomous flight to NRHO must be completed before Artemis IV rendezvous; any slip cascades into Artemis IV.

NASA OIG IG-21-004 documented early Gateway cost growth; subsequent ESPRIT and I-HAB add-ons via ESA barter shift some risk to international partners but expand integration complexity.

Gateway will be uncrewed for most of each year between Artemis visits; autonomous station-keeping and remote operations in NRHO with limited DSN coverage are unprecedented at this scale.

Gateway has survived multiple presidential transitions and Artemis architecture reviews, but ongoing budget pressure on Artemis cost recurringly puts Gateway in the descope conversation.

Gateway is the most internationally distributed crewed exploration program; foreign partner schedule slip, export-control complications, or political shifts could affect overall delivery.

The August 2023 uncontrolled corrective burn highlighted on-board fault management and autonomy gaps. Luna-26/-27/-28 must demonstrate redesigned propulsion-system autonomy before re-establishing operational confidence; 47-year hiatus contributes residual integration risk.

Roscosmos Director Borisov publicly acknowledges cumulative funding shortfalls and prioritises defence-adjacent satellite production over civil lunar exploration; Federal Space Programme 2025-2035 has slipped multiple Duma approval cycles.

Luna-26 was originally targeted for 2024, then 2027, with Roscosmos public communications acknowledging further slippage; Luna-27 and Luna-28 schedule durability is poor without restored full-funding trajectory.

ESA disengaged from PILOT-D (precision landing) and ExoMars cooperation in 2022; Roscosmos now operates within the Russia-China ILRS bloc with limited access to Western component supply chains, reducing technical optionality.

Russia retains crewed lunar prestige as a political-signalling priority — Putin publicly commits to lunar continuity — but at materially reduced cadence and capability relative to NASA Artemis, CNSA Chang'e and ISRO Chandrayaan peers.

Of four CLPS landing attempts through May 2026 (Peregrine, IM-1, IM-2, Blue Ghost 1), only Blue Ghost 1 achieved a fully successful upright landing — IM-1 and IM-2 tipped over and Peregrine never reached the Moon. Continued payload-loss risk drives schedule slippage on follow-on task orders.

NASA OIG IG-24-013 found cost growth across the CLPS portfolio averaging 20-40% per task order, eroding the original 'fixed-price commercial' framing and forcing NASA to absorb cost growth via supplemental task orders or capability descopes.

OIG findings show every CLPS task order to date has slipped at least 18 months from initial scheduled launch; cascading slips on IM-3, IM-4, Blue Ghost 2 and Griffin push science delivery downstream of Artemis crewed-mission requirements.

NASA's July 17, 2024 cancellation of the VIPER rover after $450M sunk — citing additional cost-to-completion — illustrates that CLPS-delivered NASA payloads themselves are politically vulnerable, even when the delivery vehicle remains funded.

Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ: LUNR) posted -$67M operating loss FY2024; Astrobotic remains private and capital-constrained post-Peregrine failure; Firefly Aerospace pre-IPO. Vendor bankruptcy on an awarded task order would force NASA to re-compete or absorb workforce-transition costs.

JAXA's January 25, 2024 anomaly report identified that one of SLIM's two main descent engines lost performance during the final braking phase, causing the nose-down landing attitude. Follow-on lunar landers (LUPEX, Lunar Cruiser delivery vehicles) will need to address main-engine redundancy and integrated guidance behaviour.

The H3 Test Flight 1 failure on March 7, 2023 delayed multiple JAXA payloads (XRISM, MMX, future commercial payloads) until the successful second flight in February 2024. LUPEX and Lunar Cruiser logistics elements depend on H3 cadence reaching planned 6+ launches/year.

The Lunar Cruiser MoU between JAXA and NASA (January 2024) leaves significant scope-and-cost negotiation ahead; Japanese Diet appropriation of full development funding is not yet secured beyond the early phase.

The Lunar Polar Exploration mission was originally targeted for 2024-2025 but has slipped to the late 2020s as ISRO finalises the lander design and JAXA awaits sufficient H3 cadence; bilateral cost-share negotiations remain open.

Japan signed the Artemis Accords on October 13, 2020 and has been the second-most-active national signatory after the United States; the alliance has survived multiple U.S. and Japanese administrations.

LUPEX baseline launch dates have moved from 2024 → 2025 → 2026 → 2027 across successive joint working group statements; with H3 also manifesting MMX, HTV-X and JAXA national security missions, the launch slot remains under cadence pressure.

Sub-100 K temperatures inside permanently shadowed regions exceed the qualified operating envelope of any prior rover (Pragyan operated for one lunar day in sunlit terrain). Thermal-control and battery-life qualification is the long-pole engineering risk on the rover side.

ISRO has not publicly disclosed its LUPEX line-item budget. Any disagreement on share could create a re-baselining event similar to the multiple programme de-scopes that have already moved the launch window from 2024 to 2027.

The LUPEX drilling system, intended to retrieve sub-surface samples to ~1.5 m depth, exceeds the demonstrated reach of any prior in-situ lunar drill (Apollo, Luna and Chang'e drills topped out at substantially shorter depths); cryogenic regolith mechanical behaviour is a known unknown.

