The commander of Nasa's next mission to the Moon said that he and his crew would see things that no human has ever seen. Reid Wiseman told a news conference that it was likely that his spacecraft would fly over large areas of the Moon that previous Apollo missions had never mapped. Yesterday, Nasa announced it hoped it would be able to launch the first crewed Moon mission in 50 years as early as February 2026 . Mission specialist Christina Koch explained that the astronauts would be able to study the lunar surface in exquisite detail for a full three hours. Believe it or not, human eyes are one of the best scientific instruments that we have, she said.

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.