Now that that's over with

Artemis II is in the record books. The reaction comments yesterday surprised me. I was happy the mission succeeded because I don't like the idea of anyone being incinerated to death, and these seem like good people we'd all want to see "live long and prosper," to quote my best, make-believe friends. 

Back in February, I put up a post about the SLS calling it the "biggest and most expensive POS in history." And, yes, I spelled out Piece Of Shit. By no means am I a big fan of where the agency is now, but add that to pretty much everything else that the Big Freakin' Out of Control Government has grown like a fungus in the last 50 years. Look down the right sidebar and at the bottom, the last index is the list of Post Labels I group posts under. I started that in the last 10 years, I think, so it's not perfect, but "big freakin' out of control government" is one of the labels. 

All that to say, NASA has visibly improved since Jared Isaacman took over. I suspect (without good, direct evidence) that it's because of his experience with the modern space industry (Space 2.0 as we tend to call it), flying in SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules a couple of times, when we called him Rook Isaacman. 

As I've said before, all the talk comparing Artemis II to Apollo 8 is wrong.  Artemis II pales in comparison to Apollo 8. Apollo 8 did 10 orbits of the moon, Artemis II didn't go into orbit at all; it was sent on a guaranteed return trajectory meaning there were no critical engine burns or restarts. The most impressive thing to me is that this most expensive POS in history, the SLS, didn't blow up or burn into slag on reentry killing everyone and the Artemis program itself. SLS is over $4 billion per launch. I think it was when Sean Duffy was temporarily head of NASA before Isaacman that someone said there can be no space program at $4 billion a launch. $4 billion here, $4 billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money. 

Isaacman is trying to kill off SLS and congress keeps ordering more missions because it's an easy way to buy votes in their districts. And that's why it's a POS. That and it's a completely unnecessary POS.

SLS is "the most powerful rocket ever built" only until Starship goes orbital. SLS can put more into orbit than Falcon Heavy, but not lots more - it's only like 25 or 30% more. So with some R&D / Non Recurring Engineering done you can launch two Heavies, that together are carrying more than one SLS can for about 8% of what an SLS costs. Don't stop looking for advantages there. Remember all the time and money wasted on hydrogen leaks and fixing them? That's because liquid hydrogen engines are only "best" from one perspective. Falcon Heavies are basically three Falcon 9 first stages with one upper stage. They fly with kerosene (RP-1) and LOX, and they've only flown those Falcon 9s around 400 times, so it's far more common than LH2 and LOX

The SLS has only launched with actual used (already-flown) or leftover Shuttle RS-25 engines, also known as Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs). I'm happy they got a few launches out of them before throwing them out. Those are 512,000 pound thrust – which may have been remarkable in the 1970s but it's common now. Both the Blue Origin BE-4s and the SpaceX Raptor engines, all versions, can do half a million pounds of thrust. The SSMEs cost around $125 Million each. The Raptor 2, 3, or 4 engines are in the vicinity of $2 million each while Blue Origin sells the BE-4 into ULA's Vulcan for less than $20 million.  That means the four engines of an SLS are $500 million, while four BE-4s would cost $80 million. At most. 

Artemis isn't making the future in space, it's holding the future back. As much as I'd like to redirect everything, moving over to the Falcon Heavies and either SpaceX Human Landing System or Blue Origin's Blue Moon isn't in the cards.  

The real future that's being talked about is a space or moon-based economy and that requires a lot of tons sent up to the moon. They'll have to figure out and rotate crews of construction experts, development experts, mining experts and more. There will be a lot of prospecting, so lots of geologists. What's the first thing you see when you look at telescopic photos of the moon? Craters? The leading experts on how these form say meteor impacts, which implies a meteor under every crater. Is that titanium? "Heavy metals?" Gold? Platinum? Osmium? If the moon and Earth "condensed" out of the same part of a cloud of dust or whatever, then it should be the same elements as Earth, but probably distributed differently. More light elements with the heavier ones. There are no volcanoes on the moon, and I'm sure that must have an effect, too. 

I consider this a successful mission because everyone and everything made it back to Earth in one piece and good shape. I really want to see pics of the heat shield but nobody has them online yet. We're not better than we were in the Apollo days but we're better than we've been in a while.  

Looking up at the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as they roll to Pad 39B, February 2026. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Hard to think of a better conclusion to Artemis II than that

For the last hour before splashdown and the first 20 minutes or so after it, I was watching the NASA feed as it happened. It seemed that Every Single Milestone they called out was good. The whole time was exceptionally smooth, by the book, and as close to perfect as it gets. 

Odyssey, the Orion capsule, as the splashdown is happening. As close to a perfect conclusion to that as close to a perfect mission as we get.

Go celebrate a little. It's worth it. 

We're in the final 24 hours of Artemis 2

The crew is in the final hours of their mission, which will end Friday evening East Coast time, right around midnight UTC. From the running series of posts on Space.com: 

Orion will begin its plunge through the atmosphere on Friday (April 10) at around 7:53 p.m. EDT (2353 GMT), entering a 6-minute communications blackout. The spacecraft's two parachute groups, its drogues and the main chutes, will deploy around 8:03 p.m. EDT (0003 GMT, April 11) and 8:04 p.m. EDT (0004 GMT, April 11), respectively, with splashdown expected at 8:07 p.m. EDT (0007 GMT, April 11). 

Like everyone who has been on such a historic mission, they haven't really had everything they've been through sink in to their heads. Buzz Aldrin famously went through this after Apollo 11 and being the second person to step on the moon in human history. After something that big, how do you return to an ordinary life? 

"I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume," Aldrin said in his book. "There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into." 

Tomorrow brings a big test that I think many of us have been fearing.

