Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

United Launch Alliance and Boeing teams worked through the weekend on closeouts of the Starliner crew capsule, inspections and final outfitting of the Atlas 5 rocket. A launch readiness review Tuesday approved the continuation of final preparations for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Friday of the first Starliner spacecraft on an unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station.

NASA announced Thursday it will fund four concept studies for potential robotic missions to Venus, Jupiter’s moon Io and Neptune’s moon Triton ahead of a decision next year to approve up to two of the projects for launch in the mid-to-late 2020s.

A commercial robotic lander developed by the Japanese company ispace was supposed to land on the moon at 12:40 p.m. EDT (1640 UTC) Tuesday, attempting to make history as the first privately-funded enterprise to achieve a controlled touchdown on the lunar surface. But mission controllers lost contact with the spacecraft just before landing.