While the hope of the US returning to the moon has been temporarily dashed, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton expressed high hopes for its future Griffin lunar lander missions. 'What a wild adventure we were just on,' Thornton said. 'Certainly not the outcome we were hoping for and certainly challenging right up front.' Like the Peregrine, these robotic lunar landers are expected to serve as a scout for the NASA's Artemis astronauts before they make their own moon landing in 2026. The CEO and trained mechanical engineer described'victory' after'victory' as his team scrambled to make the most of the scrapped Peregrine mission.

A shoebox-sized robot named Iris is among the final two vying for the chance to become the first US spacecraft to land on the moon in 50 years. NASA has been sending rovers to the surface of Mars for decades, with two, Perseverance and Curiosity, currently operating and sending back photographs. However, the US-based space agency hasn't sent a vehicle to explore the surface of the moon since the last Apollo landing in 1972 - 50 years ago this year. Two contractors funded by NASA have vehicles that could launch this year - including Houston-based Intuitive Machines, and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic. With contracts worth more than $70 million each, the firms could launch for the moon this year on a mixture of SpaceX Falcon 9 and United Launch Alliance rockets.

SpaceX successfully launches NASA astronauts from Kennedy Space Center into space. NASA's ambitious lunar program Artemis will send the agency's first mobile robot to the moon in late 2023. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, also known as VIPER, would search the planet for ice and other resources on and below its surface that could potentially be harvested for long-term exploration in the future. WHO GETS TO BE AN ASTRONAUT DURING THE PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT BOOM? Using the first-ever headlights on a lunar rover, VIPER will explore the lunar South Pole and "permanently" dark regions of the moon – some of the coldest areas in the solar system.

Carnegie Mellon University students who designed and built a small, boxy robot, called Iris, have achieved a major milestone: their robot passed its critical design review by NASA and is on track to land on the moon in the fall of 2021. "We are moving forward … we're going to the moon," a triumphant project manager, Raewyn Duvall, told Iris team members during a Zoom meeting following the review. Officials at NASA and Astrobotic Inc., whose Peregrine lander will deliver the robot to the lunar surface, performed the review. Duvall, a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, said the process resulted in a few small design revisions, which the team is now incorporating. The team will replace prototype parts with flight components this summer, as they test the robot to prove that it can withstand the trip to the moon without causing problems for Peregrine or other payloads aboard the lunar lander.

The UK's first ever moon rover will launch into space in 2021 in a bid to unlock the secrets of the lunar surface. The tiny, spider-esque robot - which will be the world's smallest robotic moon rover - will crawl across the moon to take photographs and gather data. Developed by London-based star-up Spacebit, the robot forms part of a collaborative mission with US company Astrobotic. Nasa announced in May that Astrobotic was to be awarded a $79.5m contract to transport 14 instruments from various partners to investigate the moon's "volatile elements" such as hydrogen and oxygen, which could be used for astronaut life support and rocket fuel in the future. SpaceBit will be one of those partners, sending the rover to the surface inside Astrobotic's Peregrine lander.

Pittsburgh, USA – Bosch in North America and Astrobotic Technology Inc. today announced a research partnership to send experimental sensor technology to the International Space Station (ISS) as early as May 2019. Bosch's SoundSee technology is a deep audio analytics capability that uses a custom array of microphones and machine learning to analyze information contained in emitted noises. SoundSee's analytics will investigate whether audio data from equipment could be learned and understood using advanced software, such that it could be used to improve the operations of the ISS. "Machines, such as motors and pumps, emit noise signatures while they operate," said Dr. Samarjit Das, principal researcher and SoundSee project lead at Bosch's Research and Technology Center in Pittsburgh. "Our SoundSee AI (artificial intelligence) algorithm uses machine learning to analyze these subtle acoustic clues and determine whether a machine, or even a single component of a machine, needs to be repaired or replaced."

The space race is heating up again in ways we haven't seen since the end of the Cold War. We haven't been to the moon since 1972 but a number of private companies and national agencies have begun looking to our nearest celestial neighbor with renewed interest, not only as a site of scientific study but also as a fuel resource and potential staging area for trips further out into the solar system. Last December, Trump signed Space Policy Directive-1, which directs NASA "to lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities." Essentially, the move will help NASA better organize exploratory efforts with its international partners and private spaceflight companies."I "What we're doing now is entirely different than what we did back [during the Apollo era]." To that end, NASA has since submitted to Congress a plan to establish the necessary infrastructure to not just get us back to the moon but to return there regularly. Dubbed the "Exploration Campaign", this plan focuses on three core areas: low-Earth orbit (LEO), the crewed missions to the moon for long-term habitation and study, and robotic missions to Mars and beyond. "EM-1 will take Orion and the Space Launch system into a high lunar orbit and that's actually the orbit that NASA has identified to do the asteroid retrieval mission that will bring a large boulder into that orbit" Lockheed Martin's Orion program manager Mike Hawes told the Observer in 2016. "This will essentially be a dress rehearsal for that mission.