Polymarket removed a forum related to the rescue mission of U.S. military servicemembers amid political pressure, the latest sign of mounting scrutiny around prediction markets.

U.S. and Iranian military forces are searching for a missing American airman after its F-15E fighter jet was shot down over Iran on Friday. One crew member has been rescued, but another is not accounted for.

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., decried the Polymarket page that allowed users to bet on which day the U.S. would confirm the rescue of the two airmen after an American F-15E fighter jet was shot down over Iran. The lawmaker called the page “DISGUSTING” in an X post.

“They could be your neighbor, a friend, a family member,” Moulton wrote on Friday. “And people are betting on whether or not they’ll be saved.”

In a response on X, Polymarket said: “We took this market down immediately as it does not meet our integrity standards.”

“It should not have been posted, and we are investigating how this slipped through our internal safeguards,” Polymarket wrote.

In a separate X post, Polymarket said it doesn’t “make money or charge any fees on any geopolitical markets.”

In an email to CNBC, Moulton said, “Polymarket didn’t take that market down because it violated their standards. They took it down because we called them out.”

Moulton also said that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has the authority to regulate prediction market platforms, but it is doing nothing.

“That needs to change, too,” he said. “Yesterday, there were 219 active bets in Polymarket’s ‘war’ category. Today, there are 223. This is spreading, and Congress needs to act.”

Moulton last month banned his staff from using prediction market platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi, a policy that his office believes is the first of its kind in Congress.

“Constituents that we serve should trust us to make decisions based on the right thing for do for our nation, not based on how bets might turn out,” Moulton said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Moulton also said on X that Donald Trump Jr., the son of President Donald Trump, “is an investor in this dystopian death market and may have access to intelligence that isn’t public yet.”

Requests for comment from Trump Jr. weren’t immediately returned to CNBC.

The Massachusetts lawmaker is part of a growing chorus of voices in Washington calling for stronger oversight of these betting platforms as interest swells.

A group of congressional Democrats introduced legislation late last month that would bar prediction markets from allowing wagers on elections, war and government actions, in addition to sports.

In February, six Democratic senators urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to clarify that it will prohibit any contracts related to an individual’s death. These contracts “present dangerous national security risks,” the lawmakers wrote.

The CFTC on Thursday announced lawsuits against three states over what it saw as efforts to circumvent the organization’s sole regulatory authority over prediction markets.

The NFL has also asked prediction market operators to keep specific event contracts that the league deems “objectionable bets” off their platforms. The league outlined examples of event contracts that could be easily manipulated, inherently objectionable, related to officiating, and knowable in advance — and asked that operators refrain from offering such trades.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan, Azhar Sukri and Luke Fountain contributed to this report.

Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.

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The moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface.

The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday.

When is the landing and how can I watch it?

The landing is scheduled for 3:45 a.m. Eastern time on March 2. Firefly will begin live coverage of the landing at 2:20 a.m. from its YouTube channel.

What is Blue Ghost’s destination?

This mission is headed to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

What is Blue Ghost taking to the moon?

The lander is carrying a variety of scientific and experimental payloads to the lunar surface, including 10 for NASA. Those include a drill to measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean off glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.

That cargo is part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Service, or CLPS, which aims to put NASA equipment on the moon at a cheaper price than if NASA built its own lunar lander. The agency will pay Firefly $101.5 million if all 10 payloads reach the lunar surface, and a bit less if the mission does not fully succeed.

Blue Ghost is the third CLPS mission to launch to the moon. The first, in 2024, from Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, failed after launching. The second, by Intuitive Machines of Houston last year, reached the moon but tipped over.

Why is the landing occurring at such an early hour?

The physics of getting to a certain place in the solar system at a certain time does not always match when people will be awake to watch. The Blue Ghost lander spacecraft gets its power from solar panels, and thus the mission is aiming to land soon after the dawn of a new lunar day. And to get to Mare Crisium on March 2, the landing time turns out to be 3:45 a.m.

“That’s just when that happens,” said Ray Allensworth, the program manager for Blue Ghost at Firefly.

The mission is to last about 14 Earth days until lunar sunset.

How has the mission gone so far?

Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft’s systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on Feb. 13. The spacecraft’s cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon’s cratered surface.

A few small glitches have come up along the way, but no major malfunctions. Mostly, the mission controllers made adjustments as they learned how the spacecraft behaved in the space environment.

“Thermal alarms might go off,” Ms. Allensworth said. “Things are getting a little hotter than planned, a little colder than planned on the vehicle. You want to look at that data and see is it actually OK.”

What happened to the other lunar lander that launched with Blue Ghost?

On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. The two missions are separate, but Ispace, seeking a cheaper ride to space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload. That turned out to be the Blue Ghost launch.

Although Resilience launched at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.

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Intuitive Machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can the Houston company do it again, but keep the spacecraft upright this time?

When the spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down on the moon last February, it managed to communicate with Earth even though it had toppled on its side. It was the first commercially operated lander to reach the moon’s surface, and the first American vehicle to land softly on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The company’s second lander, named Athena, is now on the launchpad. Here’s what you need to know about Wednesday’s flight.

