Treaties meant to ensure sustainability in space don’t currently regulate private companies, and not every country has signed on to an agreement for sustainable space exploration.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander successfully touched down on the south pole of the Moon on Aug. 23, 2023, sparking celebrations across the country.
AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi
India became the first country to land near the south pole of the Moon, a notoriously difficult achievement that also marks them as the fourth country to land on the Moon.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin planted the U.S. flag on the Moon on July 20, 1969.
Heritage Images/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
Canadian Jeremy Hansen will be one of the next astronauts on the Artemis II mission. This announcement signals a new era in Canada’s role in space exploration.
In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron penned a spoken word song called ‘Whitey on the Moon’ that criticized the 1969 Moon landing. A hip-hop scholar explains why the song still reverberates today.
Eugene Cernan on the Moon, December 13, 1972, during the Apollo 17 mission, the last manned flight to the Earth’s natural satellite.
NASA
Flying the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is the equivalent of flying one at about 100,000 feet on Earth. Tricky, considering the highest helicopter flight ever recorded maxed out at 42,000 feet.
India may land on the Moon this coming year, while Nasa will launch its new, powerful rocket farther into space than any other human rated spacecraft.
A photo taken from the International Space Station in 2014 shows the Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft on the left and the unpiloted ISS Progress 57 cargo craft. Six years later, private players have joined the space race.
Picryl
Over the coming decade, the arrival of constellations of small satellites will reshape the space industry. It constitutes a paradigm shift, particularly in terms of data gathering and processing.
The only six sites on the farside of the Moon suitable for telescope arrays of around 200km across.
NASA