Space missions to watch in 2025

By Tim Cross, Senior science writer, The Economist

BY THE END of the coming year, astronauts are due to return to the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. Regular readers may find that sentence familiar. That is because we made exactly the same prediction in the previous edition of The World Ahead. At the time, the target date for the first crewed flight of America’s Artemis programme—which aims to return humans to the Moon, starting with a lunar fly-by mission—was late 2024. But worries over the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield and life-support systems delayed things.