• In Case You Missed It: Modern Day Pharaohs Hit a Bump in the Saudi Sand

    While the Middle East is going through a tough time at the moment, to put it mildly, it may be worth remembering the hubris of the region over the years. For example, Saudi Arabia was planning to build a new city in the desert called Neom that would have included a $500 billion 100-mile horizontal…

  • Space Stories: Meteor Shakes Ohio, Executive Order Could Impact Pluto, and Musk May Muck Up Space Again

    Here are some recent space-related stories of interest. —Fox 8 News: “NASA Confirms Boom was 17,000-pound Meteor“ A loud “boom” was reported across Northeast Ohio just before 9 a.m. on Tuesday. People around Northeast Ohio flooded the FOX 8 newsroom with reports of what heard like a “large explosion” lasting several seconds and causing homes and…

  • A Day in Astronomy: First Liquid-Propellant Rocket

    On this day in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-propellant rocket in Worcester, Massachusetts. The rocket climbed to about 41 feet and traveled a distance of only 184 feet, but it was a success. After that, he kept the results under his hat for almost a decade. Although in fragile health as a…

  • AI is Impersonating Carl Sagan and Others

    AI can do a number of things well, including astronomy-related tasks, but it also has a tendency to step on toes and steal other peoples creations. This was certainly the case with the editing program Grammarly, which wanted to go beyond simple grammar-related corrections. Instead, it started bragging about how it could edit like various…

  • Space Quote: Possible Chinese Lunar Landing Spot

    “Rimae Bode is a high-priority ‘sweet spot…Think of it as a prime piece of lunar real estate: its location near the equator provides much flatter, safer terrain for landing, along with constant sunlight for power [during the lunar day] and a direct line of sight to Earth for easy communication.” -Statement by Jun Huang, a…

  • Artemis II Reset for April 1 Launch

    It’s a “go,” for now at least, per NASA’s Artemis II Flight Readiness Review. NASA has a small window in April to launch the Artemis II mission (see above), so the plan is for a launch on April 1. The next step is to get the Space Launch System and Orion capsule back onto the…

  • Pic of the Week: Blue Origin Moon Landing

    The image above is from a NASA Office of the Inspector General audit report on the Human Landing System. It shows the complexity of the Blue Origin process for getting a crew on the Moon. It is complex, and has one more step than the SpaceX plan, which already seems close to impossible. This is…

  • Audit Report: Questions about the Human Landing System

    Auditors with NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) evaluated three aspects of the Human Landing System (HLS) to be used with the Artemis Moon landing: (1) the extent to which the HLS providers are meeting cost, schedule, and performance goals; (2) the HLS Program’s implementation of the insight/oversight model; and (3) the Program’s identification…

  • Sci-Fi Quote: Less Dystopia This Time

    “I think that’s what’s so special about this film, and why people are having such an emotional connection to it … it’s like we’ve been so saturated with dystopia in future narratives for the last decade to the point where it feels almost inevitable at this point. Then you have Andy sort of reminding us…

  • Space Stories: DART Did Its Diversionary Duty, A New Moon Crater, and A New Private Space Telescope

    Here are some recent space-related stories of interest. —Nautilus: “NASA’s DART Mission Offers Proof of Protection Against Asteroid Impacts“ In November 2021, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) aimed at finding out whether or not we could redirect the trajectory of a near-Earth object simply by crashing into it…The mission was a success, making…