The Digester

Software Glitch Doomed $72 Million Lunar Trailblazer on Day One

Mar 4th 2026

A software error caused Lunar Trailblazer to point its solar panels away from the Sun a day after launch, triggering power loss and cascading failures that led NASA to end the $72 million mission while salvaging lessons and at least one instrument for future flights.

  • Lunar Trailblazer, a $72 million NASA smallsat to map lunar water, launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in February 2025 and lost contact the next day.
  • A NASA review found flight software commanded the solar arrays to point 180 degrees away from the Sun, triggering a cold state with low power and loss of attitude control.
  • Multiple erroneous on-board fault management actions compounded the anomaly and prevented recovery.
  • Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft and did not perform a true end-to-end solar array phasing test that likely would have caught the code error before launch.
  • The mission was a low-cost Class D project, where reduced testing can increase operational risk.
  • NASA ended recovery attempts in July and formally terminated the mission in August, and the UCIS-Moon spectrometer may fly on a future mission.

Sources

gizmodo.com