China unveiled a rock sample from the moon’s far side to a space summit overshadowed by shifting political and commercial rivalries on Monday, with traditional space power Russia absent from the Milan gathering amid tensions with the West.

The International Astronautical Congress (IAC) has been a venue since 1950 for scientists, engineers, companies and politicians of space-faring nations to discuss cooperation, even during the Cold War.

At the latest edition in Milan, the China National Space Administration showcased a rock sample that its Chang’e 6 rover fetched from the moon’s far side – the first such exploit and widely seen as evidence of Beijing’s rising space-power status.

A Chinese official whisked a red blanket off a glass case containing the tiny lunar fragment at a ceremony witnessed by space agency chiefs of Europe, the United States, Japan and elsewhere.

For its part, NASA was displaying rocks that its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft retrieved from the Bennu asteroid in 2023.

“This is the most exciting time in space since the Apollo era in the 1960s,” Clay Mowry, president of the 77-nation International Astronautical Federation, the non-profit that organises the annual congress, told Reuters.

Talks were expected to touch heavily on lunar exploration, NASA’s growing coalition under its Artemis moon programme and Europe’s pressing need for more sovereign access to space.

A record 7,197 technical abstracts have been submitted.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson was expected to use the event to rally support for plans to tap private companies to replace the aging International Space Station after its 2030 retirement.

The orbiting science laboratory, now more than two decades old, has been a symbol of space diplomacy led primarily by the US and Russia, despite conflicts on Earth.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, a storied power now isolated from the West after Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has no official presence at this year’s event, however.

NASA has been investing billions of dollars in its Artemis moonshot but is also keen on maintaining a presence in low-Earth orbit to compete with China’s Tiangong space station, which has continuously housed Chinese astronauts for three years.

The U.S. and China are also racing to land the first humans on the moon since the last American Apollo mission in 1972. Both are aggressively courting partner countries and leaning heavily on private companies for their moon programmes, shaping the space objectives of smaller space agencies.

EUROPE’S PRIORITIES

The Oct 14-18 event is the largest in the space calendar and comes as host nation Italy draws up a framework establishing local rules for private investment. It wants similar clarity at a European level, officials said.

A surge in space traffic led by fast-growing satellite constellations like Starlink has raised concerns about space debris collisions and a growing field of other space junk.

“These rules give the national ecosystem guidance on how to reach our objectives and grant the use of space in a sustainable and useful way,” Italy’s Industry Minister Adolfo Urso said.

Musk’s SpaceX is relied upon by much of the Western world for accessing space, driving countries – including the US – to encourage new space upstarts that can offer more affordable rockets. SpaceX’s growing Starlink internet network has made the company the world’s largest satellite operator.

After a year-long hiatus, Europe regained uncrewed access to orbit with the test flight of its Ariane 6 launcher in July.

Europe’s satellite manufacturing industry is facing growing pressures, however, as a once-thriving market for its large, bespoke geostationary satellites shifts toward lower orbit.

Industry sources say the three companies are involved in preliminary talks about combining their satellite activities, but much will depend on the attitude of a new European Commission, which blocked past efforts to forge a single player.
 

Britain said on Monday that US firms ServiceNow, CyrusOne, CloudHQ and CoreWeave would invest a combined 6.3 billion pounds ($8.2 billion) in UK data centre technology.

The announcement comes as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosts global business leaders at a major investment summit, in London. 

As Elon Musk’s X battles to keep users in key markets, several British police forces are scaling back their presence on the global social media platform and one has abandoned it, reflecting concern about its role in promoting extremist views.

X, formerly Twitter, was used to spread disinformation this summer that sparked riots across Britain, and has reinstated British-based accounts that had been banned for extremist content. Critics say Musk’s hands-off approach has allowed lies and hate speech to spread.

Reuters contacted all 45 territorial police forces and British Transport Police by email. Of the 33 to give details about their policy, 10 forces who collectively police nearly 13 million people said they were actively reviewing their presence on X, while 13 said they frequently reviewed all their social media platforms.

X has been a key communications channel for the British government, public services and even the royal family for more than 10 years. For emergency services, its succinct format and wide reach are effective in alerting users to everything from civil emergencies to missing people or road closures. 

Yet of these 23 forces, six said they were cutting their presence to just one or two X accounts. One, North Wales Police, serving nearly 700,000 residents, stopped using X completely in August.

“We … felt that the platform was no longer consistent with our values and therefore we have withdrawn our use of it,” Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman said, adding that they would continue to monitor and review alternative platforms.

Also in Wales, Gwent Police said they were reviewing X because of questions about “the tone of the platform and whether that is the right place to reach our communities”. All Gwent’s individual officer accounts have been removed.

West Yorkshire Police said they were seeking to understand whether X would still help them reach their target audience and build trust in the community. X did not respond to a request for comment.

RIOTS BASED ON DISINFORMATION PROMPT SCRUTINY OF X

The role of X and other platforms came under the spotlight in Britain this year when far-right and racist violence broke out after online posts falsely claimed that an attack in the northern English town of Southport, where three young girls were killed, was the work of an Islamist migrant.

Musk said on X that “civil war” was inevitable. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a British anti-Muslim activist known as Tommy Robinson, thanked Musk for giving him the opportunity on X to “push back on mainstream media lies and propaganda”.

Musk has also backed right-wing activists who say there has been “two-tier policing” in Britain: police supposedly showing leniency to ethnic minority and left-wing protesters while punishing right-wing protesters swiftly.

Senior police officers say the idea is baseless and that it was in the public interest to clamp down swiftly on violent disorder. The head of London’s Metropolitan Police has said the accusation puts officers at risk. None of the police forces said their reviews were directly linked to the summer riots.

But Paul Reilly, senior lecturer in communications, media and democracy at the University of Glasgow, said many users had left X “in response to the volumes of hate speech, disinformation, and of course, Elon Musk’s use of it too”.

“That leads to organisations who are looking to reach those audiences moving with them to different platforms.”

CHARITABLE, HEALTH AND EDUCATION BODIES DROP X

Of 32 ambulance and fire services surveyed by Reuters, nine said they had actively reviewed their presence on X. England’s North East Ambulance Service announced in July that it had stopped posting there.

Individual forces within the emergency services said they were weighing up whether the platform’s usefulness still justified their association with it. In recent months, some British charities, health and educational establishments have said they will no longer post to X.

Musk has said he is defending freedom of speech and has likened Britain’s anti-hate-speech laws to Soviet censorship. New online safety laws will soon require tech firms to remove illegal content from their platforms, including hate speech.

Digital analytics company Similarweb estimates that the number of iOS and Android app users of X in Britain fell in September by 17.7% in the space of a year to 10.4 million. Two years ago it was 15 million. Similarweb also estimated a 7.9% drop in the United States over the last year.

Britain’s government continues to post on X but does not use it for paid communications. It does, however, advertise on Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, a government source told Reuters.

Adam Hadley, executive director of the U.N.-backed Tech Against Terrorism initiative, said authorities should choose their social media carefully. “Platforms are kind of political: they have identities, and therefore it’s important where they post.”