That was the takeaway on Sept. 7, when the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost contact with its Vikram lunar lander during an attempt to touch down at the moon's south pole. India was poised to become the fourth nation to ever successfully touch down softly on the lunar regolith, doing so in a place that no other country has previously reached. Though the space agency is still scrambling to revive communication with Vikram -- which has been spotted from lunar orbit -- the unhappy landing sequence seemed like a painful echo of the situation earlier this year, when a private robotic Israeli lander, Beresheet, crashed into our natural satellite. It's all a reminder that, despite the fact that humans landed on the moon many times during the Apollo missions half a century ago, doing so remains a tough business. Of the 30 soft-landing attempts made by space agencies and companies around the world, more than one-third have ended in failure, space journalist Lisa Grossman tweeted.

India's space agency is preparing to launch its ambitious Chandrayaan-2 mission next week which is set to land near the currently unexplored south pole of the moon. Chandrayaan-2 will blast off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota on the country's south west coast at 2.51am (10.21pm It is the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) second lunar probe, and the first one destined to land on the moon, and is scheduled to land on September 6. India will become only the fourth country, after the US, Russia and China, to reach Earth's satellite if successful. The ISRO has said it chose to explore the south pole as it is possible there is water in the permanently shadowed areas, which could pave the way for future lunar habitation.

Despite many developers' efforts to teach cars to steer themselves around roads filled with human drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists, the first great wave of autonomous vehicles may not arrive on land. Instead, it might follow the time-honored tradition of running away from tricky problems by heading for the open seas. Rather than worrying about robo-taxis, groups around the world are working on making ships--large and small--self-piloting, which could save fuel, prevent expensive accidents and groundings, and relieve crews of some of mundanity of life on the water. Let's start at the big end of the scale. Container ships and other behemoths may not have to deal with rogue scooters, but they come with their own challenges.

Venture capital firm IvyCap Ventures has raised the first tranche of Rs 300 crore in its Rs 600-crore IvyCap Fund 2, which was launched last October. The fund saw the participation of five of the 15 existing institutional investors of IvyCap. As a part of the IvyCap Ventures Initiative, we will invest in 25-30 startups in the next two years, in sectors like healthtech, IoT, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, edtech and agritech." Last December, IvyCamp had partnered with Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), a business incubator of IIT Bombay. The objective was to leverage the IvyCamp Platform to connect and create value for entrepreneurs and innovators across the student and alumni community.