Jacinta Bowler

This is not a moon landing mission.

It was...

going to be, but they changed it in February so that now it's going to be staying in Earth's orbit and it's going to test docking with commercial landers.

And the reason why they want to do this is because when we went round the moon, that's a very exciting thing and it needs a lot of science to be able to get you there.

But going from the orbit of the moon to the surface of the moon is a whole extra step, and you need a whole new set of stuff.

In the Apollo missions, they had landers, which are basically things that would come down from orbit and then land on the moon and then take you back up from the moon back to orbit again.

And that's quite difficult.

And NASA in this case have actually outsourced that to private companies.

One of them is SpaceX and one of them is Blue Origin.

And so what they're hoping to do is use those particular spacecraft with the Orion capsule to be able to see whether they can get those two things to work together.

And it doesn't sound as exciting, but it is an important part of making sure that this stuff works.

And currently, Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft and SpaceX's Starship are both behind schedule.

So there definitely needs to be more work to make sure that we get this stuff going.

At this stage, they're hoping for mid-next year, which is so soon.

Yeah.

My gosh.

And there's also some things that they have to fix as well.

Obviously, the toilet is a big issue.

They have to make sure that that's working.

So making sure that that stuff is fixed is pretty important for when they actually land on the moon in the next few years.