When astronauts return to the moon in the next few years, the plan is to have them stay for good while establishing a permanent outpost on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor. Like all space missions, a lunar outpost will require fuel for long-term sustainability, but would it be better to mine fuel on the moon or get fuel resupply from the Earth? This is what a team of researchers led by Bocconi University in Italy hope to address as they addressed the best option in terms of deriving fuel from either the Earth or the moon.

Mattia Pianorsi, who is a junior researcher of the Space Economy Laboratory at the SDA Boccini School of Management and a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of St. Gallen, recently told Universe Today the main objective of the study was to ascertain the economic and technical feasibility of mining fuel from the moon's water ice deposits or from the Earth.

Both options would use an orbiting depot (OD) which Pianorsi says would be used "as a distribution channel for satellites as well as rockets in space.

Space travel has brought us to our next-door neighbor, the moon, and to the depths of our larger solar community inhabited by giants such as Saturn and Jupiter.

In 1982, Voyager 2 whisked past Uranus closer than any other spacecraft has since, and now is sailing—46 years after its launch—through the constellation of Pavo, some 179 light years from Earth.

But there have been few comparable satellite missions in recent years. Cost is the main obstacle, but time frame is also a factor. The design for such long journeys takes years to calculate, and planning and construction of a space vehicle would take about a decade. Factoring in the time a satellite would require to reach distant targets means our next peek into the stars will likely not come any time soon.

A team of scientists led by Slava Turyshev of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, which launched the Voyager satellites back in 1977, is anxious to get space exploration back on track. The team proposes a novel means of travel that could get us to the stars faster and cheaper.

SpaceX on Monday postponed the first test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, designed to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars and beyond.

Liftoff of the giant rocket was called off just minutes ahead of the scheduled launch time because of a pressurization issue in the booster stage, SpaceX officials said.

SpaceX said the launch will be delayed for at least 48 hours.

Starship had been scheduled to blast off at 8:20 am Central Time (1320 GMT) from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.

The US space agency NASA has picked the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025—a mission known as Artemis III—for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is about to take its most daring leap yet with a round-the-world test flight of its mammoth Starship.

It's the biggest and mightiest rocket ever built, with the lofty goals of ferrying people to the moon and Mars.

Jutting almost 400 feet (120 meters) into the South Texas sky, Starship could blast off as early as Monday, with no one aboard. Musk's company got the OK from the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday.

It will be the first launch with Starship's two sections together. Early versions of the sci-fi-looking upper stage rocketed several miles into the stratosphere a few years back, crashing four times before finally landing upright in 2021.