I think all of you who follow the space program know about the heat shield issues that Artemis 1 had, with holes essentially scattered around the entire heat shield. This has been tested about as well as it could be tested without a "disposable" Artemis mission throwing away an SLS booster to get an Orion capsule on the intended trajectory at the right speed so it could be tested under the worst case conditions.  The results were approved by NASA Chief Jared Isaacman just three months ago.

The Orion heat shield as seen after the Artemis I flight. Credit: NASA

There has been mention in a couple of places of a task for this mission of putting instruments in positions that can track the Orion capsule during reentry to capture images of it. It might reveal details about the reentry that other instruments can't or won't. 

Reentry is always a scary time in a mission. Some reentries are scarier than other. Godspeed, Artemis 2!

NASA working on plans for the new Artemis III

Artemis II is still on the way home and the existing plans for Artemis III were scrapped just over a month ago, but the agency under Jared Isaacman isn't wasting time trying to reduce the wasted time between missions. 

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday afternoon that the space agency is debating about which orbit to fly Artemis III in before locking in a blueprint, noting that the first “senior level” Artemis III mission design discussion had taken place earlier in the day.
...
“One of the questions is what the initial orbit will be for Artemis III,” Isaacman said during a news conference. “Is it going to be LEO or HEO? There are pros and cons for each of them, for sure.” 

Most readers will remember that Artemis III was originally scheduled as the first Artemis moon landing, and the date being talked about was originally 2025 but was most recently looking to be 2027. Artemis I was in November of '22, so about 3-1/2 years from flight one to two. Having III even at the end of '27, would be an incredible amount of progress. Plus the mission has been massively changed, so that instead of a lunar landing next year it's looking to be restricted to Earth orbit for a test of one or (preferably) both lunar landers, SpaceX's Starship-based Human Landing System or Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1.

The first question, though LEO or HEO has to be decided quickly because it affects other decisions. Low Earth Orbit is commonly referred to as 100 to 1240 miles (2000 km) while High Earth Orbit ranges from there up to 22,400 miles. 

A rendezvous in low-Earth orbit would potentially allow NASA to fly the SLS rocket without using an Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS. This is valuable because it could then save this final remaining ICPS stage for the Artemis IV mission (for future SLS missions, NASA would use a Centaur V upper stage, also provided by United Launch Alliance). For an Artemis III mission in a higher orbit, however, NASA would need the ICPS to push Orion there. 

A rendezvous in high-Earth orbit would better mimic thermal and other conditions near the Moon, and this might be a more benign environment for the Orion spacecraft, which is sensitive to thruster pluming and other thermal issues. High-Earth orbit would also provide a stiffer test for Orion’s modified heat shield.

The concept of doing this mission as a test of rendezvous and docking with the lunar landers is just plain common sense. It was done during the Apollo program two missions before Apollo 11's first landing. Apollo 9 took place in low-Earth orbit between 125 and 310 miles.  

The biggest question hanging there in my mind is which lander will be ready before the end of '27. Will they both be ready? The answer is both seem to be progressing as intended. The launch of the next Starship test flight was said to be "in March" but I've seen May mentioned lately. Part of that could be there was a latest version Raptor 3 engine that blew up in the last week during testing, but while engines blowing up isn't necessarily a design problem, it seems prudent to make sure it's not something that needs redesign. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mk. 1 lander is said to be “wrapping up” vacuum-chamber testing at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Blue Origin's Blue Moon Lander. Image credit: Blue Origin

Final words to Eric Berger from Ars Technica.

Isaacman said it is important for SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to reach higher launch cadences to support not just Artemis III but many future missions to the lunar surface. NASA is clearly watching both closely.

“We’ll all have a sense of which path we’re going to go down based on launch cadence of our two HLS (human landing system) providers, both of which have launches coming up in the next month or less,” Isaacman said. “A big key to our strategy—to not just return to the Moon but to stay and build a base—is the rapid reusability of heavy-lift launch vehicles. The more they get experience doing that, the more options that are available to us for Artemis III.” 

Catching up a bit

The flood of data from the Artemis 2 flyby is being posted in glorious high definition, and large files to NASA's usual places: Flickr, and NASA's images page. Artemis II has its own "Mission Science Page" that features some nice photos, too, just not strictly the flyby pictures.  The second one, is page of 1 of 15 from only this year and none of the pages appear to be sorted in any logical way. For example I went to page 15 figuring those should be the most recent pictures and a couple of side by side pictures were from before the mission launched and last night's. 

The usual space-related news sources might be easier on your nerves. Both Space.com's article and Ars Technica's have a small sample but good pictures.  

The Moon, seen here backlit by the Sun during a solar eclipse on April 6, 2026, is photographed by one of the cameras on the Orion spacecraft’s solar array wings. Orion is visible in the foreground on the left. Earth is reflecting sunlight at the left edge of the Moon, which is slightly brighter than the rest of the disk. The bright spot visible just below the Moon’s bottom right edge is Saturn. Beyond that, the bright spot at the right edge of the image is Mars. Credit: NASA

On Saturday (4/4) I commented that Comet MAPS appeared to have disintegrated. I didn't see that confirmed until this morning, Apr 7th. 

The much-heralded Comet MAPS, proclaimed by some as "The Great Easter Comet," met its end this past Saturday (April 4). The comet apparently underwent a cataclysmic fragmentation just hours before it was to make its closest approach — called perihelion — to the sun. Such was not completely unexpected, for Comet MAPS was a Kreutz sungrazer, a type of comet that comes literally within a hairbreadth of the sun. They may all have evolved from the breakup of a usually large comet's close approach to the sun, perhaps a millennium ago. From this progenitor, countless fragments of different sizes have been circling the sun in similar orbits.

An extended afternoon of watching Artemis' big day.

Must be that I'm too much of a space nerd.  

Space.com posted a schedule of what would be seen during the day, and here's an attempt to copy it. I sat down to watch a bit before the 1:56 PM (red) line and as I'm typing it's 9:40 PM and this schedule says the livestream is about to end. 