When is the launch, and how can I watch it?

Athena and three other spacecraft will launch on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch is scheduled for 7:16 p.m. Eastern time on Feb. 26. There is a greater than 95 percent chance of favorable weather and SpaceX said about less than an hour before the flight that fueling of the moon lander had been completed.

If weather or technical issues arise, backup opportunities will be available during a four-day launch window. After that, the mission would have to be delayed by a month.

NASA will provide coverage of the launch beginning about 45 minutes before liftoff. You can watch it on the agency’s YouTube channel, or in the video player embedded above.

Where is Athena going?

If the launch occurs Wednesday, the Intuitive Machines spacecraft will try to land on March 6 in Mons Mouton, a region about 100 miles from the moon’s south pole. That will be closer to the south pole than any previous lunar lander.

What is Athena carrying?

The main payload is a drill for NASA as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Paying a commercial company like Intuitive Machines to take something to the moon is cheaper than having NASA design and build its own spacecraft.

The drill is designed to dig up soil up to about three feet below the surface. It will extract lunar soil about four inches at a time. An instrument known as a mass spectrometer will then sniff around the drilled material for compounds like frozen water that easily transform into gases.

The Athena lander is also carrying three robotic rovers and a small flying “hopper” that will be deployed after landing.

The largest rover, known as the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, is part of a NASA-financed test of the first cellphone network on the moon. Nokia won financing from the space agency to test the technology but then needed a way to move at least one antenna some distance from the lander. So Nokia hired a company called Lunar Outpost to build the rover, which is about the size of a small dog.

Lunar Outpost sold space on MAPP to other customers. One, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a tiny rover called AstroAnt, which will crawl around on the top flat surface of MAPP.

Athena will also deploy a rover called Yaoki, built by a Japanese company, Dymon, that is a bit bigger than a Mac mini computer.

Intuitive Machines built the hopper as part of another NASA contract. The small rocket-powered craft could offer new opportunities to explore long distances, similar to the way NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars provided a different way to explore areas not easily reached on the ground.

On the airless moon, helicopters cannot fly, but thrusters will allow the hopper to fly long distances. It will also be carrying one of the Nokia cellphone antennas. The plan is to fly into one of the moon’s permanently shadowed craters.

An eclipse?!

The mission on the surface is scheduled to last for less than one lunar day, or about 10 Earth days, until the sun sets. With no solar energy, the spacecraft’s batteries will run out of power.

But in the middle of the lunar day, on March 14 at about 2 a.m. Eastern time, darkness will fall for a few minutes — an eclipse when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon.

The solar-powered lander will have to draw power from its batteries during the eclipse but should survive.

Why did Intuitive Machines’ last lander topple over?

The Odysseus lander was supposed to use a laser altimeter to help guide it to the moon’s surface. But because of an oversight during the launch preparations, a safety switch for the device was never disabled, rendering that tool useless. Engineers at Intuitive Machines hurriedly rewrote their landing software to use similar measurements from an experimental NASA instrument on the spacecraft. But they missed updating one key parameter in the computer code, and the landing software ignored the data.

The spacecraft thus landed oblivious to its exact altitude, only guessing its distance above the surface based on horizontal speed calculated from camera images and measurements of accelerations in the spacecraft’s velocity. The guesses were close enough that it did not crash, although it was still moving horizontally. The landing gear broke, and the spacecraft tipped.

The Athena lander is almost identical to Odysseus — each is what the company calls its Nova-C design — and Intuitive Machines officials said they had tested the laser multiple times.

What other spacecraft are traveling with Athena?

Three more separate spacecraft are riding on the Falcon 9 rocket. They are essentially taking advantage of extra payload space in the rocket for a cheaper ride to space.

One, Lunar Trailblazer, is a lost-cost NASA mission — about $100 million — designed to measure the distribution of water on the moon from orbit.

While Athena will make a quick one-week trip to the moon, Lunar Trailblazer will take a more leisurely, fuel-efficient path. If launch occurs on Wednesday, it will take just over four months to reach the moon. (If the launch occurs on a different day, the trajectory changes, and the journey could be as long as seven months.)

A second spacecraft, Odin, is a microwave-size spacecraft built by the company AstroForge of California. It will head to a near-Earth asteroid to examine whether it might be full of valuable metals that could be mined in the future.

A third vehicle, CHIMERA GEO 1, is a spacecraft from Epic Aerospace of San Francisco designed to put small satellites in distant orbits.

What else is landing on the moon soon?

Athena is the third commercial lander launched toward the moon this year, although it might be the second to arrive.

On Jan. 15, a Falcon 9 rocket launched carrying the other two landers — Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and Resilience by Ispace of Japan.

Blue Ghost, like Athena, is part of NASA’s CLPS program, and it is scheduled to land on March 2, ahead of Athena. It is headed toward Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

Resilience, also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, is taking an indirect route and is expected to arrive at the moon in May. Its landing site is near the center of Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, in the moon’s northern hemisphere. This will be Ispace’s second lunar landing attempt. Its first mission, in 2023, crashed.

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