Lunar Flashlight

Lunar Flashlight is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on 2022-12-01.

SpaceX launched ispace’s HAKUTO-R Mission 1 and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Lunar Flashlight to a lunar transfer orbit on 2022-12-11 at 2:38 a.m. ET from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

NASA procured a flight for Lunar Flashlight as a secondary payload on Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission and later moved it to the ispace launch when IM-1 slipped to March 2023.

NASA procured a rideshare launch opportunity and launched Lunar Flashlight on a Falcon 9 on 2022-12-11, along with the Hakuto-R lunar lander from the Japanese company ispace.

A change to a propulsion system provided by the Georgia Institute of Technology during Lunar Flashlight development caused the cubesat to miss its original secondary-payload launch opportunity on Artemis 1 because the propulsion system was not ready by fall 2021.

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight cubesat launched 2022-12-09 as a secondary payload on a Falcon 9 launch of a commercial lunar lander by Japanese company ispace.

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight cubesat launched in 2022 was powered by ASCENT.