How do you explore a place where the Sun never shines? China’s space programme will soon embark on one of the most innovative lunar exploration missions in recent years.

We’ve known for nearly two decades that some form of water exists on the Moon. What we still don’t know is exactly how much accessible water ice lies inside permanently shadowed craters, how deeply it is buried or what form it takes.

What we do know is that accessing that water ice will be a real challenge: it is found at the bottom of deep, hard-to-traverse craters where the Sun never shines, remaining untouched for billions of years at temperatures well below –200°C. These are among the most valuable places on the Moon, but the hardest to reach and explore.

Lunar exploration has come a long way since the Soviet Union’s Luna-1 probe reached the Moon’s vicinity in January 1959. The Apollo missions and their successors showed the challenge is no longer simply to reach the Moon. It is to explore places human and conventional rovers cannot easily go, and ultimately determine whether the Moon itself can provide some of the resources that future explorers will need.

China has spent two decades building an increasingly ambitious lunar exploration programme, named after Chang’e, the ancient Chinese goddess of the Moon. The Chang’e-7 mission is expected to set course for our celestial neighbour later this month, although a recent failure involving a different Chinese rocket has introduced some uncertainty over the launch date. Here’s what makes this latest mission so interesting.

What is Chang’e-7 set to achieve?

The mission will test several novel approaches to lunar exploration. It will consist of an orbiter, a lander, a rover and a hopper.

In addition, the Queqiao-2 lunar relay satellite is already in place. Launched separately in March 2024, it subsequently supported the Chang’e-6 mission and will facilitate communication between Earth and the lunar surface during the Chang’e-7 mission.

We don’t know precisely where the mission will land, but a site on or near an illuminated ridge close to the Shackleton crater in the Lunar South Pole’s Aitken region is a prime candidate.

The hopper will be the mission’s real star. Unlike a wheeled rover, it’s designed to leap over broken terrain and descend into craters where sunlight never reaches, places conventional vehicles may simply be unable to enter.

Adding it to the mission makes sense, given the steep crater walls, broken terrain, permanent shadow and the need for autonomous navigation and communications.

Chinese scientists won’t be looking for signs of water; we already have compelling evidence for lunar polar water. The question at the mission’s core is where exactly that water is located, in what form and concentration, and whether it could realistically be accessed.

This marks a transition from simply exploring the Moon to determining whether its resources can actually be used.

How NASA is taking a different tack

Other nations are similarly interested in addressing that same question. The United States is pursuing the same longer-term objective of making sustained lunar operations possible. Although NASA will be confronted by the same physical problems, the American space agency has opted for a different solution.

Chang’e-7 is a coordinated state mission whose elements have been designed around a single, specific objective and which can use the already operational Queqiao-2 infrastructure.

NASA, by contrast, is deliberately trying something different: building a lunar marketplace through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme. The agency buys lunar delivery, mobility and technology services from companies that own and operate their own spacecraft.

NASA currently has 17 contracted deliveries carrying more than 60 instruments.

And the American effort has already yielded useful experience: Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission, Athena, attempted strikingly similar undertakings to Chang’e-7. It carried a drill and mass spectrometer looking for volatiles, a small hopping vehicle intended to explore difficult terrain and an experimental mobile communications network. However, the lander fell over at the landing site and was powered down just one day after arriving.

In essence, the destination dictates the problems; different space programmes are experimenting with different ways to resolve them.

Learning how to live on the Moon

Finding lunar resources is only the first step. Chang’e-7 will attempt to determine where useful lunar resources are found near the Moon’s South Pole and characterise their nature.

Chang’e-8, slated for potential launch in 2028, will move towards demonstrating how they might actually be used.

Crewed exploration will likely follow, culminating in the construction of the International Lunar Research Station, jointly led by the China National Space Administration and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.

On the other side of the Pacific, the CLPS will feed technology and science into the broader NASA-led Artemis programme, which the agency explicitly describes as laying the foundation for sustained lunar exploration.

