August 10, 2023. 2:10 AM, Moscow time. The Luna-25 mission launches from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East. For the first time in 47 years, Russia is launching an unmanned lunar mission, which aims to touch down near the Moon's south pole, study its soil, and search for traces of frozen water. On August 16, the spacecraft enters lunar orbit and, three days later, begins its landing maneuvers. But at the crucial moment, something goes wrong. The engines do not shut off when they should, the craft adopts an incorrect trajectory, and it crashes into the lunar surface.

Before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, plenty of creatures orbited above human heads. During the 1950s, the Soviets and Americans took their rivalry beyond our planet, starting a space race that would immortalize names like Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, Aleksei Leonov, Buzz Aldrin, and Valentina Tereshkova. But before them, there were Laika, Baker, Belka, Ham, and Strelka. The first animals in space, but not the first to fly, since in 1783 the Montgolfier brothers had placed a sheep, a duck, and a rooster inside a hot-air balloon to see what would happen if they flew.

With all the excitement and solemnity of great historical milestones, three Chinese astronauts have successfully risen early this Thursday from the Jiuquan space base in the north of the country, in the direction of the new Chinese space station, still under construction. A new success for China's competitive space program.

We often ask ourselves what kind of country we want. It is a pertinent and necessary question, and one that has many answers. One of them would most certainly have to do with scientific ambition, behind which there are a number of virtues: it calls for a high level of education, it helps to make innovation possible in companies and therefore to create wealth, and it drives concrete solutions to improve our quality of life. Scientific projects are an engine of progress. The first Catalan nanosatellite, the Enxaneta, lifted off this Monday morning, after two postponements. It culminates a two-year work and is the first of the six nanosatellites that the Generalitat plans to activate in a first phase that will last between three and four years. To speak, as has been said at some point, of the Catalan NASA is laughable. But the project itself must be taken very seriously. If only there were more initiatives of this calibre. The Enxaneta is part of Catalonia's NewSpace Strategy, which aims to place Catalonia in the new space economy as a sector of opportunities to improve the economy and services on Earth.

The Chinese and Russian space agencies have announced that they will build an international research space station on the Moon. In a joint statement, the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the Chinese National Space Administration explain that the facilities will be built on the surface, in orbit or both, and that they will be available to other countries for multidisciplinary research, including research on the exploration and use of the Moon.