Lunar Landings News and Discussions

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Live coverage: ispace poised for moon landing attempt today

April 25, 2023 Stephen Clark

Live coverage of the landing of ispace’s commercial Hakuto-R spacecraft on the moon. The landing attempt is scheduled for around 12:40 p.m. EDT (1640 UTC). Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2023/04/25/i ... us-center/


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weatheriscool
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Bezos' Blue Origin wins NASA astronaut moon lander contract to compete with SpaceX's Starship

Source: CNBC

WASHINGTON — Jeff Bezos has his NASA moon ticket. The billionaire’s space company Blue Origin won a key contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Friday to develop a crewed lunar lander for delivering astronauts to the moon’s surface later this decade under the agency’s Artemis program.

The Blue Origin-led effort is effectively a more than $7 billion project. NASA’s contract award is worth just over $3.4 billion, officials said Friday, while Blue Origin Vice President John Couluris said the company will contribute “well north” of the contract’s value as well.

“We’re making an additional investment in the infrastructure that will pave the way to land the first humans on Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in announcing the Blue Origin award. “Our shared ambitions now are no less lofty than when President Kennedy dared a generation of dreamers to journey to the moon.” Bezos said in a tweet Friday he’s “honored to be on this journey with @NASA to land astronauts on the Moon — this time to stay.”

The Blue Origin-led team – which includes Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Draper, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics – topped the proposal of a team led by Leidos-owned Dynetics. Other proposals were expected, but likely won’t be revealed until NASA releases documents explaining its selection process.
Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/19/nasa-aw ... tract.html
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NASA Return to the Moon Could be Imperiled by Politics
by Miriam Kramer
May 23 , 2023

Introduction:
(Axios) NASA's flagship program to get people back to the Moon is at risk in the debate over the country's budget.

Why it matters: The Artemis program has survived two presidential administrations and has bipartisan support in Congress.

• Both administrations have worked to reduce the political risk of the multibillion-dollar program, awarding multiple contracts to commercial companies in multiple states and partnering with international space agencies.

What's happening: Efforts to insulate Artemis from possible cuts, delays and cancellation are facing a major test with the current budget fight on Capitol Hill.

• If NASA's funding is stalled at the 2022 enacted level or reduced, agency administrator Bill Nelson has warned Artemis II and Artemis III could be delayed. The current launch dates are 2024 for Artemis II and 2025 for Artemis III.

Read more here: https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/nasa- ... -politics
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weatheriscool wrote: Mon May 29, 2023 6:46 pm
Lemme guess if its not the Chinese themselves it will be Chinese or Asian Americans from NASA who land on the Moon livestreamed to Earth. Of course! :lol:
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India shoots for the moon with historic Chandrayaan-3 mission
Rhea Mogul
By Rhea Mogul, CNN
Published 8:38 PM EDT, Thu July 13, 2023
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/13/indi ... index.html
India is bidding to become only the fourth country to execute a controlled landing on the moon with the launch Friday of its Chandrayaan-3 mission.

Chandrayaan, which means “moon vehicle” in Sanskrit, is expected to take off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota in southern Andhra Pradesh state at 2:30 p.m. local time (5 a.m. ET).

It’s India’s second attempt at a soft landing, after its previous effort with the Chandrayaan-2 in 2019 failed. Its first lunar probe, the Chandrayaan-1, orbited the moon and was then deliberately crash-landed onto the lunar surface in 2008.

Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 is comprised of a lander, propulsion module and rover. Its aim is to safely land on the lunar surface, collect data and conduct a series of scientific experiments to learn more about the moon’s composition.

Only three other countries have achieved the complicated feat of soft-landing a spacecraft on the moon’s surface – the United States, Russia and China.

Indian engineers have been working on the launch for years. They are aiming to land Chandrayaan-3 near the challenging terrain of the moon’s unexplored South Pole.

India’s maiden lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, discovered water molecules on the moon’s surface. Eleven years later, the Chandrayaan-2 successfully entered lunar orbit but its rover crash-landed on the moon’s surface. It too was supposed to explore the moon’s South Pole.

At the time, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the engineers behind the mission despite the failure, promising to keep working on India’s space program and ambitions.

India has since spent about $75 million on its Chandrayaan-3 mission.
Decades in the making

India’s space program dates back more than six decades, to when it was a newly independent republic and a deeply poor country reeling from a bloody partition.

When it launched its first rocket into space in 1963, the country was no match for the ambitions of the US and the former Soviet Union, which were way ahead in the space race.
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Nanotechandmorefuture wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 1:57 am Lemme guess if its not the Chinese themselves it will be Chinese or Asian Americans from NASA who land on the Moon livestreamed to Earth. Of course! :lol:
The Chinese lunar programme is going to be delicious to watch. They've burned through so many design iterations for the Long March 9 over the past five years that it'll be downright impressive if they can launch an integrated test article this decade.

That being said, renovating the Long March 5 to carry lunar missions in a multi-launch format is thrifty and shows initiative.
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NASA Will Land Three Autonomous Mapping Robots on the Moon
The CADRE rovers will demonstrate the potential of multi-robot missions for NASA's new era of lunar exploration.
By Ryan Whitwam August 4, 2023

NASA is headed back to the Moon, and this time the goal is to set up a long-term human presence on Earth's natural satellite. Astronauts spending time on and around the Moon may find an army of robotic helpers at their disposal, the first of which is being built and tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The CADRE project will deploy a trio of autonomous mapping robots on the Moon, and if successful, they could help NASA understand how best to build that army of bots.

The three CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) rovers are currently in the engineering prototype phase. NASA plans to deploy CADRE in 2024 via the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. The lander will touch down in the Reiner Gamma region of the Moon, but unlike past rover missions, NASA does not intend to control exactly what each robot does.
https://www.extremetech.com/science/nas ... n-the-moon
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