April 7, 2026
“It is blowing my mind what you can see with the naked eye from the moon right now,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen radioed ahead of the flyby. “It is just unbelievable.”
Just like Apollo 8 in 1968.
History does not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
April 2, 2026
Live up dates of the Artemis II mission to “cislunar space” (it will not actually land on the Moon but will take four astronauts farther away from Earth than anyone else so far).
March 23, 2026
Just four days after a meteor streaked through skies above Cleveland, another one broke apart above Houston.
My favorite quote from the woman whose house was targeted by a meteorite:
“It looked just like a rock, and ain’t no rocks got no business falling out of the sky.”
Um. Yeah. Ain’t no blogger got no business complaining about grammar what don’t make no sense, boy.
My favorite thing about the photo of the meteorite chunk: It was sent to the media from the Ponderosa Fire Department.
Now we’re cooking!
March 18, 2026
Rocky objects traveling through space are known as meteoroids, but when they enter Earth’s atmosphere and create fireballs, they are called meteors. Any fragments that fall to Earth’s surface are meteorites.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/meteor-boom-ohio-pennsylvania-rcna263876
The Earth is bombarded on a daily basis from outer space.
Just not usually over urban areas during daylight.
In Ohio.
Not a whole lot going on there, apparently.
(On FaceCrap, people are posting things like “The sky literally exploded over Ohio!” Um. No, it didn’t, and that’s not possible. Morons.)
March 3, 2026
Lunar eclipse, tonight from 6:30 to 11:00…
Except it still raining here in Japan, and we’ll see nothing.
Rats.
At least we’ll visit JAXA tomorrow…
February 22, 2026
Just one day after NASA said it was eyeing a potential March 6 launch date for the Artemis II lunar mission, the space agency said Saturday that complications with the rocket could delay all launch attempts in March from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/21/nx-s1-5722339/nasa-artemis-ii-march-launch-delay
Looks like you get what you pay for…
(Btw, WordPress, the “quote” field used to have a separate area where you could put a link to the quote’s source. Where did that go? Nothing like helping the spread of unverified fake news…)
February 17, 2026
December 19, 2025
https://www.space.com/news/live/interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-closest-to-earth-flyby-week-dec-18-2025
Discovered on July 1 by the NASA-funded ATLAS telescopes in Chile, 3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object known to have passed through our cosmic neighborhood, following 1I/‘Oumuamua in 2017 and comet 2I/Borisov in 2019. Its trajectory shows that it originated from beyond our solar system and will eventually travel back into interstellar space.
Of course, Avi Loeb has already claimed (once again) that an interstellar comet is an “alien probe.”
And naturally, other astrophysicists immediately refuted him. Again.
It’s fast. REAL fast. So fast that even as it entered the solar system it was traveling the distance from the Earth to the Sun in only a month, and then it began to pick up even more speed (from the Sun’s gravity, NOT from “jets out the back” or whatever else unscientific SF fans say online).
Of course, we can assume that the aliens’ spaceship will detach from it precisely during its approach to Mars, or during its passage through perihelion when we cannot see it. In this case, it will have to slow down by more than 20 km/s.
And even so, this will not help the aliens much, because the trajectory will remain retrograde relative to the direction of the planets’ rotation around the Sun. So, if the aliens who flew to us billions of years ago have a plan that is a little more complicated than becoming kamikaze pilots, they will have to slow down again, spending a lot of energy on it. And the aliens still need to get that energy from somewhere.
So, most likely, we should not expect any extraterrestrial visitors at the end of the year. And we will not be able to admire the interstellar comet itself. By the time it emerges from behind the Sun, its brightness will already be approximately 11 stellar magnitudes, meaning it will be inaccessible even to small amateur instruments, let alone the naked eye.
So, nah. Sorry.
–> LIVESTREAM from 11 p.m. EST December 19th here: https://www.space.com/astronomy/comets/watch-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-make-its-closest-approach-to-earth-in-free-livestream-on-dec-18
(FWIW, the last two sentences are NOT supposed to be quotes, but wordpress is quite frankly broken.)
August 5, 2025
Hi, everyone. I haven’t written a blog post in a very long time.
For various reasons.
I’ll see if I can start posting a few entries on recent science events in a few days (for starters, four astronauts finally arrived at the ISS, the first replacements following the Boeing Starliner fiasco).
But for right now, I want to follow up this short post with some analysis I got from our friend ChatGPT…
…about Adam’s Stepsons and Bringer of Light. Stay tuned!
September 4, 2024
Using the new method, one metric tonne of lunar soil will be able to produce about 51 to 76 kilograms of water, equivalent to more than a hundred 500-millileter bottles of water, or the daily drinking water consumption of 50 people, the state broadcaster said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/chinese-scientists-use-lunar-soil-produce-water-rcna167951
The soil was from the 2020 expedition, which was the first in 44 years to bring back soil from the Moon.
Considering all of NASA’s problems, it looks like China will have a moon base years before the US does…and probably in prime resource locations as well.
And don’t forget that the hydrogen in the soil can also be used for rocket fuel. It would be a lot easier to launch ships to Mars and beyond without having to deal with Earth’s gravity…
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