Charlie Duke is part of a tiny fraternity that's getting even smaller: People who walked on the moon.

Duke, 86, visited his Apollo 16 spaceship on Wednesday at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center to mark the 50th anniversary of his one and only trip to the lunar surface.

Even during times of conflict on the ground, space has historically been an arena of collaboration among nations. But trends in the past decade suggest that the nature of cooperation in space is shifting, and fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine has highlighted these changes.

I'm an international relations scholar who studies power distributions in space—who the main players are, what capabilities they possess and whom they decide to cooperate with. Some scholars predict a future in which single states pursue various levels of dominance, while others foresee a scenario in which commercial entities bring nations together.

If man's best friend is a dog, then in the future astronauts' closest companions might well be rovers. A technique allowing astronauts in orbit to control rovers exploring planetary surfaces has been developed by a research team from ESA, the German Aerospace Center DLR and European academia and industry, culminating in an Earth-based rover session commanded from the International Space Station. A paper published in the Science Robotics journal this week details their results.

"This is the first time that an astronaut in space managed to control a robotic system on the ground in such an immersive, intuitive manner," comments Aaron Pereira of DLR.

"Our 6 degree of freedom control interface incorporates force feedback so that the astronaut can experience just what the rover feels, even down to the weight and cohesion of the rocks it touches. What this does is help compensate for any limitations of bandwidth, poor lighting or signal delay to give a real sense of immersion—meaning the astronaut feels as though they are there at the scene."

Let the robots take the strain