Orion program

Jeff Bezos' rocket company has won a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, two years after it lost out to SpaceX.

Blue Origin received a $3.4 billion contract to lead a team to develop a lunar lander named Blue Moon.
It will be used to transport astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2029, following a pair of crew landings by Elon Musk's SpaceX.

For the first time, a woman and an African-American will go to the moon. NASA announced on Monday the names of the four astronauts who will orbit Earth's natural satellite at the end of 2024 after more than 50 years of absence, reported AFP.

NASA unveiled the crew on April 3 for its first human mission to the Moon in more than 50 year, including the first woman and Black man to voyage into deep space.

Christina Koch, a NASA astronaut who holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, will be a mission specialist on next year's Artemis II flight around the Moon.

NASA will announce the names next month of the four astronauts, three Americans and one Canadian, who will fly around the Moon next year, the head of the U.S. space agency said on March 9.

As years in space and astronomy go, 2022 is going to be a tough act to follow.

NASA is now targeting Sept. 27 as the earliest possible launch date for its uncrewed Artemis 1 mission to the Moon, the agency said in a blog post on Sept. 12.

After technical issues halted its first launch attempt, NASA will try again on Aug. 3 to get its new 30-story rocket off the ground and send its unmanned test capsule towards the Moon.

Seeing a rocket blast off to the Moon is "a once-in-a-lifetime thing to experience," says Joanne Bostandji.

The Japanese government has decided that the country will join NASA's program to colonize the moon, which moves the landing to the lunar surface in 2024, the Kyodo news agency said.

The decision will be formally announced by the end of this year. NASA has announced that the new moon assimilation program has been named "Artemis." It will consist of three stages.

A NASA mission to the Moon next year aims to assess the impact of cosmic rays on the human body using a system devised and produced by Greek startup Herado, founded by Dr Marianthi Frangopoulou.