Russia and China agreed Tuesday to build a lunar space station, as Moscow seeks to modernise its extraterrestrial might and catch up with the United States in the space race.

Russia, which sent the first man into space during the Soviet Union, has been lagging behind Washington and Beijing in the exploration of the Moon and Mars.

Russia's space agency Roscosmos said in a statement that a memorandum was signed by its head Dmitry Rogozin and Zhang Kejian of China's National Space Administration (CNSA).

It said the lunar station will be designed as a "complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon".

It would be available for use by other interested countries and international partners, the statement said, without details about the completion date.

Despite its former Soviet glory, Russia's space sector has suffered greatly in recent years from a lack of financing and corruption.

Moscow and Washington are collaborating in the space sector—one of the few areas of cooperation left between the Cold War rivals.

Russia last year lost its monopoly for manned flights to the International Space Station (ISS) after the first succesful mission of the US company Space X.

Though Moscow was once at the forefront of space travel—it sent the first man into space—its cosmic ambitions have dimmed thanks to poor financing and endemic corruption.

It has been eclipsed by China and the United States, which have both clocked major wins in space exploration and research in recent years.

The Russian space agency Roscomos said in a statement that it had signed an agreement with China's National Space Administration (CNSA) to develop a "complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon".

The CNSA, for its part, said that the project was "open to all interested countries and international partners" in what experts said would be China's biggest international space cooperation project to date.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in France and one in Japan has found that an achondrite found in Algeria (in the Saharan desert) last year dates back to just 2 million years after the birth of the solar system. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of the rock and what they learned about it.

Achondrites are types of meteorites that were once part of a protoplanet. To reach Earth, the planet to which they once belonged would have been shattered during a collision with another body.

A new study that characterizes the climate of Mars over the planet's lifetime reveals that in its earliest history it was periodically warmed due to the input of greenhouse gases derived from volcanism and meteorites, yet remained relatively cold in the intervening periods, thus providing opportunities and challenges for any microbial life form that may have been emerging on the Red Planet. The study involved a national team of scientists that included Joel Hurowitz, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University. The findings are detailed in a paper published in Nature Geoscience.

mprovising new stuff from the stuff you have is part of an astronaut's job description—think Apollo 13's crew refitting CO₂ filters to save their own lives, or stranded Mark Watney in The Martian, feeding himself on the Red Planet. Now plans are underway to manufacture items in orbit, and ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst argues this could make a big difference to living and working in space.

Alexander—who has spent just under a year in orbit, becoming the second European to command the International Space Station (ISS) – spoke at ESA's Workshop on Advanced Manufacturing, which included a special session on out-of-Earth manufacturing.

While plastic-producing 3D printers have already reached space, the virtual event heard how ESA will fly the first metal 3D printer in 2022, and researchers are also planning large-scale manufacturing such as spacecraft printing their own antennas or solar arrays after launch.