Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, newly returned to Japan after a 12-day journey into space last month, said being launched into the cosmos was less scary than riding a rollercoaster and made him obsessed with Earth.

When NASA’s historic Apollo program launched in the 1960s, it resulted in six space flights to Earth’s natural satellite, the moon. These missions had grand results—from putting the first person on the moon in 1969 aboard Apollo 11 to 2,200 collected lunar samples in total.

Apollo mission planners were really smart. Recognizing that future scientists will have better tools and richer scientific insights, they refrained from opening a portion of the lunar samples returned from the historic Apollo missions. One of these sample containers, after sitting untouched for 50 years, is now set to be opened.

Yutu-2 snapped a fuzzy view of something interesting on the horizon.

The Yutu-2 rover is on a roll. It's been exploring the far side of the moon since early 2019, as part of China's Chang'e-4 lunar lander mission. It now has its eyes set on a strange-looking cube-shaped object it spotted in the distance.

The agency put out a request for proposals for a lunar nuclear power plant that can power surface exploration.

Alongside advances in space exploration, we’ve recently seen much time and money invested into technologies that could allow effective space resource utilisation. And at the forefront of these efforts has been a laser-sharp focus on finding the best way to produce oxygen on the Moon.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson today announced a new timeline for near-term Artemis missions, pushing back the first post-Apollo crewed Moon landings until at least 2025.

NASA has set its sights on the moon's south pole in its quest for ice. This week, the space agency and the company Intuitive Machines announced Shackleton Crater landing site at the south pole of the moon for a small lander set to launch next year. The location is called the "Shackleton connecting ridge" and NASA data hint at ice lurking below the surface, the agency said in a statement Wednesday (Nov. 3).

The Moon is very big, and any small object hitting it would have very little effect on its motion around the Earth, because the Moon’s own momentum would overwhelm that of the impact. Most asteroid collisions would result in large craters and little else; even the largest asteroid known, Ceres, wouldn’t budge the Moon.

An Australian-made rover is set to be launched to the Moon as part of a NASA space mission this decade. The federal government has struck an agreement with the US space agency which could see a semi-autonomous rover made by Australian businesses and researchers sent on a lunar mission as early as 2026.

We now know where NASA's first-ever robotic moon rover will touch down. The ice-hunting Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will land just west of Nobile Crater, which sits near the moon's south pole, NASA officials announced today (Sept. 20). In late 2023, VIPER will fly to the moon aboard Griffin, a lander built by Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic that will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Tiny iron nanoparticles unlike any found naturally on Earth are nearly everywhere on the moon—and scientists are trying to understand why. A new study led by Northern Arizona University doctoral candidate Christian J. Tai Udovicic, in collaboration with associate professor Christopher Edwards, both of NAU's Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, uncovered important clues to help understand the surprisingly active lunar surface.

The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions’ astronaut explorers.

So far this year, there has been no shortage of photography-worthy celestial events centered around the moon. After a super pink moon in April, a total lunar eclipse in May and the Strawberry supermoon in June, it may seem that nothing can match that, until the upcoming eclipses towards the end of the year. Yet, this full moon comes with a worrying aspect and a warning.

Coastal communities in the United States, be forewarned. A "dramatic" surge in high-tide floods is just over a decade away for nearly all US mainland coastlines, Hawaii and Guam, according to NASA.

Today, there is a lot of excited talk about going to the moon. Again. Shining brightly in our sky, it calls to us like a celestial siren, just as it always has done. NASA is still debating whether it should send astronauts straight to Mars, bypassing the moon altogether, or only go to Mars after a number of successful precursor missions to Earth's natural satellite.

Elon Musk thinks SpaceX can help NASA meet its ambitious goal of landing astronauts on the moon by 2024. “I think that can be done,” Musk said Friday, speaking after SpaceX launched the Crew-2 mission to orbit for a trip to the International Space Station.

NASA picked Elon Musk’s SpaceX to receive $2.9 billion to build a lunar lander as part of the Artemis mission to send humans to the Moon by 2024, the agency announced today. It’s a major vote of confidence in SpaceX from NASA — as no other company received money. The contract between NASA and SpaceX is expected to be signed on May 1.

We don't know how we missed this story, but a few years ago, a NASA intern was convicted of moon rock theft—specifically, he stole moon rocks so he could have sex with his girlfriend on them.