Controlling a lander behind the moon is like flying a drone from behind a brick wall thousands of miles thick. This episode explains how the China National Space Administration's Chang'e 4 mission solved that radio blackout to make the first-ever soft landing on the lunar far side on January 3, 2019, inside the Von Karman crater within the South Pole-Aitken Basin, an impact scar roughly 13 kilometers deep that likely exposed the moon's mantle.

We cover tidal locking and why the far side is not the dark side, the Queqiao relay satellite parked in a halo orbit around the Earth-moon L2 point, the X-band and S-band communication chain, and the Yutu-2 rover, a repurposed Chang'e 3 backup redesigned to survive razor-sharp lunar dust that went on to break the Soviet Lunokhod 1 longevity record. The episode also explores the olivine and pyroxene ma ...