Lunar

We're going to be on the Moon more often soon, and we'll need places to rest and work there. Building habitats and maintaining them will be tough, but bacteria could come to the rescue by helping repair cracked bricks made from lunar soil.

Graphene has been found on the Moon. The so-called “wonder material” was detected in a sample of lunar soil returned by a Chinese lander.

It's a genuine joy watching Apollo-era astronauts bounce around on the lunar surface, and it's hysterically funny watching them fall over and struggle to get back up in their spacesuits. MIT wishes to rob us of this hilarity for future missions.

NASA has selected three companies to develop extreme off-road vehicles that astronauts will drive on the Moon during Artemis missions starting in 2030, awarding US$4.6 billion in contracts to Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab.

Toyota's CALTY Design Research celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, having been responsible for "everything from the 1978 Toyota Celica to the 2024 Toyota Tacoma." The futuristic Baby Lunar Cruiser concept has been created to mark the occasion.

Last year, we heard how NASA had awarded a service contract to Axiom Space for the design and production of the agency's Artemis III spacesuit. NASA and Axiom have now unveiled a prototype of the outfit.

No single robot can perform all tasks, yet bringing a bunch of different robots along on Moon missions would be quite inefficient. The WORMS setup offers an alternative, in the form of components that can be mixed and matched to make whatever robot is needed.

The new technologies Honda plans to pursue in the coming decades include an eVTOL for inter-city transport, a robot that will act as an avatar for users to perform tasks remotely, and a renewable energy system for the Moon.

​​The Google Lunar XPrize has been almost a decade in the making, but 2017 will be the year that we finally have lift off. The XPrize foundation has today confirmed the five finalist teams that have secured launch contracts and will make the final push for the Moon's surface.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and architecture firm Foster + Partners have released a video outlining how they envision a future mission to construct a moonbase with the aid of 3D printing technology may unfold.

China's Chang'e-3 lunar lander, together with the Yu Tu (Jade Rabbit) lunar rover, successfully landed on the Moon's surface at 13:11 UT Saturday night. The event marks the first time that China has sent a spacecraft to soft land on the Moon's surface.

Moon Express has revealed the design of its MX-1 entry for the Google Lunar X Prize competition. Not a one-trick pony, the MX-1 is intended as the first of a series of robotic spacecraft that can carry out a multitude of tasks in Earth orbit as well as in deep space.