A Lunar Launch Delay That NASA Counted as a Break

China has delayed the launch of Chang'e 7, an ambitious robotic mission to the South Pole of the Moon, until early next year. At the Off World conference in Houston, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said China is targeting the exact same location on the lunar South Pole, and framed the slip as luck: “We may have dodged a bullet,” he said, because the mission would have gone to the Shackleton crater. The two programmes are not merely heading for the same region in the abstract. They are converging on a specific piece of the lunar surface.