Moon landing

China's ambitious plans regarding its missions to the Moon are not new. In January 2019, China had already earned the distinction of being the first country to land a probe on the far side of the Moon, that is the section of the natural satellite that faces away from the Earth. Now, after two years, it appears that China is ready to widen its horizon when it comes to Moon travel and is taking active steps to enable manned landing on the Moon. A brief news report published by the Xiamen University School of Aeronautics and…

The battle for domination of space by private firms is not new. The latest competition saw Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos tussle in the race to make commercial space tourism a reality. Now, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken a swipe at Bezos' Blue Origin for hiring a high-profile strategic advisory firm after it lost a $2.9 billion (roughly Rs. 21,540 crores) NASA lunar lander contract to SpaceX. Without naming Bezos, Musk said the billionaire should “consider spending some money” on actual lunar lander hardware, instead of…

Japan revised the schedule of its space exploration plans on Tuesday, aiming to put a Japanese person on the moon by the latter half of the 2020s."Not only is space a frontier that gives people hopes and dreams but it also provides a crucial foundation to our economic society with respect to our economic security," Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a meeting to finalise the plan.According to the draft schedule of the plan, Japan aims to put the first non-American on the moon as part of the Artemis programme, a US-led…

The Apollo 13 Saturn rocket being rolled out to the launch pad in 1970.Photo: NASAFor millennia, our species looked at the Moon as a place that would forever be beyond our reach, but 20th-century technologies finally made our natural satellite accessible to probes, landers, and even human explorers. Despite these achievements, however, the Moon has furiously resisted our overtures, as these lamentable historical episodes attest.In August 1958, some six months after the launch of the first U.S. satellite, the Air Force…