Enlarge / The second Intuitive Machines lander is prepared for hot-fire testing this week. (credit: Intuitive Machines)

One of the miracles of the Apollo Moon landings is that they were televised, live, for all the world to see. This transparency diffused doubts about whether the lunar landings really happened and were watched by billions of people.

However, as remarkable a technical achievement as it was to broadcast from the Moon in 1969, the video was grainy and black and white. As NASA contemplates a return to the Moon as part of the Artemis program, it wants much higher resolution video and communications with its astronauts on the lunar surface.

To that end, NASA announced this week that it had awarded a contract to Houston-based Intuitive Machines for "lunar relay services." Essentially this means Intuitive Machines will be responsible for building a small constellation of satellites around the Moon that will beam data back to Earth from the lunar surface.

Enlarge / Rendering of an individual crew quarter within the Axiom habitat module. (credit: Axiom Space)

Axiom Space is facing significant financial headwinds as the company attempts to deliver on two key commercial programs for NASA—the development of a private space station in low-Earth orbit and spacesuits that could one day be worn by astronauts on the Moon.

Forbes reports that Axiom Space, which was founded by billionaire Kam Ghaffarian and NASA executive Mike Suffredini in 2016, has been struggling to raise money to keep its doors open and has had difficulties meeting its payroll dating back to at least early 2023. In addition, the Houston-based company has fallen behind on payments to key suppliers, including Thales Alenia Space for its space station and SpaceX for crewed launches.

"The lack of fresh capital has exacerbated long-standing financial challenges that have grown alongside Axiom’s payroll, which earlier this year was nearly 1,000 employees," the publication reports. "Sources familiar with the company’s operations told Forbes that co-founder and CEO Michael Suffredini, who spent 30 years at NASA, ran Axiom like a big government program instead of the resource-constrained startup it really was. His mandate to staff up to 800 workers by the end of 2022 led to mass hiring so detached from product development needs that new engineers often found themselves with nothing to do."

Enlarge / The Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II mission, comprising its crew and service modules, was lifted into a vacuum test chamber at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 4, 2024. (credit: NASA/Amanda Stevenson)

NASA would like to start stacking the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission—the first human flight around the Moon since 1972—sometime next month, but the agency's exploration chief says the milestone could be delayed as engineers continue studying the readiness of the Orion spacecraft's heat shield.

The heat shield, already installed at the base of the Orion spacecraft, will take the brunt of the heating when the capsule blazes through Earth's atmosphere at the end of the 10-day mission. On the Artemis I test flight in late 2022, NASA sent an Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back without a crew aboard. The only significant blemish on the test flight was a finding that charred chunks of the heat shield unexpectedly stripped away from the capsule during reentry as temperatures increased to nearly 5,000° Fahrenheit (2,760° Celsius).

The spacecraft safely splashed down, and if any astronauts had been aboard, they would have been fine. However, the inspections of the recovered spacecraft showed divots of heat shield material were missing. The heat shield material, called Avcoat, is designed to erode away in a controlled manner during reentry. Instead, fragments fell off the heat shield that left cavities resembling potholes.

Enlarge (credit: NASA/Isaac Watson)

The central piece of NASA's second Space Launch System rocket arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. Agency officials intend to start stacking the towering launcher in the next couple of months for a mission late next year carrying a team of four astronauts around the Moon.

The Artemis II mission, officially scheduled for September 2025, will be the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the Moon since the last Apollo lunar landing mission in 1972. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen will ride the SLS rocket away from Earth, then fly around the far side of the Moon and return home inside NASA's Orion spacecraft.

"The core is the backbone of SLS, and it’s the backbone of the Artemis mission," said Matthew Ramsey, NASA's mission manager for Artemis II. "We’ve been waiting for the core to get here because all the integrated tests and checkouts that we do have to have the core stage. It has the flight avionics that drive the whole system. The boosters are also important, but the core is really the backbone for Artemis. So it’s a big day.”

Enlarge / This photo taken on June 25, 2024, shows the retrieval site of the return capsule of the Chang'e-6 probe in Siziwang Banner, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. (credit: Xinhua/Lian Zhen)

A small spacecraft landed in Inner Mongolia on Tuesday, bringing samples from the far side of the Moon back to Earth.

This was not China's first robotic mission to return a few pounds of dust and pebbles from the lunar surface—that came with the Chang'e 5 mission in December 2020. However, this was the first time any space program in the world returned material from the Moon's far side.

The successful conclusion of this mission, which launched from Earth nearly two months ago, marked another significant achievement for China's space program as the country sets its sights on landing humans on the Moon by the year 2030.