Ultimately, the lunar South Pole doesn’t care which flag is on a spacecraft. Any explorer entering its permanently shadowed craters faces the same darkness, severe cold, broken terrain and communications problems.

Getting to the Moon was one of the great technological challenges of the 20th century. Learning how to live and work there may be one of the great challenges of the 21st.

Andy Burnham has spoken up for Britain’s nightlife, but he needs to think much bigger.

The new PM has already given Britain’s struggling nightlife businesses something to celebrate. His government cut business rates for pubs, clubs and music venues by 20%, part of a wider attempt to revive high streets and protect institutions that contribute to the social as well as economic life of communities. It is a welcome recognition of a sector under considerable pressure. But it could also be the beginning of something much wider.

Britain needs a national policy for what happens after dark. Even a night time economy minister. And that means thinking well beyond pubs and clubs.

Around £110 billion annually of economic activity takes place in Britain’s night-time economy. Britons work at night in more than eight million jobs – 27% of the UK workforce might be working night shifts of some sort. This is not just hospitality and entertainment workers, currently the focus of national debate.

The night is a labour market as much as it is a leisure economy. It includes nurses, carers and emergency workers; freight and logistics workers; cleaners, security guards and manufacturers; airport and transport workers; and the people maintaining the digital infrastructure on which an increasingly 24-hour society depends.

The question for Burnham, then, is whether his intervention can grow from support for nightlife businesses into a serious national night-time policy.

There is plenty Britain could do.

Transport policy could explicitly recognise the nocturnal workforce. Late-night buses and trains are often discussed in terms of getting revellers home safely. But they are also how a nurse gets to an early shift, a cleaner returns home at 2am or an airport worker reaches a terminal before the first morning flight.

Planning could take a similar 24-hour view. Housing, logistics, entertainment, hospitals and transport infrastructure frequently occupy the same urban spaces but operate according to very different clocks. Better night-time planning could anticipate those conflicts rather than leaving licensing authorities to resolve them afterwards. It could also deliver better workforce policy. Living wage discussions could embrace nocturnal implications of shift work.

Other governments are beginning to experiment with precisely this broader approach.

In Australia, New South Wales has developed a 24-hour economy strategy encompassing regulation, planning, precinct development, night-time workers, transport, safety and data. It has created a 24-hour economy office and commissioner, and a dedicated minister for the night-time economy. Queensland has legislated for its own night-life economy commissioner, following earlier work already in place in Canberra by the Australian Capital Territory authority.

This is no down-under exception, though Australia might be the most proactive at state level. Cities globally have experimented even more widely. Amsterdam has its night mayor, New York the Office of Nightlife, Paris a night council, and other cities have created night managers, commissioners, commissions and advisory boards. European cities have collaborated through the UrbACT Cities After Dark network in Europe. Put it simply, as we have shown in research time and time again, over the past two decades night-time governance has expanded significantly.

Britain has been part of this experimentation too. London, Glasgow, Bristol and others have developed night-time leadership and initiatives. But internationally there remains a striking gap: almost all this institutional innovation stops at city hall or, occasionally, state or regional government. Calls for attention and legislation for night work have been made persuasively, not least with events at the Houses of Parliament, and put forward by the Night Club project too, such as annual health checks and more research into the impacts of working after dark.

Urgent opportunity

That creates an urgent opportunity for Burnham’s government.

A national night-time strategy could establish some relatively simple principles: measure the night economy properly; require major transport and planning decisions to consider impacts; examine the health and conditions of night workers; coordinate national and local policy; and treat the night as an economic development issue extending far beyond hospitality.

And it needs someone in government responsible for making that happen.

Richard Parker, the West Midlands mayor, has already called on Burnham to appoint a minister for the night-time economy. The idea deserves serious consideration, and has been echoed by wider industry calls too. Such a minister could sit within the government’s business and growth operations, while working across transport, health, employment, culture, policing and local government. It could take a minister of state position within the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST), or even in the Treasury as a secretary alongside regional growth and productivity, or in the Cabinet Office in a similar set up to a cross-cutting minister for cities established under the Tories and Liberal Democrats.

