My experience at the Galaxy Forum in China. I attended the 2024 Galaxy Forum in Wenchang, China last week, where I along with speakers from over 12 countries discussed global lunar exploration plans, ...

The ninth launch of SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy rocket on May 29 failed as well—due to a fuel leak and loss of attitude control on the upper stage, and the anomalous engine re-lighting of the ...

Emails and direct messages remain the best ways on the Web to deeply connect and converse with people. Write to me to say hi, share your thoughts, sponsor my work, hire my services, or drop an ...

RSS feed aficionados, you can subscribe to new posts from my space blog in any supported reader of your choice via this RSS feed link: * https://jatan.space/rss If you don’t know what RSS is, here’s ...

Moon Monday. Moon Monday #225: Lots of global lunar mission updates 🌙. Key news of the month: China has achieved daytime Earth-Moon distance measurement wherein a 1.2-meter telescope reflected an ...

For most of the 20th century, scientists thought the Moon’s surface was bone-dry. The 382 kilograms of rock and soil samples brought by the Apollo missions to Earth attested to this. When they did ...

A not-to-scale representation of ISRO’s Venus orbiter mission Shukrayaan. Credit: ISRO. Edit in October 2024: I’ve written a new, much longer article on ISRO’s Venus Orbiter after India approved the ...

Left: The Atlas V rocket of United Launch Alliance (ULA) taking off with NASA’s Curiosity rover inside the fairing.Right: Tory Bruno, CEO and President of ULA. Image credits: ULA. Glued to the Apollo ...

NASA is returning humans to the Moon later in the decade, but a fleet of agency-supported robotic spacecraft will touch down on lunar soil starting this year. With its $2.6 billion Commercial Lunar ...

On December 16, China successfully completed the Chang’e 5 mission to bring samples from the Moon, their first such endeavor. The last time lunar samples were fetched was when the Soviet Union sent ...

Update: The article got a response from an ex-ISRO scientist to which I responded back. An artist’s impression of the Mangalyaan spacecraft. Credit: ISRO. September 24, 2020, marks six years since ...

NASA wants to land humans on the Moon again—this time to stay. The agency’s Artemis program envisions people sustainably living on the Moon using locally available resources like water. We know from ...