The FAA recently approved plans by the company “Moon Express” to send the MX-1E probe to the lunar surface. This has garnered some press, a lot of it focused on plans to land human ashes on the moon (with some outlets being spectacularly wrong about some aspects of human ashes in space, such as claiming that this will be the first time ashes have been launched into space). Moon Express is claiming that once proven, they will be able to send missions to the moon for $10 million a pop. Included here is requisite verbiage about mining helium 3 from the moon for fusion reactors, though that of course remains a market without a market.
Moon Express has apparently contracted with Rocket Lab to launch their small lunar lander atop Rocket Lab’s “Electron” launch vehicle. If, like me, you reacted to that sentence with “Who? What?” it’s because Rocket Lab, a New Zealand company, hasn’t actually launched one of their Electrons yet. Electron *looks* like a smaller Falcon 9 made out of carbon fiber.