Apollo missions

China and India scored moon landings, while Russia, Japan, and Israel ended up in the lunar trash heap.Now two private companies are hustling to get the U.S. back in the game, more than five decades after the Apollo program ended.It’s part of a NASA-supported effort to kick-start commercial moon deliveries, as the space agency focuses on getting astronauts back there.“They’re scouts going to the moon ahead of us,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology is up first with a planned liftoff of…

European astronauts could walk on the Moon for the first time in the coming years, in exchange for the continent taking on a key role in an ambitious NASA space programme. The US space agency's Artemis programme aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the historic Apollo missions, which ended in 1972. For the first time, the European Space Agency (ESA) and European aerospace giant Airbus have been entrusted with supplying vital "service modules" (ESMs) for NASA's Orion spacecraft. In exchange,…