Time (in EDT / GMT)	Event	What to know
10:50 a.m. EDT / 1450 GMT	Artemis 2 crew wakes up	This begins Flight Day 6. Flyby day. NASA will play the crew a song.
1:00 p.m. EDT / 1700 GMT	NASA's main livestream begins	This is a special broadcast. The 24/7 feed will transition to this.
1:56 p.m. EDT / 1756 GMT	Artemis 2 surpasses Apollo 13 distance record	The Orion ship will fly farther than Apollo 13, going beyond 248,655 miles from Earth.
2:10 p.m. EDT / 1810 GMT	Artemis 2 crew comments on beating Apollo 13 record	The Artemis 2 crew will comment on their new record, but we'll get audio only.
2:15 p.m. EDT / 1815 GMT	Orion cabin configured for flyby	The astronauts will darken the cabin lights and prep cameras and other gear.
2:45 p.m. EDT / 1845 GMT	Seven-hour moon flyby observation period begins	The Artemis 2 crew will observe both near and far sides of the moon. The main phase lasts five hours.
4:35 p.m. EDT / 2035 GMT	Interior views of Orion	NASA will show inside views of Orion during the flyby.
Ongoing.	Observations continue.	The crew has 35 targets for 10 science objectives. They may see the Apollo 14 and Apollo 12 landing sites.
6:44 p.m. EDT / 2244 GMT	Loss of signal	NASA will temporarily lose contact with Artemis 2. It should last 40 minutes.
7:02 p.m. EDT / 2307 GMT	Artemis 2 closest to moon	Orion will be about 4,070 miles above the moon at closest approach.
7:07 p.m. EDT / 2307 GMT	Artemis 2 reaches its farthest point from Earth	Orion will be at its farthest from Earth, at about 252,760 miles away.
7:25 p.m. EDT / 2325 GMT	Reacquisition of signal	Mission Control should reacquire signal with Artemis 2.
8:35 p.m. EDT / 0035 GMT on April 7	Artemis 2 sees solar eclipse	The astronauts will see the moon block the sun in a total solar eclipse. It will last 53 minutes. They may also observe Mars, Mercury, Venus and Saturn.
9:20 p.m. EDT / 0120 GMT on April 7	Artemis 2 lunar flyby observation period ends	The flyby observing period ends. The crew begins sending some imagery to Earth.
9:32 p.m. EDT / 0132 GMT April 7	Solar eclipse period ends	The Artemis 2 crew finishes observing the sun's corona and planets.
9:45 p.m. EDT / 0145 GMT April 7	NASA's Moon Flyby Livestream ends	NASA's special Artemis 2 moon flyby commentary ends, but 24/7 mission coverage continues

The day was filled with video highlights and incredible sights.  Along with hours of nothing like those highlights.  Along the way, I grabbed this picture that's one of the more incredible sights of the night.

The captured video scene is slightly stretched left to right, but along the right side you see a tiny bright crescent next to much larger, but less well-lit, grayish-brown crescent. The big crescent is the moon; the small one is Earth. The Earth is starting to be occulted (the astronomical term when one object blocks out one farther behind it) by the crescent moon. 

There has been a lot of talk about the astronauts on this mission seeing things no astronaut has seen since 1972, or ever before, but a couple of things here - like this photo - have never been seen by any human at all. I'm sure it could have been seen if prior moon missions were timed exactly right, and I'm equally sure nobody scheduling those moon landing missions would have thought of this. Seeing this is a sign of the beginning of the age of a space-faring civilization.

 

 

It's Resurrection Sunday - Happy Easter

 

It's Easter, Resurrection Sunday, and as I do regularly, I look at what I've posted for the major holidays in the past, and often modify them quite a bit. Not wholesale tear it up and start over, but some extensive additions and deletions.  FWIW, this one is largely unchanged from 2024.

Looking for the Living One in a Cemetery

Luke 24: 1-12 New Living Translation

24 But very early on Sunday morning^[a] the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. ² They found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. ³ So they went in, but they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. ⁴ As they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes.

⁵ The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked, “Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? ⁶ He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what he told you back in Galilee, ⁷ that the Son of Man^[b] must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day.”

⁸ Then they remembered that he had said this. ⁹ So they rushed back from the tomb to tell his eleven disciples—and everyone else—what had happened. ¹⁰ It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several other women who told the apostles what had happened. ¹¹ But the story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn’t believe it. ¹² However, Peter jumped up and ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in and saw the empty linen wrappings; then he went home again, wondering what had happened.

---

Coming from my background, becoming an evangelical Christian was a large change.  I had studied biochemistry and microbiology in college through my third year before life imposed some detours, eventually getting my degree and starting my career as an engineer late in life (over 30).  I had been an amateur astronomer since about age 10, so between them I was deeply marinated in the standard model of Cosmology as well as conventional biological evolutionary theory.  Frankly, I wasn't giving it much thought any longer, but my wife had re-affirmed her faith (she had first accepted Christ as child) and I was having all of my mental models disrupted.  She had started a subscription to Bibical Archaeology Review and the constant refrain from archaeologists, not religiously motivated, along the lines of "we thought this was old Jewish folklore, but here it is" got me thinking "if that's true, maybe there's more that's true."  Strobel's The Case for Christ, played a role in filling in the gaps in my historical knowledge.  

I went forward for Baptism in 1995 in an evangelical church and an important part of that change was because the pastor had a similar background to mine, at least in the biochemistry/microbiology. He was a pharmacist and the director of the pharmacy department in one of the local hospitals. He quickly became one of our closest friends in the worst time of our lives - Mrs. Graybeard's cancer in 1997. It's a long story, but in the last couple of years the church's elders dumped him. As the story came out, we found a new church - a nearby Southern Baptist church. Our pastor started going to another Southern Baptist church, but closer to his home. He passed away a little before Easter of '24.  

