NASA has awarded contracts to three companies to develop vehicles for the first crewed missions to the Moon in more than five decades. Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab – based in Texas, Colorado and California, respectively – were chosen to create designs for the lunar rover under a contract worth up to 4.6bn, NASA said on Wednesday. NASA plans to pick one of the companies to carry out a test run for their Lunar Terrain Vehicle before the arrival of the crew for the Artemis 5 mission scheduled for 2029. The US space agency said the winning bid will be "able to handle the extreme conditions at the Moon's south pole" and "feature advanced technologies for power management, autonomous driving, and state-of-the-art communications and navigation systems." "We look forward to the development of the Artemis generation lunar exploration vehicle to help us advance what we learn at the Moon," Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement.

A large robotic arm on China's space station has successfully grasped and maneuvered a cargo spacecraft in a crucial test ahead of upcoming module launches. The 33-foot-long (10 meters) robotic arm on the Tianhe module of China's new Tiangong space station took hold of the Tianzhou 2 supply ship and moved it around 20 degrees, before returning it to the forward port on Tianhe's docking hub. The 47-minute operation began at 5:12 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Jan. 5 (2212 UTC, 6:12 am Beijing time Jan. 6) to test the procedures and equipment needed for the addition and movement of larger space station modules. The successful trial was vital to the China National Space Administration's plan to complete construction of its space station later this year. China's next space station modules, named Mengtian and Wentian, are scheduled to launch on separate Long March 5B rockets in the coming months and dock with the orbiting Tianhe. The robotic arm will then need to grasp the modules, each with a mass of more than 44,100 pounds (20,000 kilograms), and maneuver them from the forward port to radial ports.

Chinese astronauts edged into space on Friday to add the finishing touches to a robotic arm on the Tiangong space station. The foray, the second spacewalk in two months and relayed on state television, is part of China's heavily promoted space programme which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon. In June, three crew arrived at the station, where they are set to remain in space for a total of three months in China's longest crewed mission to date. On Friday, astronauts Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming successfully exited the Tianhe core module to install foot stops and a workbench on the station's robotic arm, said the China Manned Space Agency in a statement. The foray is part of China's heavily promoted space programme which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon Photo: CNS / - Video footage showed the astronauts working outside the spacecraft while tethered to it with a long rope.

Astronauts at China's new space station conducted their first spacewalk Sunday, state media reported, as Beijing presses on with its extraterrestrial ambitions. It was only the second time the country's astronauts have stepped out of their craft while in space. Three Chinese spacemen blasted off in June, docking at the Tiangong station where they are to remain for three months in China's longest crewed mission to date. On Sunday morning, two of them exited the core cabin, said state broadcaster CCTV. The first, Liu Boming, was transported via mechanical arm to a work site and the other, Tang Hongbo, moved by climbing on the outside of the cabin.

It might be known as the Red Planet, but according to observations from NASA - Mars'glows green' at night due to chemical reactions in its upper atmosphere. The eerie phenomenon was captured by NASA's'MAVEN' orbiter but astronauts are unlikely to see it as it is only visible as ultraviolet light - naked to the human eye. The discovery could help create a more detailed picture of Martian weather - which will help the first crewed missions to Mars expected to leave sometime in the 2030s. The first crewed mission to Mars will need better forecasts than are currently available to avoid wild winds and storms that can last weeks, the authors explained. Each evening the upper atmosphere softly flickers in ultraviolet light as the sun sets and temperatures fall to minus -79.6 degrees Fahrenheit and below.

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.

When it comes to space policy, reliving the glory days too often means pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into black holes. Preliminary budget plans suggest that the Trump Administration will provide funding for Space Policy Directive 1, which tasks NASA with getting humans back to the moon for the first time in over 45 years. Ross Marchand (@RossAMarchand) is the policy director for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance in Washington DC. NASA is already testing the feasibility of using the Orion space capsule to get humans to and from alien worlds. President Trump's directive, hatched from a unanimous recommendation from the National Space Council in June, has the agency eager to prove that it can once again taxi humans into space.

NASA wants to collect more asteroid material than ever, and they're looking for help to do it. NASA sees your disdain for its plan to capture part of an asteroid and drag it into orbit around the moon, but you know what? It's neat, and the agency is going to do it anyway. And it wants help from private companies to do it. In a strange pre-announcement, NASA today said that in the "near future," it will release the Asteroid Redirect Mission Umbrella for Partnerships (ARM-UP) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA).