Landing on the moon is so difficult that only four countries have ever done it successfully: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, and India. In more than six decades of spaceflight, every other nation that has tried has either crashed or never attempted it at all. The reasons come down to physics, money, and the extreme precision required to touch down on a world with no atmosphere.
What Makes the Moon So Hard to Land On
The single biggest physical challenge is that the moon has no atmosphere. On Earth or Mars, a spacecraft can use parachutes or the friction of air to slow itself down during descent. On the moon, that option doesn’t exist. As the European Space Agency puts it plainly: propulsion systems are needed to brake a descent because parachutes or wings simply will not work. A lander must carry enough fuel to slow itself from orbital speed to a near standstill, then control that descent with pinpoint accuracy using only its engines.
This creates a brutal engineering chain where everything must go right. The spacecraft needs to calculate its altitude in real time, adjust its thrust continuously, and touch down gently enough that it doesn’t tip over or crumple on impact. A delay of even a few seconds in processing sensor data can mean the difference between a safe landing and a crash. There’s no second chance, no gliding to a backup site, and communication delays with Earth mean the lander has to handle the final moments autonomously.
The Track Record of Failures
Even the countries that eventually succeeded racked up failures first. The Soviet Union crashed multiple probes before Luna 9 achieved the first soft landing in 1966. NASA’s Apollo program completed only six of its ten planned moon landings. And these were superpowers spending enormous portions of their national budgets on space programs during the Cold War.
More recent attempts show the problem hasn’t gotten easier. Israel’s Beresheet lander in 2019 crashed after its main engine shut down during descent. Russia’s Luna-25 mission in 2023, its first lunar attempt in nearly 50 years, slammed into the surface after a thruster fired too long. Japan’s ispace company lost its first Hakuto-R lander in 2023 when the onboard computer misinterpreted radar data, causing the lander to hover at five kilometers above the surface until it ran out of fuel and fell. The company’s second attempt also failed when a laser range finder degraded during flight and couldn’t measure descent speed fast enough. The lander hit the moon at 42 meters per second.
These aren’t amateur efforts. They involved experienced engineers, years of development, and hundreds of millions of dollars. The failures illustrate how a single sensor glitch or software error during the final minutes of descent can destroy an entire mission.
The Cost Barrier
Building and launching a lunar lander costs hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. For most countries, that price tag is simply out of reach when weighed against other national priorities. The Apollo program cost roughly $25 billion in 1960s dollars (well over $200 billion today), and it required a workforce of around 400,000 people at its peak. Even modern missions using smaller robotic landers cost between $100 million and $500 million or more.
A lunar mission also demands infrastructure that most nations don’t have: deep space tracking networks, mission control facilities, heavy-lift rockets capable of reaching the moon, and the institutional expertise to design spacecraft that can operate in the vacuum of space for days or weeks. Countries without an established space program would need to build all of this from scratch or partner with a nation that already has it.
Why So Few Countries Even Try
For most of the Space Age, landing on the moon was a two-player game between the United States and the Soviet Union, driven by Cold War competition. After the Apollo program ended in 1972, no country attempted a soft lunar landing for over 40 years. The political motivation evaporated, budgets shifted, and low Earth orbit became the focus for the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and satellite technology.
China broke that long silence with its Chang’e 3 lander in 2013 and has since landed three more times, including the first-ever landing on the moon’s far side. India succeeded with its Chandrayaan-3 mission in 2023 after a failed attempt in 2019. Both countries invested steadily in their space programs over decades before attempting a landing, building up the rocket technology, deep space communication networks, and engineering expertise needed to pull it off.
Most other spacefaring nations, including those in Europe, have chosen to focus their budgets on satellites, space telescopes, Mars orbiters, or contributions to the International Space Station rather than independent lunar landers. Landing on the moon is a specific, expensive capability that doesn’t automatically follow from having a space program.
Private Companies Are Changing the Picture
In early 2025, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander became the first private spacecraft to execute a fully successful soft landing on the moon. This came about a year after Intuitive Machines’ lander reached the surface but tipped over on its side. These missions, funded partly by NASA contracts, represent a shift toward commercial lunar access that could eventually lower the barrier for countries that can’t build their own landers.
Still, the private sector’s track record reinforces how hard the problem is. Multiple companies have tried and failed before any succeeded, and even successful commercial landers are relatively small, carrying science instruments rather than astronauts.
A New Space Race Is Taking Shape
The geopolitical landscape around the moon is splitting into two competing camps. The United States leads the Artemis program, announced in 2019, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface and eventually establish a long-term presence there. It operates through the Artemis Accords, a set of agreements signed by dozens of partner nations covering how countries will cooperate in lunar exploration.
On the other side, China and Russia signed an agreement in 2021 to build the International Lunar Research Station, a rival program with an open invitation for other countries to join. For the first time, the U.S. and China are running competing lunar programs on roughly the same timeline. This competition is drawing more countries into lunar ambitions than at any point since the 1960s, though turning ambition into a successful landing remains as technically demanding as ever.
Several nations, including Japan and South Korea, now have active lunar programs. But the gap between planning a mission and actually touching down safely on the moon’s surface remains enormous, as the long list of crashed landers makes clear.