Easter is the most important day in Christianity and far more important than Christmas because of the resurrection.  Everyone has a birthday, but history only records one resurrection.  The resurrection is essential to Christianity; without it there simply is no reason for Christianity to exist.  Since virtually everyone, including honest atheists, agrees Jesus was a real man in history (I've always found it amazing that Jesus' existence is better attested in ancient sources than that of Julius Caesar - but no one claims Julius Caesar was not a real person) and died on the cross, the question becomes whether or not it can be verified that Christ was seen after the resurrection by someone other than the closest circle of disciples. Strobel says:

Did anyone see Jesus alive again? I have identified at least eight ancient sources, both inside and outside the New Testament, that in my view confirm the apostles’ conviction that they encountered the resurrected Christ. Repeatedly, these sources stood strong when I tried to discredit them. 

Could these encounters have been hallucinations? No way, experts told me. Hallucinations occur in individual brains, like dreams, yet, according to the Bible, Jesus appeared to groups of people on three different occasions – including 500 at once!

In the end, after I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.  

I still think a great summary is "Five Confounding Facts About Jesus' Resurrection" a 2016 post at Donald Sensing's Sense of Events, which has been gone for a while and replaced by Sensing Online.  He has done several excellent posts on the subject, including Jesus and History and links to articles put together by working scientists, "On what basis would a scientist accept the Resurrection?" and "Is Belief in the Resurrection Unscientific?" Do yourself a favor and read this year's (2026's) Easter post at Sensing Online. 

Enjoy your day and your time with your family. I actually woke at 3AM this morning telling myself I forgot to do an Easter post. As I've said almost every year, churches seem more crowded on Christmas than Easter but everyone has a birthday while there's only one who had a resurrection.  That's more important than a birthday.

 

Ham radio and Artemis 2

Before I get to that, a short update on the comet story. While I haven't seen an actual headline comet MAPS appeared to break apart in a video I saw that was made as the comet was getting close to going behind the blocked out visual center of the Lasco camera's center of view. The latest view, time tagged at the same 2306 UTC that previous posts displayed, shows nothing has come out from near the sun. 

This tells me that the comet was ripped apart by something in that environment. Not only is this not unexpected, it's rather common for these Kreutz sungrazers. 

Late in the afternoon, I ran across an interesting story for those of you interested in radio, ham radio, and experiments you can do yourself.  It focuses on how hams are tracking Artemis 2.  It opens with what I find to be an interesting thing I haven't heard yet. Three of the four Artemis 2 crew are hams. Commander Reid Wiseman, is KF5LKT;  Canadian Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen is KF5LKU, the next call issued, and Pilot Victor Glover is KI5BKC (so he's been licensed longer). You'll note that the only astronaut who isn't a ham is the YL Mission Specialist Christina Koch. 

The story itself is from a Vancouver, British Columbia newspaper called the Vancouver Sun. Vancouver is about as far as one can get from Florida's Kennedy Space Center and still be in North America. The story they present is almost entirely centered on Vancouver native named Scott Tilley who is apparently not a ham, they never say or give a callsign for him but a contractor on a program NASA started. 

This week, he is tracking NASA’s Artemis II rocket as one of 34 individuals and organizations from around the world selected by the American space agency to monitor its first crewed mission to orbit the moon in more than 50 years. 

Here's where the ham community kicks in. QRZ member K6CLS adds: 

The 13cm EME guys are tuning in. Orion xmits downlink on 2216MHz +/- 2.5MHz. easy to see the continuous signal with some gain from a dish and a good preamp.

To look at the spectrum, some folks are using a down converter to an SDR, or an SDR that can work on 2216MHz, or a spectrum analyzer directly!

Can see the chips in the signal, so it looks like QAM something, but I'm sure it's more complex.

Several folks have reported they can see the Doppler shift in the mark tones.

Fun stuff!

As you can see by him specifying the downlink at 2216 +/- 2.5 MHz, is part of S-band (2.0 to 4.0 GHz) communications (the way NASA is using it), the 13cm ham band is close to the 2.4 GHz WiFi band, so some folks online may have some means of tuning in the band - if you're comfortable working with microwave frequencies near that to tack in coax or power splitters, amplifiers and other kinds of modules.  EME is Earth-Moon-Earth communications or Moon Bounce. Wikipedia notes, 

"The first Earth-Venus-Earth contact by amateur radio operators was established on the 13 cm band in 2009."

That's in case that Earth-Moon-Earth stuff is too easy for you. I honestly didn't know anyone anywhere had done Venus Bounce or EVE before.

If you're interested in trying to put something together to listen for Artemis 2, I don't know of any really easy, off the shelf solutions because I haven't looked. A quick look at some broadband SDR companies whose products I've used don't show any that are rated for 2.0GHz to, well, anything. That basically just implies that you need to use a block downconverter from 2216 MHz down to something you have that would allow you to play with the signal. I'll have to play more with this idea. 

A little bit more of that

The latest MAPS photo, exactly 24 hours from April 2nd: brighter and closer to the sun than yesterday. 

And for your convenience, here's both days in one graphic: 

Tomorrow will be the "do or die" day for Comet MAPS; at around 0800 UTC on the 4th, or about 4:00 AM EDT Saturday morning, the comet will go behind that large dark blue circle for its closest approach to the sun. According to the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) Circular#5675, Comet MAPS will pass within 101,100 miles above the sun's surface (the photosphere) at 10:24 AM EDT (1424 GMT).

If it survives that closest approach, we don't get to know until it comes out from behind that dark circle and I'll SWAG 1900UTC Saturday, or around 3PM EDT. 

