this week, we're heading into space to find out how we'll live, work and eat on the moon. we have space homes and a spacewoman... all of a sudden, it clicked in my head. "wow, the international space station "is a submarine in space." ..moon bots and moon dust. the surface is fine and powdery. i can pick it up loosely with my toe. you know, i think i've seen that chap somewhere before. jfk: we choose to go - to the moon in this decade and do the other things, i not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

neil armstrong: it's one small step for man... - ..one giant leap for mankind. 52 years ago, we laid our last footprint on the moon. as the crew of apollo 17 left the surface, they didn't know that gene cernan would be the last person to walk on another world for quite a while. we're on our way, houston. but now, in this decade, finally... ..we're going back. and liftoff of artemis 1. nasa's artemis programme will, in the next year or two, return us to our neighbour.

part of its mission — to land the first woman and the first person of colour on the moon. another part — to use what we learn here to send the first astronauts to mars. this is where it all began, florida's kennedy space center, named after the president who made the original pledge to go to the moon. and now this place is at the centre of even grander plans, because this time we're notjust visiting the moon — we want to stay. this is gateway, humanity's first space station that will orbit another world. it will go round the moon every seven days. and, like the international space station above earth, astronauts will call this place home. although, where the iss can accommodate up to 12 astronauts and is comparable to a five—

or six—bedroom house, gateway will be...more cosy. gateway is a studio apartment. it's... we're going to have room for our four astronauts, multiple docking ports, so we can bring our orion crew transportation ship, we can bring logistics, and we can dock a lander. these four explorers won't all be cooped up on board for the whole time, though. two will actually be spending a week or two on location — down on the lunar surface. it's a chance to further study the landscape and hopefully find a location for our next giant leap — a permanent moon base. gateway will be there before we put a habitat on the surface. gateway allows us to access any point on the lunar surface. when we went with apollo, we had to pick that spot on the moon and go to it.

gateway will give us the opportunity to go down at different locations. the first section of gateway could be launched as early as 2025, with new modules then being added from 2027. a lunar base is admittedly further out and it comes with risk, but also reward. so how do we make that a reality? to find out, it's time for me to take one small step of my own. oh, wow. i can instantly see the dust kind of kicking up. yeah. it's really fine, isn't it? it leaves the footprints like you'd expect. oh, my gosh. that's brilliant. and this is how moon dust behaves, itjust puffs up like that? it does, yeah. it's so fine. welcome to swamp works... ..the dusty, dirty lab where they work with simulated moon dust. now, the loose soil that covers the lunar surface is called regolith. it's extremely fine, very sharp on a microscopic scale,

and it gets everywhere. so when we landed with apollo 11, we didn't know what the surface of the moon exactly was going to be like. you'll notice from some of the footage, the landing pads are quite huge on the landing legs and the ladder�*s far away from the surface. there was a lot of concern of, how much will this lander sink into the surface? how fluffy is this regolith? the surface is fine and powdery. i can...| can pick it up loosely with my toe. in fact, it's because the eagle lander didn't sink in as much as expected that neil armstrong had to take such a giant leap from the bottom rung of the ladder. today, swamp works is developing robots that can cope with and take advantage of lunar soil. and it will be very useful. see, moon dust is made

of materials like silicon dioxide and calcium oxide, which all contain a lot of oxygen. if we could mine the regolith and use chemical processes to extract the oxygen, we could make our own breathable air and our own rocket fuel. the way space flight exploration has been working right now is imagine you're going on a holiday with your family, you're going on a long road trip, thousands of miles, right? right now, we are bringing a trailer behind us with all the gas, you know, that we need with us, all the fuel, everything that we need comes with us. so we want to change that paradigm. we want to... and one of the biggest things that makes the biggest impact is the fuel, right? if we can source some of that from the moon and eventually from mars, that will allow us to bring more and to go more often. making our own fuel makes regular trips to and from the gateway space station much more viable. now, mining moon dust is called isru... and, because they love

an acronym round these parts, the robot to do this will be called the isru pilot excavator, ipex. we had to really reinvent how you do excavation for doing mining on the moon, and eventually mars. the challenge is the technology we have for mining here on earth relies on a lot of mass and a lot of weight, right? the more steel you put on an excavator, the heavier it becomes and the better it digs. we can't launch something as heavy as we want on a rocket. it's still very expensive, right? so we have to reduce the mass of what we put on rockets. and then when you land it on the moon, it weighs one sixth of what it does here on earth, right? imagine, like, trying to dig as if you were on ice, right? it will just scoot across the surface. the scoop will not engage and you won't be able to collect anything. so the way the robot scoops up the dust is using this thing called a bucket drum. and it's got a kind of spiral in there. and if it turns it one way,