This would not be a minister for pubs. It would effectively be a minister for all of the nightlife: responsible for asking what government policies mean during the hours when Whitehall traditionally assumes Britain is asleep. The urgency is there, as nightlife bears the brunt of increasingly impactful climate hazards, imposed on a nocturnal workforce that is typically precarious, migrant, affected by significant health issues and underpaid.

Burnham’s new No 10 North makes this particularly timely. If its purpose is to rethink how central government relates to places, it should also rethink what time of the day government sees them.

Britain helped pioneer modern thinking about the night-time economy. It could now become the first country to turn decades of local experimentation into a genuinely national approach. Cutting business rates for pubs and clubs is a good start. The bigger opportunity is recognising that Britain’s economy, infrastructure and public services do not stop at 5pm. Neither should the way they are governed.

Brian Langrin has taken over as governor of the Bank of Jamaica today (August 19).

In announcing the appointment on August 17, the country’s finance minister Fayval Williams said Langrin was a “forward-looking leader whose experience spans Jamaica, the Caribbean and the wider international development community”.

“His deep understanding of monetary policy, financial stability, innovation, regional partnerships and international co-operation will serve Jamaica well as we navigate a rapidly changing

Quantum computers are expected to transform many facets of science and industry over the next decade or so – but it’s very hard for most potential users to get their hands on one to find out what they can actually do with it. A new open-access facility opened in Queensland this week aims to change that.

The A$10.5 million National Quantum Computing Testbed is located at the University of Queensland and is a collaborative effort led by research teams from the university and CSIRO.

It will allow researchers from academia and industry to test new ideas on a real quantum processor in an affordable and fully open access environment. As such, it removes many of the barriers to innovation in this rapidly developing field.

From bits to qubits

Everyday classical computing, like the kind that runs our laptops or mobile phones, stores and processes data in the forms of bits. These are are binary numbers – for example, combinations of 0s and 1s. Each bit can be either 0 or 1 at any given time.

Quantum computing, however, stores and processes information as quantum bits – otherwise known as qubits. These exploit special properties of quantum physics to create what are known as “superposition” states.

At any instant each qubit can be 0 or 1, like a traditional bit – or it can be any combination of both 0 and 1 simultaneously, such as 30% 0 and 70% 1.

This will allow quantum computers to process certain kinds of very large datasets extremely fast. In turn, they could generate new discoveries which address challenging problems across various fields, from medicine and renewable energy to cybersecurity and urban design.

A quantum computing testbed for everyone

If you want to use a quantum computer today, you can do it through commercial cloud services which provide access via the internet. These include IBM Quantum Experience and AWS Braket.

These services are expensive. And because users can only send inputs and receive outputs, they get a limited understanding of how a quantum processor is operating. If something goes wrong, they may not know why.

This existing model limits the development and testing of new and creative ideas which are crucial for the emerging quantum computing industry. The absence of an openly available and easily accessible quantum computing facility has been a serious hurdle for the Australian industry and research communities.

The newly launched testbed facility is a first step in bridging the gap between early-stage innovation and commercial-scale opportunities. It will initially consist of a 5-qubit superconducting chip, with potential for upgrade in future. It’s integrated with state-of-the-art quantum software and simulation capabilities.

Being open access, the facility will provide some hands-on options to a wide range of end users. For example, university researchers will have access to low-level hardware to perform scientific experiments. Industry engineers will also have access to high-level software to test ideas for practical applications.

A global race

Governments around the world and large industry players are racing to develop a useful quantum processor.

The current generation of quantum computers offer only limited capabilities. This is due to their small number of qubits and relatively high noise levels, which reduce their capability to accurately perform useful calculations.

However, quantum processor technologies have seen a remarkable progress in the past few years. Large companies such as IBM and Google, as well as start-ups such as PsiQuantum and Diraq, have ambitious plans to build useful quantum computers within the next decade.

Building a large-scale quantum computer capable of solving useful practical problems may take a few more years. But testbed facilities, like the one launched in Queensland this week, can accelerate the development by enabling deeper understanding of their operation.