I'm not sure how I'm going to try to watch this. I have a solar filter for a telescope but more study is required and life has been throwing lots of interruptions at us. 

A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

A little bit on Artemis 2...

NASA's Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft successfully performed its translunar injection burn, or TLI, in a 5 minute, 55 second maneuver that sent the probe beyond Earth orbit -- the first time astronauts have done so since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The burn began on time at 7:49 p.m. EDT (2349 GMT), 1 day, 1 hour and 14 minutes into the mission.

"Integrity, looks like a good burn," Mission Control Capcom Chris Birch radioed to the crew.

The Orion spacecraft stack came within 115 miles of the Earth's surface, which must have been near it's perigee. The source says they raised their perigee twice today but didn't say exactly what it was. The TLI burn will push the spacecraft into a free return path that will loop around the moon and get flung back toward Earth by the Moon's gravity. That far point is being described as the farthest from Earth humans have ever been, and will allow them to see the entire lunar farside in one view, rather than the close approaches of the Apollo era. 

A little bit on comet MAPS heading into it's closest approach to the sun.

Comet MAPS is now visible in the latest photo from SOHO's LASCO C3 camera, timed (as printed in the lower left hand corner) at 2306 UTC or 7:03PM EDT. MAPS is small and easy to miss, so I put a red circle around it.

If you compare this image to the one posted Tuesday, it's about midway between the first two points on the lower line of the predicted path - the approach to the sun - marked Apr. 2 12h UT (2PM EDT) and Apr. 3 9H UT (5AM EDT). In other words right where you'd expect it to be within an hour or so.

Tomorrow ought to be interesting to watch the Lasco camera. The position prediction plot from Tuesday shows the comet moves from that 5AM tomorrow morning position just mentioned almost to the point where the large (dark blue) blocking circle covers it. 

Artemis II Step One is a winner - one down lots to go.

The first step of Artemis II, the big step from sitting on launch pad on the ground to Earth Orbit appeared indistinguishable from perfect. There were a couple of oddities during the countdown, that delayed the 6:24PM EDT launch to 6:35, but liftoff and the milestones went almost as boringly perfect as the typical Falcon 9 flight - and that "almost" qualifier was because the flight profile wasn't the same as the Falcon 9's. I've watched hundreds of Falcon 9 launches, so I'm used to the times that the major milestones come on.

The sky was surprisingly clear and blue; surprising because it was completely overcast earlier in the day and some showers were blowing onshore both here and up on the Cape. Thankfully, that was closer to 3PM (1500 EDT) and long gone by launch time. We were able to watch the launch on its path that seemed close to due east, until the solid rocket boosters dropped. Which seemed later in the flight than the two side Falcon 9 boosters drop off a Falcon Heavy. It was pretty from 35 miles south of the launch, but not very loud and the (much) smaller Falcon launches regularly rattle our doors and windows more than the much bigger SLS. I chalk that up to weather.  

Artemis II ascends from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

And about three minutes later (I think)

The solid rocket boosters (SRBs) detach after NASA's Artemis 2 Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via Space.com)

Of course this is all about the first hour of a mission that will last on the order of 10 days. Credit where credit's due, a successful start is always a good thing, but doesn't mean a whole lot about the next 10 days. Not to mention that the vast majority of the media will be covering this. We should know by tomorrow if the life support systems operate as needed; and if they don't work properly the mission will be aborted. I'll be watching this as I'm sure most of you will be.

The other thing to keep an eye out for this weekend

In case you haven't seen this story, here's something to be aware of through the weekend beside Artemis II. There's a comet approaching the sun this weekend, by the name of MAPS. This comet was discovered on January 13th so 11 weeks ago (this is week 14, it was discovered in week 3). Soon after discovery as the orbit was calculated, it was determined that the comet would make a close approach to the sun, with its closest point - its perihelion - this Saturday, April 4th.  

The highlight is that this comet is  going to come very close to the sun, and after its closest approach, if it doesn't get ripped apart by the sun, it will be bright enough to see in the daytime which would make it a naked eye object close to the sun in the daytime sky. 

Let me fill in some details from Space.com.  First off, MAPS seems like an odd name, compared to other comets I've seen. Historical comets like Halley's comet were typically named after the discoverer. That's still pretty typical although more organized than it was in "the old days." 

"MAPS" is an acronym using the first letters of the surnames of the discoverers: Alain Maury, Georges Attard, Daniel Parrott, and Florian Signoret. They found the comet using a remotely operated 11-inch telescope at the AMACS1 observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert. What makes this discovery special is that Comet MAPS belongs to a special class of comets known as Kreutz sungrazers. (Pronounced like KROYTZ)
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Saturday, April 4, is the day of Comet MAPS perihelion — when it will make its closest approach to the sun. Based on updated orbital elements published on the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) Circular#5675, Comet MAPS will pass within 101,100 miles (162,700 km) above the sun's surface (the photosphere) at 10:24 a.m. EDT (1424 GMT, 7:24 a.m. PDT). The comet will then be in the midst of completing a hairpin-curved path around the sun, racing at a speed of 322 miles (518 km) per second.

I haven't seen anyone predicting confidently whether or not MAPS will survive its close encounter of the potentially destructive kind, and I wouldn't put much faith in that if they did. I think they'd need to have more knowledge of the comet than exists at the moment. Before you try to see it, you would probably do better trying to follow news online about it. I'll get back to that shortly.

Let me show you a projection for the comets path with times marked around the sun. The approach to the sun starts at the lower left hand part of the picture - you'll note the first point is labelled April 2nd at 1200 UTC. The two dots on upper right of that triangle marking its path are both two days later, April 4th, 0600 UT and 2200 UT, 16 hours later. It exits the path in the picture on the 6th at 0500 UT. You'll note in the center of the image, the orbital path goes over a white circle - that's the diameter of the sun, or about 1/2 degree.  The dark circle that image is contained in is the area the telescope has blocked off - to keep the sensor from being burned out. 

