US Artemis
Moon Monday #216: Firefly Blue Ghost brings precision landing and lunar sci-tech bounties
Plus: Contextualizing the failure of Intuitive Machines’ second Moon mission and that of Lunar Trailblazer as grave losses for NASA.
US Artemis
By Jatan Mehta | Coverage, with context, of NASA’s Artemis and CLPS programs to return humans and robots to the Moon after Apollo. This time to (hopefully) stay.
US Artemis
Moon Monday #215: Firefly performs first actual soft lunar landing for the US in the 21st century, bags key firsts
Plus: Intuitive Machines and Lunar Trailblazer launch for Luna while KASA plans the same. And, maybe nobody should “dominate” space.
US Artemis
Moon Monday #214: Blue Ghost preps for lunar landing, gets its fix in lunar orbit
Plus: Intuitive Machines set to launch second Moon lander, Australia continues lunar tech investments, and more.
US Artemis
Moon Monday #213: Mission updates from the US, Japan, China, and this Indian
CLPS and Artemis updates * On February 13, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program successfully fired its engines for 4 minutes and 15 seconds to enter an elliptical orbit around Luna. Over the rest of February, Blue Ghost will fire its engines multiple times
Articles
Critical scientific documents go missing from NASA-backed lunar community website
A whole host of documents presenting work and recommendations of US scientists and engineers in service of NASA’s Moon exploration goals have gone missing from the website of the agency-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG). The missing documents include but is not limited to the key 2023 CLOC-SAT report
US Artemis
Moon Monday #212: UNO Skip, then UNO Flip, ft. VIPER and Artemis
Plus: Scientific archives as your Wild Card, a Draw Four for Boeing, UNO Reverse with Japan, and a stack of Artemis updates.
Moon Monday
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
US Artemis
ISRO provided ground tracking support for Intuitive Machines’ NASA CLPS Moon landing
Last week I wrote how the annual report of NSIL, an Indian government arm tasked with commercializing ISRO’s space technologies, notes that ISRO provided commercial ground tracking support for a lunar mission by another country in 2023. For some reason, the NSIL report doesn’t specify the mission name.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #211: A long march of lunar papers from China, and mission updates
Chinese researchers have published a whole range of papers lately on their recent lunar exploration outcomes as well as ongoing scoping of future ambitions. Here’s a contextualized compilation. 1. Studying rocks from the first lunar farside samples brought to Earth by the Chang’e 6 mission has revealed that
US Artemis
Moon Monday #210: Mission updates from Japan, the US, China, South Korea, India, and Finland
Read to the end to know how I avoid (Artemis) hot takes on Moon Monday.
Moon Monday
Moon Monday #209: Let’s be high on launch and low on provocation
Updates on CLPS, ispace, Artemis, Chandrayaan 4, and more. Read to the end for a fact check on an op-ed.
US Artemis
How to follow CLPS Moon mission updates
With a fleet of NASA-supported robotic Moon landers part of the agency’s CLPS program launching throughout this decade, I’ve compiled an exhaustive rundown for you to be up to speed on these novel missions: All about CLPS Moon landing missions 🌗 I update this page every month or two.