Notable milestones included the successful maiden launches of the American Vulcan Centaur and China's Gravity-1, and Long March 12 rockets.

Two significant scientific missions were launched in October: NASA's Europa Clipper to Jupiter's moon Europa to look for signs of an ocean under its icy surface and ESA's Hera to the Didymos binary asteroid system that was impacted four years earlier by the DART spacecraft to validate the kinetic impact method of redirecting an asteroid on a trajectory to collide with Earth.

On Mars, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter concluded operations in January after completing 72 flights when its rotor blades sustained critical damage.

JAXA's SLIM and Intuitive Machines' IM-1 achieved soft landings on the lunar surface; however, both landers tipped over during their final descent, leading to the conclusion of their missions shortly thereafter.

[1][2][3] Later the ISRO's Aditya-L1 spacecraft launched 5 months previously was inserted into a halo orbit around the Earth-Sun L1 point on 6 January.

Einstein Probe, X-ray space telescope mission by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in partnership with ESA and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) dedicated to time-domain high-energy astrophysics, was launched on 9 January 2024.

European Space Agency launched their PROBA-3 dual satellites for solar coronagraphy on 5 December 2024 on a PSLV-XL rocket.

In the end, the Peregrine spacecraft never left the (highly elliptical) Earth orbit it was injected into by the carrier rocket, and the mission ended ten days later (after one orbit) on 18 January when the spacecraft re-entered the Earth's atmosphere (under control of the mission team) and was destroyed.

[15] Irrespective of this solar array issue on lander, the two LEV 1 and 2 rovers, deployed during hovering just before final landing worked as expected, with LEV-1 communicating independently to the ground stations.

JAXA said it re-established contact with the lander and its solar cells were working again after a shift in lighting conditions allowed it to catch sunlight.

While SLIM was expected to operate only for one lunar daylight period, or 14 Earth days, with its on-board electronics not designed to withstand the −120 °C (−184 °F) nighttime temperatures on the Moon, it managed to survive 3 lunar nights, waking up on 25 February, 27 March and 24 April respectively, sending back more data and images.

This feat of surviving lunar night without a radioisotope heater unit was only previously achieved by some landers in the Surveyor program.

It was later ejected on 28 February returning all types of data, except post IM-1 landing images that were the main aim of its mission.

[25][26][27][28] The lander also includes the Lunar Library that contains a version of the English Wikipedia, artworks, selections from the Internet Archive, portions of the Project Gutenberg, and more.

The lander also placed a small national flag of China, made of basalt, a substance that occurs in vast quantities on the Moon's surface, to demonstrate the spirit of in situ resource utilization.

[43] After dropping off the return samples for Earth, the Chang'e 6 (CE-6) orbiter was successfully captured by the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point on 9 September 2024.

On 17 December, two Chinese astronauts, Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong, completed the longest spacewalk in human history, of 9 hours and 6 minutes, with the assistance of the space station's robotic arms and ground-based scientific personnel, completed tasks such as the installation of space debris protection devices, inspection, and maintenance of external equipment and facilities.

[48] SpaceX launched Axiom Mission 3 aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) on 18 January 2024.

[52] China's Orienspace's Gravity-1 rocket completed its successful maiden flight on 11 January 2024, debuting on a new mobile sea platform in the Yellow Sea while breaking records as both the world's largest solid-fuel carrier rocket and China's most powerful commercial launch vehicle to date (as of early 2024).

On 11 April, another test flight of the Russian Angara A5 launched, with the Orion upper stage being used for the first time.

[57] The maiden launch of Ariane 6 occurred on 9 July, but it was a partial failure as though CubeSats were deployed correctly, but the second stage failed to relight due to an anomaly with an auxiliary power unit.

Importantly, the launch also marked the debut of the YF-100K engine that will power the first stage of Long March 10 which is expected to send Chinese astronauts to the Moon before 2030.

Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem or PACE, a NASA Earth-observing satellite, launched on 8 February 2024.

In April, NASA launched a next-generation solar sail demonstration aboard a Rocket Lab Electron.

[68] This technology is crucial for ISRO's upcoming Gaganyaan Human Spaceflight Program and the Chandrayaan-4 lunar sample return project.