It will take 1.5 years to reach its final destination far beyond the moon.

In a world first, Japan’s space agency announced it successfully used steam to propel a spacecraft toward the Moon. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) water-powered CubeSat spacecraft, EQUilibriUm Lunar-Earth point 6U (EQUULEUS), was launched on its way by NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which recently broke a record for the farthest distance traveled by a human-rated spacecraft.

“This is the world’s first successful orbit control beyond low-Earth orbit using water propellant propulsion system,” JAXA said in a statement on Saturday.

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JAXA / University of Tokyo.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) water-powered CubeSat spacecraft, EQUilibriUm Lunar-Earth point 6U (EQUULEUS), was launched on its way by NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which recently broke a record for the farthest distance traveled by a human-rated spacecraft.

The agency’s sent a tiny lunar lander aboard NASA’s Artemis I moon mission.

Japan will have to wait a little longer to perform its historic first lunar landing. That’s because a tiny Japanese moon lander that hitched a ride aboard NASA’s Artemis I moon mission has failed to make it to the lunar surface, a report from Space.com reveals.

Officials working on the OMOTENASHI moon spacecraft announced on Twitter that they had failed to pick up the CubeSat’s signal ahead of a planned lunar landing attempt.

Meet OMOTENASHI: Japan’s tiny lunar lander.

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JAXA

That’s because a tiny Japanese moon lander that hitched a ride aboard NASA’s Artemis I moon mission has failed to make it to the lunar surface, a report from Space.com reveals.

A SpaceX recovery ship is headed more than a thousand kilometers downrange to support the second expendable Falcon 9 rocket launch in nine days.

No earlier than (NET) 9:57 pm EST (02:57 UTC) on Monday, November 21st, a Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 pad carrying the Eutelsat 10B geostationary communications satellite. For unknown reasons, the French communications provider paid extra to get as much performance as possible out of Falcon 9, requiring SpaceX to expend the rocket’s booster instead of attempting to land and reuse it.

The mission will be Eutelsat’s third Falcon 9 launch in less than three weeks and will wrap up a trio of launch contracts the company secretly signed with SpaceX to move satellites off of competitor Ariane Group’s unavailable Ariane 5 and delayed Ariane 6 rockets. In a rare coincidence, Eutelsat 10B will also be SpaceX’s second expendable Falcon 9 launch in a row and the third Falcon launch to expend a booster this month. But like those two other missions, not all of the Falcon rocket tasked with launching Eutelsat 10B will be lost.

The spacecraft successfully enters lunar orbit.

A toaster oven-sized NASA spacecraft will pave the way for a lunar orbital station that will help the U.S. space agency establish a permanent presence on the moon.

CAPSTONE, the first cubesat mission to ever visit the moon, was launched from New Zealand by a Rocket Lab Electron rocket on June 28 and it was designed to test the stability of the orbit NASA intends to use for its lunar Gateway orbital outpost.

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Illustration by NASA/Daniel Rutter.

NASA announced in a blog update that its 55-pound (25-kilogram) CAPSTONE cubesat spacecraft successfully inserted itself into orbit around the moon on Sunday, November 13.