Crewed lunar flights get the coverage. The work that determines whether anyone can stay there is being done by robots, and there are a lot of them scheduled.
More than twenty landings are planned through 2029, using a mix of agency missions and commercial landers, each testing something specific.
What they are actually testing
Precision landing, first. Setting down within tens of metres of a chosen point rather than within kilometres. That matters because the interesting locations are near permanently shadowed craters, and a spacecraft that lands imprecisely near a crater rim is a spacecraft that lands somewhere useless.
Communications, second. There is no infrastructure. Every mission currently talks directly to Earth, which does not work on the far side and does not scale to many simultaneous users.
Power, third, and this is the hard one.
The lunar night problem
A lunar day is roughly a month long, which means about fourteen Earth days of darkness at a time. Temperatures fall to well below minus one hundred and fifty degrees.
Solar power produces nothing during that period, and batteries large enough to carry equipment through two weeks of dark and extreme cold are heavy. Most landers so far have simply not survived their first night.
Solving this is the difference between visiting and staying, and it is why several upcoming missions carry nuclear power sources or novel thermal designs rather than another camera.
The commercial shift
A significant share of these landings are run by private companies under contract. The agency specifies what it wants delivered and buys the service rather than building the spacecraft.
The trade-off is visible in the results. Failure rates are higher than a traditional programme would accept, and the cost per attempt is low enough that failing is survivable. That is a different engineering culture, and it is producing more attempts per year than the previous approach managed per decade.
What to watch for
Not the landings themselves. Whether anything that lands is still operating a month later.