Recent content by Moonwatcher

In all the articles about SPHEREx and PUNCH, none of them mention what orbit they will be launching into. Seems strange to launch such lightweight space telescopes on a Falcon 9 that can haul up 40,000 lbs. easily into low Earth orbit, but I guess it is the most cost-effective launch vehicle...

SLS was never about getting back to the moon. It was just a jobs program to keep people in jobs in powerful Senators' and Congressmen's states. If it had been about going back to the moon, we would have built SLS as Block 2 from the get-go and never done these anemic payload versions at such...

Considering that the JWST was 10X overbudget and likely should have been cancelled, astronomers should be looking at the glass as being 80% full, not 20% empty. Any data we get from JWST is lucky gravy at this point. In the future, hopefully NASA will do a better job at staying on time and on...

Indeed, at the rate of current progress, we will be lucky to back on the moon by 2030. Mars is a great aspirational goal, but there is far too much to be done, designed, and tested. At NASA's current budget of just 0.5% of the Federal budget (half a penny out of each dollar), there simply isn't...

We have an example size of one. Us. It is hard, in fact impossible, to fathom any conclusions from a sample of one. Everything these "thinkers" conceive is based on thin air, mere conjecture at best.

It has been a few years, LOL, so I can't remember the other sites, (should be able to find them on a NASA website) but some of them I recall would have been very interesting to see and geologically significant. No, in those days no one suspected there was any water on the moon. Those findings...

Yes, even a "negative" provided information, but we knew the Apollo missions were capped at 17 due to the Congress and Nixon administration killing Apollo. Guess we ought to happy we still have some of the old hardware left to show naysayers who say we didn't go to the moon. Ugh. Still, given...

Glad that some good data could be had from the Apollo 16 samples. It was disappointing that neither Descartes nor Caley were volcanic in origin, so all the geologists in the backroom were wrong. Young and Duke knew this as soon as they landed and looked at the rocks. From then on in many...

Crew has changed several times. In 2019, Eric Boe was replaced by Mike Fincke, due to a medical issue. Mike Fincke was supposed to fly the CFT mission with NASA rookie Nicole Mann and veteran Chris Ferguson (a crew of three). But then Chris Ferguson quit being an astronaut citing "family...

One issue that needs to be addressed with any "ban" is the use of nuclear power and even nuclear bombs in the service of HELPING to advance space exploration. We have seen time and time again that technology that can be used as weapons often have other peaceful uses. For example, high powered...

Excellent article. But "He has accumulated a total of 178 days in space and logged 5 hours and 36 minutes of time in four spacewalks" seems a bit off. Normally each EVA would last 3 to 7 hours on the ISS. Might it be 25 hours and 36 minutes? Given all we know about the tests of this vehicle...