Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

Intuitive Machines confirmed plans Wednesday to launch a commercial lunar lander aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast in 2021 on a mission to deliver multiple payloads to the moon, including up to five science instruments for NASA.

Wrapping up a six-month mission in orbit, three Chinese astronauts departed the Tiangong space station Saturday and landed in the remote Gobi Desert of northwestern China at 6:33 p.m. EDT (2233 UTC).

The first images beamed back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft after it briefly landed an asteroid buoyed expectations Wednesday that the probe collected enough samples to meet the mission’s minimum requirement for return to Earth.