it scoops the soil, which gradually works its way towards the middle and stays there. like that. and then when it wants to unload... ..it turns it the other way and it all comes out again. we put them on opposite ends of the robot and when it excavates, it's using both sets of drums at the same time, but they're digging in opposite directions. so one is pulling it that way and one is pulling it that way... right. ..and pulling itself down to the surface. yeah. one of the main dangers faced by extraterrestrial rovers is getting stuck. so, as an added bonus, ipex's scoops and arms can also help it to get out of a hole or flip it over if it takes a tumble. one of its other defences will keep its cameras free from all that electrostatic dust, which will cling to every part of it. its lenses will be fitted with an electrodynamic dust shield. simply apply electricity

and the charged dust particles are repelled, keeping its vision clear. but after a while of going to and fro, we might want to stay a little longer on the surface. robots like this one will prepare the ground for permanent buildings by smoothing and compacting the foundations. do you have a name for this arm? um... we call it... we call it meercat, actually. you've always got cool names for these things! yeah. why? it's called the multipurpose end effector for regolith acquisition... meercat... ..transportation and... yeah, yeah, that's it. you see, what worries me is there are some brilliant inventions you guys haven't bothered with because you couldn't think of a cool acronym.

a cool name. that is like one of the... it's very important to have a good name for your projects because it, like, represents the soul of the project, right? now, just like the fuel situation, we can't take building materials with us to the moon either — we have to make our structures from moon dust. these bricks and blocks and bars have all been made by mixing and melting regolith with plastic. in the future, giant sd printers will build shelters to protect those living on a world with no atmosphere from radiation, asteroid and micrometeoroid impacts, moonquakes and temperatures ranging from +100 to —200 degrees celsius. even replacement parts can be made from regolith. so this is a wheel that has been printed with regolith and polymer. 0k. this is another example of what we can do if we capture the resources from the moon. now, do you know, i've seen

and held wheels for rovers before, full—size wheels, and they're really light. right. but this is really heavy. yes, this is the opposite. because those wheels that are light, especially if you're sending it on a rocket, they need to be light because it's expensive. this is heavy because it's made on the moon. and heavy wheels are a good thing, i guess. it's better, right? especially for a digger. like the more weight that we have on the excavator, the better it's going to perform. would you believe you can even make rope out of regolith? this is made from basalt glass — really, really thin fibres, a bit like optic fibre. so you could even make rope out of moon dust. these are hopeful times for space exploration, but it's always been a risky endeavour. im—i odysseus — lunar lander separation confirmed. this year, we've seen three probes sent to the moon. two made it, and both of those had, shall we say, awkward landings. and the artemis mission to put boots back on the lunar ground has been pushed back to 2026 at the earliest. but nasa says space explorers need to take these setbacks in their stride.

i don't see it as a disappointment. it's very cliche to say space is hard, but what we're endeavouring to do is highly complex. we expect challenges along the way so this doesn't surprise us and we're pushing forward. it sounds really expensive to do space exploration. is it, and is it worth it? so, yes, it's really expensive. it was really expensive for us to explore this planet, really expensive to lay rail infrastructure, to lay highway infrastructure, to put the infrastructure in place that allows us to travel in air traffic around this globe. it's absolutely necessary for us to lay that critical infrastructure for going to space, because what we learn in that endeavour is tremendous. the exponential growth that we've seen in the world in technology is because of great endeavours like this. it's absolutely worth it. here in the united states,

every year the general population is spending as much money on potato chips as our budget is every year to go out to the moon. that's a good figure. the motivation may be different to that of the space race of the 1960s, but the size of the ambition is just as great today, as we shoot for the moon once again. i never dreamed that i could become an astronaut. i'm talking to kayla barron... ..one—time resident of the international space station and now part of the artemis crew, the team they've started rolling out the measure in india, the plan is to explain into other countries where big elections are taking place. the european parliament has proved the world because my first framework for regulating the risks of artificial intelligence. ai works by

classifying products according to risk and adjusting to scrutiny accordingly. the law's creators say will make the tech more human centric, however the act still has to pass several more steps before it becomes law. a surgical team at cromwell hospital in london have become the first in europe to use apple vision pro to perform two micro surgeries will stop with software, it allowed some of the team to have touch free access when setting up the surgery and offered them visualisations that were previously unavailable. fancy wearing sunglasses? they can quickly swipe to become reading glasses. well, deep optics have you covered with their newly created 32 and glasses. users can transition between the two settings thanks to liquid crystal lenses. they contain pixels and tiny electronic controls. i never dreamed that i could become an astronaut. i'm talking to kayla barron...

