Paris and Washington pledged Wednesday to reenforce their cooperation in space, particularly on exploration and climate, during a visit by France's Emmanuel Macron to NASA headquarters alongside US Vice President Kamala Harris.

The French president, on a state visit to the United States, highlighted the American lunar program Artemis, whose first uncrewed test mission launched in mid-November with participation of the European Space Agency (ESA).

"We are very keen" to participate, he told Harris, adding with a smile: "It's very important for us, as long as you can propose a French leader to fly to the Moon quite rapidly," he said, in a nod to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who joined Macron for the NASA visit.

SpaceX on Wednesday postponed the launch of the world's first private lander to the Moon, a mission undertaken by Japanese firm ispace.

A Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to blast off at 3:37 am (0837 GMT) on Thursday from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida, but SpaceX said further checks on the vehicle had led to a delay.

"After further inspections of the launch vehicle and data review, we're standing down from tomorrow's launch of @ispace_inc's HAKUTO-R Mission 1; a new target launch date will be shared once confirmed," the firm tweeted.

Until now, only the United States, Russia and China have managed to put a robot on the lunar surface.

The mission by ispace is the first of a program called Hakuto-R.

The lander would touch down around April 2023 on the visible side of the Moon, in the Atlas crater, according to a company statement.

The delay came after the launch had already been postponed by a day due to the need for additional pre-flight checks, SpaceX and ispace said on Wednesday.

Measuring just over 2 by 2.5 meters, the lander carries on board a 10-kilogram rover named Rashid, built by the United Arab Emirates.

Graphene Flagship Partners University of Cambridge (U.K.) and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium) paired up with the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC, United Arab Emirates), and the European Space Agency (ESA) to test graphene on the moon. This joint effort sees the involvement of many international partners, such as Airbus Defense and Space, Khalifa University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Technische Universität Dortmund, University of Oslo, and Tohoku University.

The Rashid rover is planned to be launched on December 1, 2022 from Cape Canaveral in Florida and will land on a geologically rich and, as yet, only remotely explored area on the moon's nearside—the side that always faces the Earth. During one lunar day, equivalent to approximately 14 days on Earth, Rashid will move on the lunar surface investigating interesting geological features.

The Rashid rover wheels will be used for repeated exposure of different materials to the lunar surface. As part of this Material Adhesion and abrasion Detection experiment, graphene-based composites on the rover wheels will be used to understand if they can protect spacecraft against the harsh conditions on the moon, and especially against regolith (also known as "lunar dust").

NASA is canceling a planned satellite that was going to intensely monitor greenhouse gases over the Americas because it got too costly and complicated.

But the space agency said it will still be watching human-caused carbon pollution but in different ways.

NASA on Tuesday announced that its GeoCarb mission, which was supposed to be a low-cost satellite to monitor carbon dioxide, methane and how plant life changes over North and South America, was being killed because of cost overruns.

When it was announced six years ago, it was supposed to cost $166 million, but the latest NASA figures show costs would balloon to more than $600 million and it was years late, according to NASA Earth Sciences Director Karen St. Germain.

Unlike other satellites that monitor greenhouse gases from low Earth orbit and get different parts of the globe in a big picture, GeoCarb was supposed to be at a much higher altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) from one fixed place in orbit and focus intently on North and South America. That different and further perspective proved too difficult and costly to get done on budget and on time, St.