October 2025
What future for UK human spaceflight?
... 2025 with Thales Alenia Space, Italy, to lead European aerospace companies in building the Argonaut lunar descent element of ESA’s first lunar lander. From the start of the next decade, the spacecraft will launch regular missions to the...
June 2017
How to build a Moon base cheaply
...deliver goods without rocket deceleration has already been tried successfully. An artist illustration of the Moon Express MX-1 lunar lander on the surface of the Moon after a soft landing. The California-based company is one of three selected by NASA...
27 January 2020
US bill spurns Moon programme favouring Mars instead
... the SLS’s inaugural flight in 2021. Interestingly, the new bill also directs NASA to develop a human lunar lander “as an integrated lunar landing system carried on an Exploration Upper Stage-enhanced Space Launch System,” known as SLS Block 1B. This...
31 December 2021
Space missions to watch out for in 2022
...carrying with it 4G communications equipment for NASA’s Artemis programme. Carried to their destination by Intuitive Machines' lunar lander, Lunar Outpost’s M1 Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover will also scoop up some regolith, take...
20 September 2019
Russia and China to cooperate on future Moon missions
... NASA, which could threaten to delay work on lunar landers needed for Artemis. Such bills usually prevent agencies ...relying on a special authorised anomaly to start a lunar lander program. With questionable timetables, reshuffles and financial worries...
02 December 2014
Roscosmos plans deep space exploration
Russia is planning to recommence its uncrewed lunar sample return activities, ceased since the last lunar lander flown in 1974. Plans include three uncrewed craft – Lunas 25, 26 and 27 – flying in 2023-25. Subsequently, Luna 28 and 29 would ...
