Global Space Race: Cancellations, Delays, and Historic Milestones

This summary covers major updates in the world of science and space exploration: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa cancels his moon flyby mission, Boeing's Starliner capsule faces another launch delay, China successfully lands on the moon's far side, and a humble fern from New Caledonia boasts the world's largest genome.

Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

Japanese billionaire Maezawa cancels moon flyby mission

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa cancelled his "dearMoon" mission, which the project said would have been the first private flight around the moon, the mission announced on Saturday. The team had originally aimed to make the circumlunar flight with celebrities on board by the end of last year but that became "unfeasible", the mission said in a statement on its website.

Boeing Starliner capsule's first crewed test flight postponed minutes before launch

A second attempt at launching Boeing's new Starliner space capsule on its inaugural test flight with NASA astronauts on board was automatically halted with minutes to go before liftoff by a computer-abort system, mission officials said. The scrubbed launch, capping a string of 11th-hour technical issues that ground teams worked through and resolved earlier in the countdown, adds another indefinite delay for the highly anticipated and much-delayed test flight.

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

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.

Humble fern from New Caledonia boasts world's largest genome

You thought the living organism with ;/"he largest genome might be the blue whale, an African elephant or perhaps a giant redwood tree? Not even close. A human being? Wrong again. That honor instead goes to a little fern that grows in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean. New research shows that this fork fern species, called Tmesipteris oblanceolata, has a genome - all the genetic information of an organism - that is 7% larger than that of the previous record-holder, the Japanese flowering plant Paris japonica, and more than 50 times the size of the human genome.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)