Q&A with Scott Bolton, principal investigator on NASA’s Juno mission

Wrapping up a busy two days on the lunar surface, a Chinese spacecraft carrying moon soil took off from a makeshift launch pad and fired back into orbit Thursday on the first leg of its journey back to Earth.

More than three years after its launch was delayed by a corporate merger, a commercial Earth-imaging satellite has finally shipped to its California rocket base for liftoff aboard an Atlas 5 in September.

Representatives from NASA, Boeing and Lockheed Martin argued that the United States shouldn’t skip past the Moon in favor of Mars when it comes to crewed deep space exploration. The discussion came up during a panel at the SpaceCom conference concerning the forthcoming Artemis 2 mission.