>China
As if China isn’t enough of a juggernaut on Earth, their fledgling space program is also of greater and greater interest to the rest of the world.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin recently announced that he will go to China later in the year to open discussion with the China National Space Administration, according to space.com. Meanwhile, a recent NASA-sponsored workshop in Washington, DC, on Moon exploration found the Chinese notably absent, attending only the opening day and skipping the discussion and brainstorming sections of the event.
With several manned spaceflights under their belt, China is expected to try their first spacewalk as part of the Shenzhou 7 mission in 2008.

The Moon has also been oft-cited as a Chinese goal.

>Moon prize
Space.com reports that NASA and the X Prize foundation have teamed up to offer new challenge called the Lunar Lander Analog Challenge.

The challenge is to have competing teams demonstrating their vehicle’s ability to launch vertically, hover in mid-air, then land on a target nearby.
Of the $2.5 million prize, NASA is putting up a cool $2 million.

>Indian carry
Chandrayaan-1, the 2007-2008 Indian lunar mission, will carry two NASA scientific devices designed to find minerals and ice on the lunar surface, according to a recent Associated Press report.
The arrangement calls for two NASA payloads to be carried to the moon by a 1,160-pound (525-kilogram) spacecraft.

One of the devices will map ice deposits in the moon’s polar regions, ahile the other instrument will asses mineral resources, said U.S. Embassy spokesman David Kennedy in the article.
Chandrayaan-1 will also carry three scientific instruments from European research centers.