Moon Monday #202: A bao-burrito-bhel of global lunar updates

Dating farside volcanic samples, awaiting the next wave of landers, and disliking opaque orbital operations.

Moon Monday #201: Scientists can now study exotic Chang’e 6 lunar samples

Plus: New round of Chang’e 5 sample studies, gifting part of the Moon, and Sino-US cooperation

Moon Monday #200: Thank you, a crewed Chinese rover, Artemis updates, and more

Welcome to the 200th edition of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter! 🚀🌗 I’d like to take this moment to highlight four things working on Moon Monday has enabled: 1. An extensive 4-year archive of curated and contextualized global lunar exploration developments, with embedded links to everything. All editions are completely

I write for you, not social media or SEO

Many of my headlines make little sense to Google, Web Search Engines, and for SEO. For example, I titled Moon Monday #199 as “Not the fault in our stars but certainly stressful faults on our Moon”. Most likely, mainstream social media algorithms don’t care much for such headlines either.

Moon Monday #199: Not the fault in our stars but certainly stressful faults on our Moon

Let’s study Moonquakes to not let them shake a Moonbase.

Moon Monday #198: Suit up to walk under Moonlight, and grab global mission updates

First look at the Artemis Moonwalking suit Following China’s unveiling of its lunar spacesuit last month, Axiom Space has revealed the latest design of its AxEMU suit that astronauts will wear on NASA’s crewed Artemis III lunar surface mission later this decade. The first-time unveiling of the suit

Discussing India’s lunar exploration heading with Carnegie India (podcast)

I was a guest on Carnegie India’s podcast Interpreting India. In light of the recently approved Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission, we discuss for a good 45 minutes where India’s Moon exploration plans are heading, and what are the enablers and constraints on the increasingly complex road for

Moon Monday #197: Starship Artemis, and lunar mission updates

NASA’s road to the Moon inches through Starship SpaceX’s fifth launch of its fully integrated Starship Super Heavy rocket on October 13 was a resounding success, with both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship second stage completing their flight as well as soft return objectives. With this

Indian Space Progress #20–21: ISRO’s plan to study Venus alongside NASA and ESA

Also in this special edition: ISRO’s ambitions to fetch samples from the Moon, build a space station, and develop a heavy-lift rocket!

Moon Monday #196: Confusion about lunar water and LUPEX, and papers plus mission updates

You can now follow my articles on some non-questionable social networks that also federate (interoperate): Flipboard, Mastodon and Bluesky. The hunt for water on the Moon continues US researchers find that permanently shadowed regions up to 77° latitude—which is outside the Moon’s south pole—could host surface and

Let’s explore our Moon’s mountains! 🌖

The Moon is home to some amazing mountains. Unlike the millions of years it takes for most mountains on Earth to form via slowly colliding tectonic plates, most lunar mountains form near-instantly through asteroid or cometary impacts. Here are some resources to explore them. 🗻 1. With cool elevation graphs and

Moon Monday #195: Little LUNA on Earth, a Sino spacesuit, and communicating navcom

You know how I remarked in the previous Moon Monday about having two feature stories instead of one to adequately contextualize big new developments? Well, this week’s Moon Monday has three! For Europe, China, and the US. 🙈 Europe’s new test facility brings more of those lunar vibes on