Live coverage: Crew-8 splashdown off the coast of Pensacola, Florida

A heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket hurled a 9-ton Chinese spacecraft toward the moon Monday on a 23-day mission attempting to return lunar samples to Earth for the first time in 44 years.

If SpaceX is able to dispatch a robotic Dragon capsule to land on the red planet in 2018 on time and successfully, engineers stand to get a lesson on what it will take to eventually send humans there, capturing key data on an untested Mars landing scheme a decade sooner than NASA could do it, space agency officials said this week.

This NASA animation depicts the OSIRIS-REx mission to grab a sample of Asteroid Bennu and return it to Earth for study. Launch from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas 5 rocket is scheduled for Sept. 8 and landing in Utah is planned for Sept. 24, 2023.