Ankur Desai

There was a cheer in mission control and there's just been a cheer in the BBC newsroom.

That said, the chutes have opened.

integrity has splashed down.

It just looked gorgeous with its red and white parachutes sailing majestically across the Pacific Ocean.

There's still work to be done.

The rescue vessels are on the way.

They need to be extracted from the capsule.

These are not trivial matters, but the worst is over.

This has been...

10 days that have made history.

But it's not the end of the story.

Hopefully, this will set astronauts up for another test flight and eventually landing on the moon, they say, by 2028.

But I think they're being a bit optimistic about that.

So are we likely to see more history making in the coming years?

You said it could take longer than 2028.

Why is that?

Well, it's incredibly ambitious.

For one thing, the lunar landers have not yet been built.

They're supposed to be tested next year by docking in Earth orbit to see if they can dock.

The key problem is that these lunar landers are not the lunar landers I remember seeing when I was a boy, which was just basically a small van designed to carry two astronauts down to the