..one—time resident of the international space station and now part of the artemis crew, the team who are preparing to go back to the moon. first time i looked out the window of our capsule... i6 sunrises and sunsets each day over our beautiful planet, really fundamentally feeling this interconnectedness. everything each one of us does has an impact on the people, notjust immediately around us, but on the entire planet. that inspired me to be really deliberate about, what contribution am i going to make to leave a better, healthier, more connected more cooperative planet? what inspired you to become an astronaut? i did decide from a pretty early age that i wanted to serve in the military, and ultimately found my way to the naval academy and to the navy and to the submarine force in particular.

and i met an astronaut at a navy football game, and hearing her storyjust reminded me so much of my experience on the submarine. and all of a sudden it clicked in my head, "wow, the international space station "is a submarine in space." and i told her that and she said, "it totally is. it's exactly the same." you have these really complex machines out in these extreme environments that are designed to keep human beings alive in a place we're not meant to be, really, which is deep under the surface of the ocean or in the vacuum of space, and notjust keep us alive, but also allow us to accomplish a mission, do something as a team that's of value to others. what do you think it might be like to live on the moon and then mars? well, the moon is beautiful from the space station, first of all.

when the sun is reflecting off this sphere, it's notjust...you know, a crescent moon, a sliver in the sky. it felt like you could just reach out and grab it, and i think made me realise how incredible it is going to be to send human beings back. and there's incredible scientific questions we're going to be able to answer. we're planning to return to the moon, but this time to the lunar south pole. so we'll be exploring a different area than we visited during the apollo era. answer some really fundamental questions not only about the moon's formation and its geology, but about our entire solar system. you are part of the artemis team.

the artemis 3 crew is the one, i suppose, that everyone wants to be on, because i think that's the one where the people are going to stand on the moon. are you in with a chance of being on artemis 3? of course. everyone in our office dreams of the opportunity to be part of those crews. you wait and hope. but the really cool thing is, even if you're not in that seat on the flight, you get to support them and be a part of the team that makes that happen. the artemis 3 mission, they will put the first woman and the first person of colour on the moon. i'm guessing that those two people will become as famous as neil armstrong. put yourself in her shoes, even if it's not you. what would that represent for you? for humankind? you know, i think that moment will really represent how far we've come. you know, we did amazing things in the apollo era, but not everyone had the access to those opportunities. there have been women in the nasa astronaut office for a really long time doing really incredible things. so we'll be standing on those women's shoulders. the first woman to command a space shuttle, the first to do a spacewalk, the first to command the space station. and when we look around at the diversity of our office, it's really incredible,

like, who we have around us. it will be this incredible, historic, iconic moment that i think young women and girls around the planet will look to as an example of the fact that you can do anything if you work hard and are supported by the systems, the communities around you to have an opportunity to achieve those goals. you might have seen space food before. but what about space plants? if nasa wants its astronauts to stay out in space for longer, they'll need to be able to replenish their own food supply. this is nothing new. astronauts have been growing crops in space for the past a0 years. but there's still an awful lot

that scientists are trying to learn about space farming. we have things like radiation that we have to deal with. we also have issues with microgravity. plants have learned how to detect gravity with their roots and gravity—sensing organelles in the plants, and so they know how to use these cues. and without these cues, they have to re—adapt to this environment. so, without gravity, the next cue that they use is light. so how to go up and down, how to orient themselves is based on light now, cos they don't have gravity. water behaves very differently in microgravity. it has a high surface tension, so it likes to cling. and when the water clings to the roots, it prevents the roots from breathing. and so the plants can experience things like drought stress. they mayjust look green to you and me, but plants appear very different when viewed in the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum. and the scientists here are learning how their appearance changes under different types of stress. here in the plant processing area we're giving the plants a stressor. so in this case, we're reducing its watering.

