Independent Space Writer & Journalist ~ Author of Moon Monday ~ Invited Speaker ~ Slow thinker ~ Human | Email me: hey@jatan.space
Indian Space Progress
I hope you enjoy this bird’s-eye view of all major developments in India’s space trajectory over the last two months! 🚀 India’s space budget for FY2024 Despite the many highs of 2023 for Indian space, the FY2024 budget of $1.56 billion for the country’s Department of
Moon Monday
China’s ambition to build a lunar navcom constellation Ling Xin reports on China’s ongoing studies to have a phased constellation of 30+ satellites which would provide high-precision navigation as well as high-bandwidth communications for most places on the Moon with up to quadruple coverage. Earlier studies focused on
Pages
I’m glad to share that alongside many inspiring individuals like Louis Burtz, Ranjana Kaul and Yoav Landsman, I’ve been an Affiliate at the Open Lunar Foundation for a while now. We’re thrilled to aid the non-profit’s daunting work of developing key technical and policy building blocks
Moon Monday
On the intersection of ispace, NASA CLPS, funding, and science The publicly traded ispace Japan is taking another loan from the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, amounting to $62 million, to continue working on its upcoming three Moon missions: * The company’s second lunar lander M2/RESILIENCE, launching end of 2024
Moon Monday
How will ISRO go from Chandrayaan 3 to an Indian on the Moon? Clarifying and laying down India’s plans for increasingly complex robotic lunar missions, where human spaceflight comes in, and what realistic timelines look like.
Moon Monday
The first ever samples from the Moon’s farside are now cached on Earth After successfully collecting samples from the Moon’s farside and stowing them in lunar orbit earlier by excellently orchestrating multiple Mooncraft over months, CNSA made the Chang’e 6 mission’s lunar orbiter module fly towards
Moon Monday
Newly forged KASA aims to land on Luna At long last, South Korea formed its space agency called the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA) to consolidate and/or coordinate the country’s various space activities—which span space science research, rocket and spacecraft technology development, and private space activities. So far,
Moon Monday
The efforts to gauge plume effects of Moon landers Two new papers by Philip Metzger suggest that Apollo lander rocket plumes blasted out at least four times more lunar soil than previously thought. This work, captured well by Michael Greshko for Scientific American, is part of an ongoing larger community
Articles
Today (June 14), Srinivasa Hegde, Mission Director of India’s first lunar orbiter Chandrayaan 1, passed away. Among its many unique feats, Chandrayaan 1 discovered water on the Moon, which encouraged many nations worldwide to explore our cosmic neighbor, and also catalyzed NASA—a key partner on the mission—to
Moon Monday
I’m truly excited to welcome Astrolab as the latest yearly sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter! 🚀 California-based Venturi Astrolab Inc. (Astrolab) is developing a fleet of large multi-purpose rovers for advanced exploration of our Moon. To that end, Astrolab leads one of the three teams NASA selected earlier
Moon Monday
I’m over the Moon to share that Open Lunar Foundation is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the fourth year in a row! 🌗 Open Lunar is a non-profit organization that brings together and enables a diverse set of experts to develop key technical
Indian Space Progress
I’m thrilled to welcome PierSight as the latest sponsor of my monthly Indian Space Progress blog+newsletter! 🚀 Ahmedabad-based PierSight Space, which raised $6 million recently and also won the INDUS-X challenge for oil spill detections, aims to build a constellation of synthetic aperture radar satellites for persistent ocean monitoring.
Moon Monday
Welcome to the fourth Chinese lunar special after Moon Monday #174, #175 and #176. In this edition, the top story focuses on contextualizing all we know about China’s plans to create a long-term Moonbase. Through a CASC news release on April 26, chief designer of China's lunar
Moon Monday
Welcome to the third Chinese lunar special after Moon Monday #174 and Moon Monday #175. In this edition, the top story focuses on contextualizing all that comprises China’s first crewed Moon landing mission. It’s incredible how China has made systematic strides with their Moon missions. The successful lunar
Moon Monday
This week the Chinese lunar theme continues from Moon Monday #174 as we try to get a contextual understanding of the country’s lunar endeavors—information about which is otherwise usually scattered in bits and pieces. New craft around Luna, including a first for Pakistan On May 8, China’s
Talks
I’ve been speaking about exploring space, our Moon, and science writing on multiple forums lately, more so than the usual. But I didn’t want to share each of these talks and interviews as individual blog posts, and then also promote them all on like five social networks. These
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