The image of the United States flag planted on the moon's surface is a lasting one. A star-spangled banner against a black sky, surrounded by the boot prints of the few humans – all American men – to have set foot on our satellite.

But while space news remains largely dominated by Uncle Sam, with its gigantic rockets and plans for Mars, it's been a while since the US embarked on a mission to land on the moon. In fact, the last one was in 1972. The Apollo-17 mission concluded the only manned lunar exploration program.

After that, the US stayed away from the moon for more than three decades. There were a few orbiters and even impactors (spacecraft designed to impact a celestial body) in the 1990s and 2000s, but no further surface landing craft. To date, the late 2022 Artemis-1 mission consisted of only a short circumnavigation of the satellite by the unmanned Orion spacecraft, before it returned home. Meanwhile, China and India have landed spacecraft there, while Japan, Israel and South Korea have entered the moon race.

But now, with two unmanned missions, this American silence will soon be a thing of the past. The first to take off on January 8, Peregrine is scheduled to land on February 23. Nova-C, meanwhile, is scheduled to take off in the second half of February.

"This seems to be the end of a long period in the wilderness," said Xavier Pasco, specialist in US space policy at the Foundation for Strategic Research. "In reality, it's the consequence of a long game of political ping-pong between George Bush – who relaunched the project in 2004 – and then Barack Obama, who put the brakes on, reminding us that the United States had nothing to prove since it had already 'conquered' the moon. And then, there was Donald Trump, who once again promised a major program."

What will these two American landers be doing on the moon in 2024? Peregrine is designed by Astrobotic, a company founded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2007. Weighing 1.3 metric tonnes at lift-off, the craft is due to deposit a payload of around 100 kilos on the moon. This will include a few dozen scientific devices including spectrometers, radiation detectors and even a bitcoin.

Nova-C was designed in Houston, Texas, by Intuitive Machines, a company founded just 10 years ago. Here too, we're dealing with a lander weighing close to 2 tonnes, carrying around 100 kilos of NASA-stamped scientific experiments, including cameras, laser reflectors and instruments for studying plasma and radio waves.

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