It is also possible that the comet may become extremely bright around this time, possibly even bright enough to glimpse in the daytime, though the very close proximity to the sun in the sky makes this an extremely dangerous proposition. Indeed, the sun's infrared rays can burn the retina of the eye and cause irreparable damage, all without causing any pain and neither sunglasses, telescopes, nor binoculars will protect against the type of eye damage that could ultimately result in blindness, when a person — however briefly — accidentally looks directly into the sun's rays.

To get a good (and safe) view of Comet MAPS as it approaches and then sweeps rapidly around the sun, reserve a seat next to your computer and stay tuned to SOHO's LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment) C3 camera, by accessing either its near-live images or videos that span the past 24 hours.

The source article at Space.com goes into some inevitable - but pointless IMO - speculation on what could happen during the roughly four days captured in this image. The comet could disintegrate before or just at perihelion (closest approach to the sun), it could disintegrate after perihelion but still close to the sun, or it survives the perihelion and comes out unscathed. 

That last alternative is the only one that could give us a great show. The unpleasant reality is we have nothing we can do to influence it. The comet is going to do what it's going to do and not only doesn't care what we see, it's a hunk of ice and rock: it can't care what we see. I'm not sure when the last bright daytime comet was; they mention "The Great Comet of 1965," Ikeya-Seki, which was the most brilliant comet of the 20th century. It attained a magnitude of at least -10 (as bright as a half-moon) and was readily visible next to the sun during the daytime. In 1965, I was first getting interested in watching the night sky and I missed that one, getting a typical beginner's refracting telescope with about a 2" objective about a year after the comet. I've just read about Ikeya-Seki since 1965, much like I got my first shortwave receiver after the best solar cycle in recorded history, cycle 19 in the late '50s.

Two news stories in space

The story that has actually made big media news: 

Probably the bigger story to lead with is to bring everyone up to date to what happened to Mike Fincke that led to the urgent medical evacuation of the International Space Station back in February.  

In the last couple of days Fincke spoke in public about what it was for the first time. From the Associated Press and dated Friday, March 27th: 

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.

“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.

Fincke points out that he was tested with the medical equipment on the station which showed nothing in particular and once back on the ground the tests involved more sophisticated scans, after which he was told he had no evidence of having had a stroke, or some sort of cardiac event. It has been at least informally associated with his many days in space - AP says he has 549 days in space - far more than just this mission. 

Fincke stopped apologizing to everybody after NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman ordered him to stop.

“This wasn’t you. This was space, right?” his colleagues assured him. “You didn’t let anybody down.”

Ever the optimist, he’s holding out hope that he can return to space one day.

It sounds good for Mike, although my Anal-Retentive streak says that associating the temporary symptom to his 549 days in space seems weak to me. He's never had it before, and a web search for "temporarily unable to speak" returns a lot of things none of which are related to spaceflight.  

And the story that's just for us space geeks

SpaceX's Falcon9 fleet leader, booster B1067 earned a (dash)34 after its serial number this afternoon, lifting another batch of 29 satellites into orbit for mission 10-44. The 34th flight of this booster returned B1067-34 to the fleet leadership, since in the last month since the 33rd flight a couple of other boosters caught up to B1067-33. Liftoff was at 5:15 p.m. EDT (2115 UTC), and the mission, like virtually all of these Falcon 9 Starlink launches, was almost boringly perfect. Flying to the NE, the worst direction for those of us living south of Cape Canaveral.  

Booster 1067 entered the SpaceX fleet in 2021 and since then has launched missions including CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, Eutelsat Hotbird 13G, SES O3B mPOWER-A, PSN Satria, Telkomsat Merah Putih 2, Galileo L13, Koreasat-6A Crew-6 and USSF-124, plus 22 batches of Starlink satellites.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1067 landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn't dead center of the target, but it sure wasn't in danger of missing the deck.

Crew-11: left to right: Russia's Oleg Platonov, NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, and Japan's Kimiya Yui on the right. (Image: © SpaceX)

What ties these two stories together is that Mike Fincke's Crew-11 flight wasn't on B1067, but it was on a Falcon 9.  

The BIG Story

The story that's taking over headlines this week is the Artemis II launch this week. I've noticed it not just on the space news sites I watch regularly but also on TV news channels. While I'm certain that the Cape is working actively on preparing for the mission, I haven't seen the words "the countdown has begun" - or the same meaning. But let me drop a quote from Space.com: " 'We are ready': NASA still on track to launch Artemis 2 astronauts to the moon April 1." 

The launch window opens Wednesday, April 1 at 6:24 PM, staying open for two hours, and there are more launch windows until April 6th. NASA conducted a Flight Readiness Review back on March 20th before the rollback to the pad and no issues came up then - or have come up since then - that are threatening the schedule. 

 "Since that time, all of our operations have been going very smoothly," Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said during a mission status update on Sunday (March 29). "Our flight systems are ready, the ground systems are ready, our launch and operations teams are ready, and our flight operations team in Houston are also ready. The crew arrived yesterday, and I know that they're ready – they are more than ready."

"There are little things that we find as we go that we're working right there, but none of them are threatening the first right now," Glaze said.

At the moment, the only known risk is a 20% chance of the weather exceeding limits for cumulus clouds.  

NASA astronaut and Artemis 2 Mission Specialist Christina Koch introduces the crew’s zero-g indicator, ‘Rise’, which is hoisted in the air by NASA astronaut and Artemis 2 Commander Reid Wiseman. The other two crew members, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen (left) and NASA astronaut and Pilot Victor Glover (right), will join Koch and Wiseman on the ten day mission around the Moon and back. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now

The idea of carrying a soft toy as a zero-g indicator is a recent goofy joke story - I don't really recall the first time I heard of one, but I can think of seeing the term used for a while. It's a zero-g indicator in the same way everything is. If you hold it out at arm's length, let go of it and it doesn't fall, just floating there, you're in zero-G microgravity, and if it falls you're not.

