Two moon landers, one from Japan's ispace and another from U.S. space firm Firefly, began their journeys into space on Wednesday with SpaceX's unusual double moonshot launch, underscoring the global rush to examine the lunar surface.

EPIC (Earth image) The ispace mission will launch ‘Hakuto-R Mission 2’ on a four-and-a-half month journey to the lunar surface Japanese lander heads to the Moon About one month after launch Complete a lunar flyby 4.

The two landers rocketed away in the middle of the night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the latest in a stream of private spacecraft aiming for the moon.