because on the station we know it's difficult to water. and so we can identify through our imaging project, using infrared and visible light as well as fluorescence, that stress. we take all this data and to make that association we use machine learning. then we can associate the wavelengths that are most indicative of that stress and include them in a camera that would monitor the plants on station. this is where the plants live when they get up there. the veggie unit. this is how they grow stuff on the international space station? yeah. it's a simple led system as well as a bellows, so it's open to the crew environment. we have two of these and six plants each. so you can imagine we're not making a huge feast, but it's enough for a nice serving of lettuce. lovely salad. yeah. how excited are the astronauts

that they can now have salad and not just space food? they're very grateful. they can have salad, we've grown peppers as well, and they can even have flowers because we've grown zinnia on space. now, there is a knack to getting these seeds to sprout in space. the way you grow plants on the international space station is using this, which is a plant pillow. so this is the wick that sucks the moisture up. you plug your water source into here and you fill the bottom with soil, and then you get your tiny seeds, which stay in these polymer wrappers so they don't zip off and you lose them around the iss. and you pop it in here, and 28 days later... ..get yourself a lettuce. aside from the obvious benefits of creating a renewable food source, there are all sorts of other advantages to growing plants in space. gardening is very therapeutic. it's something that the

astronauts would say, "hey, you know, let me take care of something green." it makes them happy. plants produce oxygen and they recycle waste, they recycle water. all this fundamental stuff together will make them a very important organism to take with us. when we're living on the moon and when we're living on mars, what type of plants will we be eating? we would like to have things like nuts and citrus, but again, there's still so much we don't know about how those plants adapt to the environment. the current goal is to use hydroponic systems, which rely on water—based nutrient solutions instead of soil, which is heavy and expensive to transport. but in 2022, scientists showed that plants can grow in lunar soil, regolith. which kind of brings us full circle in a way, doesn't it? if we want to live on new worlds, we need to use the resources that they provide us instead of taking more from our home planet. this has been a fascinating trip to nasa, a place which will one day help us put builders, miners, and even farmers on the moon.

hello again. friday was a day of sunny spells and passing showers, as those shower clouds started to collapse down late in the day, we had some pretty still conditions there in the highlands. temperatures in scotland, northern ireland and wales generally quite close to average, but across large parts of england, in contrast, it was very mild, 17 degrees in east anglia, six above average for the time of year. now the showery conditions on friday were caused by this area of low pressure that's working out of the way now. it will be bringing some heavy snow to parts of sweden and norway into saturday.

get a quiet ridge of high pressure, a weather window, if you like, ahead of the next system that's working in off the atlantic. what all that means is over the next few hours, increasingly, the skies will tend to clear. and what that means is we'll see temperatures drop like a stone. and heading into the first part of saturday morning, there'll be quite a widespread frost, scotland, northern ireland, parts of northern england as well. a chilly start to the day then, but a lovely sunny morning through most of the uk on saturday. however, rain will quickly spread into northern ireland along with some strengthening winds, and we'll see some splashes of rain getting into wales and south west england. the rain probably not too heavy here through the course of the morning. across eastern england, eastern areas of scotland after that sunny but chilly start to the day, 0k, the weather will tend to turn a bit cloudier, but it should stay dry until after dark, really. temperatures 10—14 celsius. now for the second half of the weekend, we've got a band of rain that's going to come through saturday night.

the dregs of that still around across eastern england as we start the day on sunday. following that, we'll have south—westerly winds bringing mild air across the uk, and we'll be looking at some showery conditions moving back in. so, sunday weather—wise we start off with rain across east anglia, south east england. that clears away. sunny spells follow widely, but there will be some scattered showers, some of them turning quite heavy through the course of the afternoon. the south—westerly winds drudging up some mild air across all parts of the country. temperatures about 13 celsius in glasgow and belfast, but up to around 15—16 celsius in the warmest parts of england. beyond that, southerly winds are going to kind of dominate into the early part of the new week. however, with low pressure never far away, there will be some showers or longer spells of rain affecting western areas at times. however, it does stay mild, i3 celsius, the top temperature in edinburgh through monday and tuesday, and it stays mild, really, through the week in london with highs of around i6 celsius or so.

live from washington. this is a bbc news special on russia's presidential election. voting is under way in russia, in an election vladimir putin is bound to win. it's the first election since russia's invasion of ukraine, where people in occupied territories

will also cast their votes. and, with the result all but guaranteed — we'll take a look at what putin's hold on the country means for the people of russia and ukraine. hello, i'm caitriona perry. 2024 is the year of elections. more than half the world are taking to the polls with elections in more than 64 countries. many will be tightly fought. but this weekend's ballot in russia, will not. russians are now casting their ballots for president. 112 million people are eligible to vote — among them, residents of what russia's is claiming as its new territories in the east of ukraine. territories that ukraine is still fighting hard to gain back control of. ukraine and its allies say they will not recognise the election�*s results.

with vladimir putin's opponents in exile, in prison or —