Review: Manned and Unmanned Flights to the Moon

by Jeff Foust
Monday, January 13, 2025

Manned and Unmanned Flights to the Moon
by Terry C. Treadwell
White Owl, 2024
hardcover, 208 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-3990-3927-7
US$42.95

Later this week, two lunar landers will head to the Moon on the same launch. A Falcon 9, currently scheduled to lift off shortly after 1 am EST Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center, will carry Blue Ghost 1, the first lunar lander by Firefly Aerospace, and HAKUTO-R M2 or Resilience, the second lander by Japanese company ispace. Blue Ghost 1 is carrying ten NASA experiments for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program along with a few commercial payloads, while Resilience is carrying a set of commercial payloads.

The fact that two landers are sharing a single launch reflects the changing nature of commercial exploration. Firefly and ispace are notionally competitors, battling to win business from companies and organizations interested in sending payloads to the Moon (ispace, based in Japan, cannot directly bid on NASA payloads, but its US subsidiary is partnered with Draper for one CLPS mission.) But the desire by companies to cut costs, particularly given the challenges of closing the business case for commercial missions, can result in competitors working together to save some money.

Blue Ghost and Resilience are just part of a renewed wave of missions to the Moon that include commercial landers and government missions, along with plans by the United States and China to land people on the lunar surface in the coming years. That interest, though, only gets a brief mention in the book Manned and Unmanned Flights to the Moon, which focuses far more on the original race to the Moon, including missions that never attempted to go there.

Much of the book reads like a conventional history of spaceflight, with introductions of rocketry in general and the prehistory of the Space Age. The author, Terry Treadwell, then steps through the history of NASA’s human spaceflight programs, providing mission-by-mission summaries of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo flights, presumably on the basis that even the earlier missions served as steps towards human missions to the Moon. There is not, though, a similar summary of Soviet crewed spaceflights in the same era.

Despite the book’s title, there’s far less discussion of robotic missions to the Moon during the 1960s. Passages on programs like Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter are mixed into the chapters on crewed programs, and typically limited to no more than a page or two. Soviet achievements in robotic missions, which achieved many firsts in lunar exploration, are also overlooked.

After chapters devoted to Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program, a final chapter spends a few pages on the recent return to the Moon, going up to last year’s commercial missions by Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines as well as JAXA’s SLIM lander. There are only limited details about those missions or future plans, like the Artemis lunar exploration campaign.

The events of the last year alone—the drama of the ill-fated Peregrine lander, the off-kilter landings of IM-1 and SLIM, and the success of China’s Change’e-6 lunar farside sample return mission—show there are many tales to be told about a revitalized global interest in lunar exploration, whether or not one frames it as a race between countries and companies. That effort is worth a book (or two or three or more), but Manned and Unmanned Flights to the Moon is not that book.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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