I Done Learnt Somethin New Today

With thanks to Angus McThag at The Abode of McThag, because he posted a piece that made me aware of something called Earth Hour (or Urf Ower as he called it). In short, Earth Hour is just as stupid and useless as Earth Day which happens on April 22 ever year, except it's one hour long on the night of March 28th from 8:30 to 9:30. I feel it's not important for me to check the accuracy of this statement, but I think I've written some post about the stupidity of Earf day every year since I started the blog in 2010. 

Earf Ower started 22 years ago, and a website called Holiday Today describes it this way:

Earth Hour is observed on the last Saturday of March each year as a global grassroots movement for the environment. In 2026, the specific date for the event is March 28. During this hour, millions of people, businesses, and landmarks across more than 190 countries and territories switch off non-essential electric lights from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time. This symbolic act is organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to raise awareness about the dual crises of climate change and nature loss. Beyond the simple flick of a switch, the initiative encourages participants to “Give an Hour for Earth” by spending 60 minutes doing something positive for the planet, such as learning about biodiversity or adopting sustainable daily habits.

It'll probably be over by the time I post this. 

I'm torn between making fun of this "holiday" and just ignoring it. Compared to the pages of text I've dedicated to Earth Day, it doesn't seem worth it to make fun of an hour. Many times I've said Earth Day is my very favorite holiday to make fun of. Even more than Kwanzaa. This has some of the smell of Earth Day, but nowhere near as much of it. So since it's in the same spirit as Earth Day, but only 1/24 as long, I'll just borrow a couple of paragraphs I've used for the longer "holiday".

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they think are pretty; and unspoiled. They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, the greenies think that's just wonderful. 

When you think of it that way, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life. Of course we should all protect the wilderness! It's theirs! That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago. He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and need electricity. Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Gee, it's after 9:30. Earf Ower is over in the Eastern time zone.

Earf Ower symbol borrowed from Holiday Today. 

Will Privately run space stations really succeed?

This week was a big one in the Space Industry, the biggest we've had in years, with the Tuesday announcements. The big two announcements were putting the Lunar Gateway (AKA lunar space station) on hold and shifting the emphasis to creating a permanent presence on the moon with more direct flights. Most of the major shifts this week were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space. 

As far back as 2018, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was sounding the alarm about the need to find a replacement for the space station if the United States wanted to maintain an ongoing human presence in low-Earth orbit. 

One aspect of this event has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA’s attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station. We've covered the private space station efforts of Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, Nanoracks (later became Voyager), and Northrop Grumman (later withdrew from the program) here before. 

The problem seems to be that none of those three surviving contractors know what NASA really wants. 

In most cases of major space or defense projects, the Agency buying the project issues a document listing everything they want the thing to do. A common document is often called a Hardware Requirements Drawing (HRD) along with requirements drawings for the everything they want it to do. Before that is issued there's generally a Request for Proposal document (RFP) that lists everything they want the system to be able to do. The companies that respond to the RFP go line by line through the RFP responding if they can meet all of the request for proposal and the cost. 

NASA has not released an RFP saying what they really want the independent Space Stations to do.  

“We’re on a path that’s not leading us where we thought it would,” said Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station program for NASA.

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NASA proposed a new solution that would bind the private companies more closely to NASA, requiring them not to build free-flying space stations but rather to work directly with the space agency on modules that would, at least initially, dock with the International Space Station. This change was not well-received.

Part of not telling the private station coordinators what they need is undoubtedly that NASA themselves don't know what they need the new stations to do. 

• Building space station modules is really hard. The HALO and iHAB elements of the now-shelved Lunar Gateway—have both faced significant delays.
• It’s very expensive. Privately, the space station companies have told NASA they generally expect their stations to cost a few billion dollars to construct. NASA believes a truer estimate is probably in the range of $5 to $10 billion. And then it costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to operate, on top of approximately $2 billion in crew and cargo transportation costs for continuous presence.
• Stations are operationally challenging. The ISS (NASA) has to deal with debris-avoidance maneuvers, equipment failures, medical emergencies, and more. None of the current four companies have any experience with this. 
• Who will come to the space stations? It’s not at all clear that the European Space Agency would pay private stations (or transportation providers such as SpaceX) directly for time on orbit. Typically, they have “bartered” services with NASA for crew time on the International Space Station. NASA is also dubious that the “orbital economy” touted by the private companies will come to pass. “We can’t entertain fiction,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said this week. “It has to be grounded in reality.”

This graphic outlines NASA’s alternative plan for commercial stations. Credit: NASA

In the four months after Isaacman became administrator, the issue of what to do with commercial space stations has been one of several raging fires his team has had to put out. In some ways, it appears to be the most intractable. 

The architect of the original Commercial LEO destinations (CLD) program, a longtime NASA official named Phil McAlister who retired last year, does not believe NASA’s new option meets those goals.

“I don’t see how this new plan benefits industry at all,” he told Ars. “This new plan destroys the development work the companies have accomplished over the last several years, and it ensures NASA and the nation will see no benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars that NASA has spent on CLD designs that are now obsolete.”

Of the companies that have been working on their own stations, Axiom, Voyager, Blue Origin, and Vast Space, all but Axiom have all designed “free-flying” stations from the beginning and never intend to dock with the International Space Station, nor go through the ultra-rigorous and expensive certification process to do that. NASA is being too "top down" - decreeing things from the top. They should start from the standpoint of issuing that Request For Proposal. They should try to set it up so that they can use whatever they need to use of the other station's capabilities, and let the new space station sell time on board to colleges or small businesses that will grow into it.

