American pop artist Jeff Koons is to send sculptures to the Moon later this year on a spacecraft blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, his gallery said Tuesday.

Koons, one of the most celebrated and expensive living artists, is famed for kitsch pieces such as "Ballon Dog" and "Rabbit," and his work is exhibited in galleries around the world.

His latest project "Moon Phases" consists of physical sculptures that will be left permanently on the lunar surface in a transparent, thermally coated miniature satellite, the Pace Gallery in New York said.

Koons will also make unique digital versions of the sculptures—marking his entry into the lucrative new world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

The sculptures will travel on the "Nova-C Lunar Lander," designed by private company Intuitive Machines, and will be placed on the surface of the Moon in the Oceanus Procellarum.

SpaceX has enjoyed a lot of wins in the past few years. In addition to successfully glide-testing and landing multiple Starship prototypes, they've rolled out its first Super Heavy boosters, test-fired the new Raptor Vacuum engines, and assembled the "Mechazilla" launch tower at Boca Chica, Texas. They also unveiled the first fully-furbished orbital test vehicle (SN20) that was stacked with a first stage booster for the first time on its launch pad.

Given the prodigious rate of progress, few were surprised when Musk announced that the first orbital flight test could take place as soon as January 2022. Unfortunately, this date had to be pushed back to an environmental assessment and the usual bureaucratic rigmarole. However, Musk recently announced on Twitter that in light of his company's success with the new Raptor engines, they could be ready to conduct the long-awaited orbital test flight this May.

The tweet was posted on Monday, March 21st, in response to a story by Michael Sheetz, a space reporter with CNBC.

A cutting-edge nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) rocket engine using what's called centrifugal liquid fuel bubble-through could one day be a ticket for NASA to go directly into deep space.

Under an NTP research contract for the Space Nuclear Propulsion Project Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System, is leading a collaboration of universities across the nation including the University of Rhode Island (URI), Drexel University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Pennsylvania State University and the University of Michigan (U-M) to research the concept.

It takes expensive tools to learn about the universe, but projects like the Very Large Array for radio astronomy in New Mexico and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which orbits Earth, have pushed scientific knowledge forward in ways that would not have been possible without these instruments. Every 10 years, astronomers and astrophysicists outline priorities for the hardware they need in the decadal survey on astronomy and astrophysics.