Sharing Moon Monday’s approach to avoiding (Artemis) hot takes and speculative coverage

Some of you have been wondering and asking why I haven’t covered potential Artemis changes in the new US administration on my Moon Monday blog+newsletter. So here’s the thing.

In the nearly three months since the US electoral outcome, speculations on shifts in the Artemis program have come and gone, or even gotten superseded. As it is the space industry suffers from having more coverage of pre-launch and ongoing spaceflight than that of post spaceflight. As such, what many people and media outlets have been engaging in for the past two months is pre-pre-spaceflight and pre-policy!

I’ve generally kept an editorial rule that I don’t discuss or proliferate something on my blog that’s more speculation or more incomplete than not. I prefer to wait for a tangible aspect of something to move in the present, and then pull related threads and coverage to get a better sense of what’s happening and where things are really going. My goal with Moon Monday is to archive updates and efforts that actually transpired, including for Artemis. This way it can provide more long term value rather than be tied to just the news cycle.

There can be good reasons to do speculative coverage, and I’ve done some in the past when I thought it was warranted or if it was something only I could’ve said. But for Artemis, there are so many doing and spreading the speculations already that I don’t feel the need to proliferate it all further. I’m quite tired of the transient way in which most space news is covered, and I’d like to keep Moon Monday away from all of that.

To be clear, I’m not implying other media outlets should take the same approach as Moon Monday. Unlike what seems to be broadly assumed by people at large, the media is not a monolith. Not all media publications and journalists cover the same topics, and to the same depth or on comparable timescales. It holds true even within science and space journalism. In fact, if it wasn’t for many outlets providing space communities with daily coverage, my weekly Moon Monday editions wouldn’t have been able to build on it to provide a broader context. But there’s a difference between daily updates on actual developments versus transient speculations.

Just as importantly, majority of the US-based and Europe-based media publications covering space have a strong western bias, which is something I explicitly try and avoid here. Moon Monday covers global lunar exploration. There are many other lunar developments happening right now in countries worldwide—and that doesn’t mean including only China—which don’t get covered well or enough. These developments are just as important too.

With Moon Monday, my goal has been to provide a larger global picture that complements the daily coverage in parts of the world, and use that to identify gaps and fill them if possible. In turn, this contextual coverage feeds back to journalists and daily reporters worldwide who are subscribed to Moon Monday.

And so that is why you haven’t seen me spread Artemis speculations vis-à-vis the new US administration on Moon Monday. Having explained these things, now that the new US presidential term has officially begun and some space policy activity is unfolding, I look forward to covering all the tangible updates as well as share my perspectives along the way while retaining the approach above. To follow Artemis developments, subscribe to my blog for free and check out the dedicated Artemis page.

Thoughts?