Under 6 days to Artemis II

With all relevant disclaimers about how well preparations go and no big changes, we are under 6 days until the Artemis II mission to loop around the moon, sending an astronaut crew farther from Earth than any group of people since Apollo 17 - the last Apollo mission. Thanks to a website apparently created for just such questions, this was the time to the "T zero" of 6:24PM EDT on Wednesday, April 1st.Counting from the time at the bottom of this screen capture.

At the risk of being too boring, you know that this is going to be the first crewed mission of the Artemis/Orion capsule, and that there has only been one test flight of the fully stacked Artemis SLS system, in November 2022. 

Each Artemis mission is going to cost in the vicinity of $4 Billion and both the first and second missions were delayed repeatedly with problems fueling the system, leaking fuel and other problems with the system. I prefer to think that when we're launching a rocket that's not only the same basic design as previous vehicles but that's literally using parts that flew on previous programs, that everything should go smoother than a system that's new to everyone who gets near it. Artemis II had a Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) in February and failed it, requiring the system be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to be repaired. It then passed the WDR and another problem surfaced the day after they declared success. That led to a second rollback to the VAB. 

NASA has said it won't perform another WDR, which means there are fewer boxes to check during this second stint at the pad. Still, a launch on April 1 is far from guaranteed. NASA will undoubtedly err on the side of caution, given that this is a crewed mission. The stakes are higher. If it doesn't launch during the period between April 1 and 6, there's another window opening April 30th. They haven't posted any summaries of the windows starting from May and through the summer. 

How NASA plans to get nuclear power to Mars

NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on the Lunar Gateway (lunar space station) and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the current efforts to get back to the moon, especially in light of Jared Isaacman's and President Trump's approaches to space policy.

Don't forget though that Lunar Gateway and other components of the previous approach have been under construction for years and $4.5 billion has been spent so far, with hardware already well into the assembly process; including being delivered almost exactly a year ago. 

The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA’s rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.

This is not the first time NASA has announced a nuclear propulsion demo. More than 20 years ago, NASA was working on a nuclear-electric propulsion initiative called Project Prometheus. It was canceled. In 2021, NASA and DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development agency, started work on a nuclear rocket engine known as DRACO. NASA and the Pentagon canceled the DRACO program last year. 

The cancellation of the DRACO  program (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations) is not unusual. Space-based nuclear power programs being cancelled has been the norm, despite there being solid reasons for developing them. Nuclear power seems to be the logical choice for more ambitious robotic missions deeper into the Solar System, where the energy from photovoltaic cells isn't enough to generate the required power. Closer to Earth, nuclear reactors on the Moon can be used to power habitats, robots, and lunar bases during the two-week-long lunar night. 

As an aside I remember reading about this topic in the late 1960s, in particular a program called NERVA, the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. Looking into things for this post, I see that President Nixon canceled the NERVA project in 1973. Despite nearly two decades of work, NERVA never flew in space. This is one of those cases where everyone sees the engineering trades but getting all the approvals is the big problem. 

Nuclear-powered rocket engines are more efficient than chemical rockets. They come in two forms: nuclear-thermal and nuclear-electric engines. Nuclear-thermal rockets produce higher thrust, using heat from a reactor to heat up a chemical rocket fuel. Nuclear-electric engines have lower thrust but greater efficiency. The now-canceled DRACO mission would have used the former approach. NASA’s new nuclear mission will use the latter.

This is the mission Isaacman talked about in the short video yesterday - sending a nuclear powered rocket called SR-1 Freedom to Mars with robotic helicopters on board. 

NASA will cannibalize the core module of Gateway for the SR-1 mission. The Power and Propulsion Element, or PPE, is under construction at Lanteris Space Systems in Palo Alto, California. The module will have the most powerful electric propulsion system ever flown in space, with three 12-kilowatt engines and four 6-kilowatt thrusters. The PPE would have originally relied entirely on solar power. Under NASA’s new plan, it will have solar arrays and a uranium-fueled fission reactor.
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The goal for SR-1 Freedom is to “prove the US can build, launch, and operate a nuclear propulsion system,” laying the “foundation” for more capable missions to follow, said Steve Sinacore, NASA’s program executive for space reactors. Launch is just 33 months away.

Launching 33 months from now is December of 2028; and since today happens to be the 25th, that means launch would be Christmas Day of 2028.  I wouldn't bet on that.  That said, Space Reactor 1, or SR-1, will have a roughly 20-kilowatt fission reactor, a fraction of the power levels NASA aimed to achieve with previously planned missions before their cancellations. This is still 20 times more electricity than the nuclear power generators currently operating in deep space, such as on NASA’s Mars rovers and the Voyager probes leaving the Solar System.

Artist's illustration of NASA's Space Reactor-1 mission approaching Mars. Credit: NASA

Although NASA will be the “prime integrator” for SR-1, actually launching radioactive fuel into space requires input from multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Energy. Any rocket selected to launch a nuclear-powered mission must undergo a special certification. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which NASA originally booked to launch the Gateway core module, is undergoing a nuclear certification to launch NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

The three helicopters that Isaacman said SR-1 would carry are currently envisioned to be duplicates of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, that survived many times the expected number of flights.  

“After separating from SR-1 Freedom, the entry capsule enters the Martian atmosphere at hypersonic speeds greater than Mach 5, slowing to approximately Mach 2,” Sinacore said. “Next, a supersonic parachute deploys to slow the capsule further, and finally, the heat shield separates and the helicopters are released in a first-ever mid-air deployment.”

NASA isn’t sure what they will do with the SR-1 mothership after reaching Mars. They could try to maneuver it into orbit around the red planet, or slingshot the spacecraft past Mars to head to another planetary destination.

Looking at these details becoming available, this SR-1 mission seems to be the most interesting NASA mission in many years.