As it happened: ispace makes second attempt at historic Moon landing

Heino Falcke, an accomplished radio astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands, leads a team of European scientists and engineers who developed a scientific receiver flying on China’s Queqiao spacecraft flying to a point in space beyond the far side of the moon.

A commercial lunar lander built by Astrobotic will launch from the Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in late 2023 to deliver a water-hunting NASA rover to the moon’s south pole, officials announced Tuesday.

The next time astronauts land on the moon, they will ride to the lunar surface in a spacecraft that looks a lot different than the Apollo-era landing module last used in 1972. Lander concepts proposed by SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics — which won a combined $967 million in NASA funding Thursday — take wildly different approaches to carrying crews to the moon.