2024 in spaceflight

The Lunar I-Hab (formerly known as International Habitation Module, International Habitat or I-HAB) is designed as a habitat module of the Lunar Gateway station, to be built by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA. The I-HAB will have a maximum launch mass of 10,000 kg (22,000 lb) and provide a habitable volume of 10 m (350 cu ft) (the gross pressurized volume is 36 m (1,300 cu ft)).

Lunar Trailblazer was a small (class D) lunar orbiter, part of NASA's SIMPLEx program, with a mission to detect and map water on the lunar surface to determine how its form, abundance, and location relate to geology. Its mission is to aid in the understanding of lunar water and the Moon's water cycle. Lunar Trailblazer was launched on 27 February 2025, as a secondary payload on the IM-2 mission. The Principal Investigator (PI) of the mission is Bethany Ehlmann, a professor at Caltech. Soon after launch, NASA lost contact with the spacecraft.

SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) is a near-infrared space observatory that will perform an all-sky survey to measure the near-infrared spectra of approximately 450 million galaxies. In February 2019, SPHEREx was selected by NASA for its next Medium-Class Explorers mission, beating out two competing mission concepts: Arcus and FINESSE. SPHEREx launched on 11 March, 2025 on a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket alongside the PUNCH microsatellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The principal investigator is James Bock at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California.

DESTINY (Demonstration and Experiment of Space Technology for INterplanetary voYage with Phaethon fLyby and dUst Science) is a planned mission to fly by the Geminids meteor shower parent body 3200 Phaethon, and sample dust originating from the "rock comet". The spacecraft is being developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA and will demonstrate advanced technologies for future deep space exploration. As of October 2024, DESTINY is planned to be launched in fiscal year 2028.

Peregrine Lunar Lander flight 01, commonly referred to as Peregrine Mission One, was a failed American lunar lander mission. The lander, dubbed Peregrine, was built by Astrobotic Technology and carried payloads for the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Peregrine Mission One launched on 8 January 2024, at 2:18 am EST, on the maiden flight of the Vulcan Centaur (Vulcan) rocket. The goal was to land the first U.S.-built lunar lander on the Moon since the crewed Apollo Lunar Module on Apollo 17 in 1972.

The Venus Orbiter Mission (VOM), unofficially known as Shukrayaan (Sanskrit: Śukra 'Venus', Yāna 'Craft, Vehicle'), is a planned Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) mission to study the surface and atmosphere of Venus.

Gaganyaan-1 (from Sanskrit: gagana, "celestial" and yāna, "craft, vehicle") will be the first uncrewed test flight of the Gaganyaan programme, with launch tentatively planned for Q2 2025.

Axiom Mission 3 (or Ax-3) was a private spaceflight to the International Space Station. The flight launched on 18 January 2024, and lasted for 21 days, successfully splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. It was operated by Axiom Space and used a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. The booster, B1080, had previously flown Axiom-2, among other high-profile missions.

The Europa Clipper Magnetometer (ECM) is a spacecraft magnetometer aboard the planned Europa Clipper mission. It will be used to precisely measure Europa's magnetic field during consecutive fly-bys, allowing scientists to potentially confirm the existence of Europa's hypothesised subsurface ocean. If this ocean exists, the instrument will be able to determine its depth and salinity, as well as the thickness of the moon's icy shell.

Polaris Dawn was a private crewed spaceflight operated by SpaceX on behalf of Shift4 CEO Jared Isaacman, the first of three planned missions in the Polaris program. Launched 10 September 2024 as the 14th crewed orbital flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft, Isaacman and his crew of three — Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon — flew in an elliptic orbit that took them 1,400 kilometers (870 mi; 760 nmi) away from Earth, the farthest anyone has been since NASA's Apollo program. They passed through parts of the Van Allen radiation belt to study the health effects of space radiation and spaceflight on the human body. Later in the mission, the crew performed the first commercial spacewalk.