Historical Moon landings - good to know for when silver finally takes off

I thought this was pretty cool:



Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualizing-all-attempted-and-successful-moon-landings/


I grew up literally minutes away from the Saturn V rocket featured in that video at the Johnson Space Center. It's now part of a tourist attraction called Space Center Houston which is pretty cool if you ever find your way down here. They have a tour where you can visit the actual mission control room where the Apollo missions were conducted (the room is much smaller than you would expect from watching Hollywood movies).

China lands on moon's far side in historic sample-retrieval mission​

BEIJING, June 2 (Reuters) - China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Sunday, overcoming a key hurdle in its landmark mission to retrieve the world's first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere.

The landing elevates China's space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the United States are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.

The Chang'e-6 craft, equipped with an array of tools and its own launcher, touched down in a gigantic impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon's space-facing side at 6:23 a.m. Beijing time (2223 GMT), the China National Space Administration said.

The mission "involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty", the agency said in a statement, opens new tab on its website. "The payloads carried by the Chang'e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions."

More:

I wonder how they maintained contact/control of the uncrewed spacecraft without line of sight?

Perhaps it’s fully automated with a dash of AI to manage things

“Open the pod bay door HAL “

But the question remains, how do they even know it’s landed intact ?

Would they be able to use the recent Indian lander as a relay ?
Sorry South Pole network not available right now. Our team are working on it and hope to get you reconnected as quickly as possible

It sounds like they used some relays of some kind:

... "Landing on the far side of the moon is very difficult because you don’t have line-of-sight communications, you’re relying on a lot of links in the chain to control what is going on, or you have to automate what is going on," ...

Click to expand...

They can run a satellite around the moon like earth. I heard they used drill bits from Harbor Freight to manufacture the craft.

Chinese lunar lander has collected rocks and returned to lunar orbit: