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.

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.

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.