20 Years of Missions to the Moon

Out of all missions to the moon or its orbit carried out in the past 20 years, China has flown almost half. This is including the latest mission - Chang'e 5 - to launch tomorrow. The robotic lander is expected to collect rocks and return them to Earth.

The last moon mission that drew a lot of international attention was the landing of a Chinese space craft on the dark side of the moon in January of 2019 (launch date in December 2018), as our graphic shows. For the first time in history, a rover shed light into the workings of the moon’s far side that has been long shrouded in mystery. Chang’e 4 shot pictures of the side of the moon permanently turned away from Earth and examined its geology via radar and spectrometers. After Chang'e 3 in 2013, Chang'e 4 was already China's second successful rover mission to the moon.

But other nations haven’t looked on idly while the relatively new Chinese space agency was making headway. As NASA records show, several other nations have ventured towards the moon in the last 20 years, a contrast to the early age of moon exploration in the 1960 and 1970s, when the U.S. and Russia were the world's only spacefaring nations.

Other than China, only India managed a rover program (if without a successful rover mission to-date). The U.S., most notably, proved the existence of small quantities of water at the moon’s south pole with a combined orbiter and impactor mission in 2009. The European Space Agency ESA, as well as the Japanese space agency accomplished their own successful moon orbits. While the EU was testing a new solar–powered ion drive, the Japanese carried out geological survey.