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, Reuters reported.

“Without clear schedule certainty in the near-term, it is with a heavy heart that Maezawa made the unavoidable decision to cancel the project,” it said. “To all who have supported this project and looked forward to this endeavor, we sincerely appreciate it and apologize for this outcome.”

In a separate post on the mission website, Maezawa suggested the cause of the cancellation was uncertainty over the project development, saying he signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption the launch would come by the end of 2023.

“It’s a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch,” Maezawa said.

“I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX named Maezawa, the colourful founder of Japanese online fashion store Zozo Inc (3092.T) its first private passenger in 2018.

Three years later he was the first private passenger to visit the International Space Station in more than a decade, launching on a Soyuz rocket.

In 2022, Maezawa announced that K-pop star TOP and DJ Steve Aoki would be among the eight crew members he planned to take on the dearMoon mission.

In November he said the flyby mission would be delayed until this year or later.

TikTok plans to start labelling images and video uploaded to its video-sharing service that have been generated using artificial intelligence, it said on Thursday, using a digital watermark known as Content Credentials, Reuters reported.

Researchers have expressed concern that AI-generated content could be used to interfere with U.S. elections this fall, and TikTok was already among a group of 20 tech companies that earlier this year signed an accord pledging to fight it.

The company already labels AI-generated content made with tools inside the app, but the latest move would apply a label to videos and images generated outside of the service.

“We also have policies that prohibit realistic AI that is not labeled, so if realistic AI (generated contents) appears on the platform, then we will remove it as violating our community guidelines,” Adam Presser, head of operations and trust and safety at TikTok, said in an interview.

The Content Credentials technology was spearheaded by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a group co-founded by Adobe (ADBE.O), opens new tab, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and others, but is open for other companies to use, read the report.

It has already been adopted by the likes of ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

YouTube, owned by Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google, and Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab, which owns Instagram and Facebook, have also said they plan to use Content Credentials.

For the system to work, both the maker of the generative AI tool used to make content and the platform used to distribute the contents must both agree to use the industry standard.

When a person uses OpenAI’s Dall-E tool to generate an image, for example, OpenAI attaches a watermark to the resulting image and adds data to the file that can later indicate whether it has been tampered with, Reuters reported.

If that marked image is then uploaded to TikTok, it will be automatically labeled as AI-generated.

TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, has 170 million users in the U.S., which recently passed a law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban. TikTok and ByteDance have sued to block the law, arguing it violates the First Amendment.

China on Friday launched an uncrewed spacecraft on a nearly two-month mission to retrieve rocks and soil from the far side of the moon, the first country to make such an ambitious attempt.

The Long March-5, China’s largest rocket, blasted off at 5:27 p.m. Beijing time (0927 GMT) from Wenchang Space Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan with the more than 8 metric ton Chang’e-6 probe.

Chang’e-6 is tasked with landing in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon, which perpetually faces away from the Earth, after which it will retrieve and return samples.

The launch marks another milestone in China’s lunar and space exploration programme.

“It is a bit of a mystery to us how China has been able to develop such an ambitious and successful programme in such a short time,” said Pierre-Yves Meslin, a French researcher working on one of the scientific objectives of the Chang’e-6 mission.

In 2018, Chang’e-4 gave China its first unmanned moon landing, also on the far side. In 2020, Chang’e-5 marked the first time humans retrieved lunar samples in 44 years, and Chang’e-6 could make China the first country to retrieve samples from the moon’s “hidden” side.

FOREIGN PAYLOADS

The launch was attended by scientists, diplomats and space agency officials from France, Italy, Pakistan, and the European Space Agency, all of which have moon-studying payloads aboard Chang’e-6.

But no U.S. organisations applied to get a payload spot, according to Ge Ping, deputy director of the China National Space Administration’s (CNSA) Lunar Exploration and Space Program.

China is banned by U.S. law from any collaboration with the U.S. space agency, NASA.

“The far side of the moon has a mystique perhaps because we literally can’t see it, we have never seen it apart from with robotic probes or the very few number of humans that have been around the other side,” said Neil Melville-Kenney, a technical officer at ESA working with Chinese researchers on one of the Chang’e-6 payloads.

After the probe separates from the rocket, it will take four to five days to reach the moon’s orbit. In early June a few weeks later, it will land.

Once on the moon, the probe will spend two days digging up 2 kilogrammes (4.4 lb) of samples before returning to Earth, where it is expected to land in Inner Mongolia.

The window for the probe to collect samples on the far side is 14 hours, compared to 21 hours for the near side.

The samples brought back by Chang’e-5 allowed Chinese scientists to uncover new details about the moon, including more accurately dating the timespan of volcanic activity on the moon, as well as a new mineral.

Ge said the scientific value of Chang’e-6 lay in the geological age of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, which his team estimated was about 4 billion years, much older than the samples previously brought back by the Soviet Union and the United States, which were about 3 billion years old, as well as the 2-billion-year-old samples from Chang’e-5.

LUNAR BASE

Besides uncovering new information about the celestial body closest to Earth, Chang’e-6 is part of a long-term project to build a permanent research station on the moon: the China and Russia-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

The construction of such a station would provide an outpost for China and its partners to pursue deep space exploration.

“We know that the moon may have resources that could become useful in the future, so the European Space Agency, NASA, the Chinese agency and others around the world are going to the moon,” said James Carpenter, head of the ESA’s lunar science office.

“Part of the rationale is to understand those resources,” Carpenter said.

Wu Weiren, chief designer of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Project, speaking at the 2024 China Space Conference last month, said a “basic model” of the ILRS would be built by 2035.

(Reuters)