The Most Interesting Space Missions of 2020

In 2020 there was a lineup of announced space missions: four to Mars, two private crewed flights, and the start of the American lunar program. It's worth revisiting that list knowing what happened afterward, because the pattern of delay is more instructive than the original list.

Mars: almost everything launched, and in the same month

The Mars launch window opens every 26 months. The July 2020 window was met by three of the four planned missions:

• Perseverance, from NASA. Launched in July 2020, it landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021. It carried along the Ingenuity helicopter, which became the first powered flight on another planet.
• Tianwen-1, from China. Reached orbit in February 2021 and put the Zhurong rover on the ground in May of the same year — China nailed the orbiter, descent module, and rover on its first attempt.
• Hope, from the United Arab Emirates. Entered Martian orbit in February 2021 to study the atmosphere, and remains to this day the only Arab mission to another planet.
• Rosalind Franklin, from the European Space Agency. Missed the 2020 window, was rescheduled for 2022, and the launch was cancelled in March 2022 when cooperation with Russia was suspended. NASA stepped in in 2023. The current forecast is to launch in October 2028 and land at the end of 2030, eight years after the original date.

Crewed flight: one delivered, one stumbled

SpaceX carried two NASA astronauts to the Space Station in May 2020 aboard the Crew Dragon — the first crewed flight from the United States since 2011, and it has since become routine.

Boeing's Starliner promised the same for the same year. The uncrewed test in 2019 failed, the second one only came in 2022, and the first flight with astronauts on board took place in 2024 — with thruster problems that made the capsule return empty, while the crew came back on another vehicle.

Blue Origin delivered a year late: the New Shepard made its first crewed flight in July 2021, in a suborbital hop lasting a few minutes.

The Moon: both programs slipped

China's Chang'e 5 was the one-off exception: launched in November 2020, it brought lunar samples back in December of the same year. On the American side, the SLS rocket with the Orion capsule only flew in November 2022, uncrewed, and the timeline for bringing people back to the Moon has slipped repeatedly since then.

The pattern, and why it applies to your project

Looking at the full list, one rule stands out: whatever already had hardware flying met its deadline; whatever depended on new integration between partners fell years behind. SpaceX had already been launching the Dragon uncrewed for years before putting people inside. Rosalind Franklin depended on a rocket, a descent module, and an international agreement, and lost all three at once.

It's the same mechanism behind any technology project timeline. The part that already exists and runs has a reliable deadline. The part that depends on a third-party system, on data that hasn't been released yet, or on an agreement between teams is where the deadline slips — and it slips by multiples, not weeks.

That's why, when we put together a timeline for custom software development, we separate the two things in the proposal: what's already ready and what depends on someone outside delivering. The second list is always the one that sets the real date.