LUPEX science data is openly shared under JAXA / ISRO open-data policies and is expected to feed into both Artemis Accords coordination and (indirectly) the broader global ILRS / Artemis lunar resource-utilisation dialogue.

Roscosmos's federal space budget contracted ~30% in real terms 2022-2025; Luna-25's August 2023 crash and the subsequent multi-year slip of Luna-26 / -27 / -28 raise serious doubts that Russia can deliver its committed ILRS mission set on schedule. China is increasingly the de-facto sole engine of programme delivery.

Luna-25 (Aug 2023) crashed on descent; Luna-26 / -27 / -28 have all slipped multiple years from original targets. Roscosmos's ability to deliver the Russian contribution to ILRS Phase I on the 2026-2030 reconnaissance timeline is the largest single execution risk.

ILRS membership consists of bilateral MoUs signed at agency level; most partner countries do not commit budget or hardware. Diplomatic optics dominate the partner list; tangible programme contribution is concentrated in CNSA / Roscosmos plus a small set of European and Chinese-academic suppliers.

Chang'e-7 and Chang'e-8 must operate in extreme cold and complex terrain; Russian Luna-25 already demonstrated that south-polar landing precision is a residual technical challenge even for state-funded programmes. Mission failures during Phase I would jeopardise ILRS credibility.

Without a unified ILRS budget, cost-overrun and schedule risk lives entirely within each contributing nation's domestic appropriation; the absence of a multilateral funding pool reduces single-programme exposure but also means partner countries can quietly defer or scale back without programme-level visibility.

Beijing has explicitly framed ILRS as a multilateral alternative for nations that prefer not to sign Artemis Accords; the soft-power competition is bidirectional — Artemis added 67 signatories by May 2026, while ILRS has added 13+ since 2021.

Chandrayaan-4 requires on-surface sample collection, ascent from the lunar surface, lunar-orbit rendezvous and trans-Earth injection — capabilities India has not previously demonstrated; the Vikram crash on Chandrayaan-2 illustrates the residual risk in the soft-landing leg alone.

The H3 launcher experienced a first-flight failure in March 2023 before recovering; LUPEX schedule is partially exogenous to ISRO. The mission was originally targeted earlier in the decade and has slipped to the late 2020s.

LVM3 currently launches at low single-digit cadence and is also the Gaganyaan launcher; competing demand for the same vehicle plus the human-rating qualification programme may compress Chandrayaan-4 mission slots.

Chandrayaan-3 was delivered at Rs 615 crore and Chandrayaan-4 was approved at Rs 2,104.06 crore — both well inside the cost envelopes for comparable Chinese, U.S. or commercial CLPS lunar architectures; cost-overrun risk is contained but not zero.

India signed the Artemis Accords in June 2023 and runs LUPEX jointly with JAXA; the framework is rules-based-aligned but does not subordinate Chandrayaan to Artemis schedule risk.

Chang'e-1 through Chang'e-6 have all met primary mission objectives — including the most technically demanding (far-side soft landing on Chang'e-4 and far-side sample return on Chang'e-6); technical risk on Chang'e-7 and Chang'e-8 is bounded by this heritage, though polar terrain hazards remain.

Long March 5 is also the workhorse for Tiangong module launches, Tianwen Mars missions and the Xuntian telescope; competing demand on the heavy-lift vehicle could compress the Chang'e-7/8 launch windows in 2026-2028.

The 2011 Wolf Amendment bars NASA from bilateral cooperation with Chinese government entities; Chang'e international science partnerships are routed through European, Russian and global-South partners rather than the U.S., creating a parallel rather than co-operative lunar science ecosystem.

Analyst estimates place Chang'e per-mission cost in the $150-300M-equivalent range — well below U.S. CLPS task-order economics and orders of magnitude below Artemis lander development. Cost-overrun risk is contained by state-funded structure.

CLEP is embedded in the Five-Year Plan and routinely cited in State Council communications as a strategic priority; programme survival risk inside China is essentially zero — execution risk is the dominant variable.

The 'mini flying detector' (hop probe) intended to enter permanently shadowed crater interiors is a world-first technology demonstration; no civil lunar mission has previously deployed a propulsive hopper into a PSR. Failure of the detector would not jeopardise the primary mission but would compress the science return.

Long March 5 launches at low cadence and is shared across Chang'e 7, Tianwen-3 (Mars sample return NET 2028) and the upcoming space-station resupply variants; manifest pressure could compress Chang'e 7 launch-window flexibility.

Chang'e 7 must survive long-duration shadow exposure with sub-100 K temperatures and undulating south-polar terrain that has defeated multiple prior lunar lander candidates; the Queqiao-2 relay de-risks comms but does not de-risk thermal survival.

CNSA has signed ILRS cooperation agreements with 15+ states including Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, Belarus, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and South Africa as of 2026; the U.S. Wolf Amendment prohibits NASA-CNSA cooperation, dividing the global lunar coalition into two competing blocs.

Cost-overrun risk is implicitly absorbed by CASC parent and the State Council; in contrast to U.S. or European programmes there is no Congressional or parliamentary appropriations gate that could defund Chang'e 7 mid-development.