Category: Science

Space News for August 2026. 

There’s a lot of news that’s happened lately that could have major effects on the way that space exploration will play out over the next decade or two. So let’s get to it!

We’ve been exploring Outer Space for nearly 70 years now, so it has a lot of history behind it and of course it’s making history all of the time! (Credit: The Spaceinfo Club)

I’d like to start with a mission that may have escaped the notice of a lot of people but which is very important in view of developing space technology and infrastructure. In order to be able to function properly while in space every satellite has to be able to communicate with the ground, which means it has to have its antennas pointed back to Earth. This is especially true of the big communications satellites that are located in geostationary orbits, 36,000 km above the Earth’s surface.

When placed in a Geostationary orbit at 36,000 km above the Earth’s surface a satellite will appear to remain in the same position in the sky. Of course being so far from Earth it’s really hard to repair or refuel such a satellite! (Credit: Module 2: Weather Satellites and Orbits)

In order to maintain their proper orientation, with their antennas pointing back at our planet, communications satellites have station keeping rocket engines that must fire every so often when the satellite begins to drift out of position. Of course, these rocket engines only have so much fuel and when that runs out, well it won’t be long before that multi-million dollar satellite is just useless junk. The lifetime of any communications satellite is therefore basically a matter of how long its fuel lasts.

Communications satellites, like the Intellsat 5 shown here, must keep their antennas pointed towards Earth if they are to do their job. This requires an occasional burst from station keeping rocket engines on the satellite. When those rocket engines run out of fuel then the satellite is pretty much space junk! (Credit: www.astronautix.com)

Engineers have been talking about how to extend the lifespan of such expensive satellites ever since the 1980s; I know some of those guys! There are basically two ways to it. The first would simply be to refuel the satellites rockets while they are in geostationary orbit. That would require a specially designed ‘tanker’ spacecraft that could go up to geostationary orbit and do the refueling. At the same time it would require that communications satellites be designed so that they can be refueled, which currently none of them are!

The idea of refueling a satellite, or spaceship has long been recognized as necessary if we are to really being exploring our Solar System. (Credit: WSJ)

The second alternative would be to have a spacecraft go up to geostationary orbit, rendezvous with a communications satellite and attach a specially designed module to the satellite, a module that contains new, fully fueled rocket motors that can keep the satellite oriented properly for at least several more years. The big advantage of this scheme is that it can work with existing communications satellites.

The Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) on the right attaches itself to a communications satellite and then the MRV uses its engines to keep the communications satellite pointing in the right direction! (Credit: National Defense Magazine)

And that is exactly what was launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on the 21st of July. Developed by Northrop Grumman the ‘Mission Robotic Vehicle’ (MRV) will spend the next few months climbing to geostationary orbit where it will use its 3m long arms to attach ‘jetpacks’ to three communication satellites, extending their useful lives by an estimated six years each.

The ‘arms’ of Northrup’s MRV. Looks like something out of a Grade-B SF movie doesn’t it? (Credit: Aviation Week)

The MRV itself is about the size of a mini-van while each of the jetpacks is the size of a washing machine. After it has serviced the three satellites Northrop even hopes to launch more jetpacks enabling the MRV to service more satellites. In the long run the development of this technology will help to further reduce the cost of doing business in space, the fact that Northrop’s MRV was launched into space by the reusable Falcon 9 illustrates that point.

The Space X Falcon 9 rocket is reusable. That ability has greatly lowered the cost of getting into space. Now it is hoped that the MRV will lower the cost of staying in space! (Credit: Wikipedia)

Speaking of reusable launch systems, China has now successfully launched and, more importantly recovered the booster stage of a rocket that is comparable in size and payload to the Falcon 9. On the 9th of July a Long March 10B rocket took off from China’s Wenchang space facility on the island of Hainan. Just six minutes later the rocket’s first stage hovered in an upright orientation above a floating platform in the China Sea. As the booster hovered it was safely captured by a series of nets.

Launch of China’s Long March 10b rocket. It doesn’t look exactly like a Falcon 9 but it certainly resembles one! (Credit: Next Spaceflight)

This unique, net style of recovery, as opposed to the Falcon 9’s landing legs could help reduce the cost of the Long March 10B launch system, or make it more difficult to successfully catch the booster. Only time will tell which is true but China has taken a significant step in its desire become an equal to the US in space technology.

The Long March 10b first stage about to be caught in its recovery ‘netting’. Whether this is a better recovery technique than a rocket with landing legs is questionable right now. Only the future will tell! (Credit: Space)

Another bit of news about space concerns Boeing’s Starliner capsule, the long troubled manned capsule that was supposed to be taking astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) years before Space X’s Dragon capsule. You remember how in 2024 two NASA astronauts took Starliner on its maiden voyage to the ISS but had so many problems on the way there that the space agency decided to have them wait in space for eight months until a Space X dragon could bring them home.

Oh, the trials and tribulations of Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule. Neither NASA nor Boeing have given up yet but there is little time left to work out all of the problems with Starliner. (Credit: Space)

Well, neither Boeing nor NASA have completely given up on Starliner and word coming out of Boeing is that the problems with the maneuvering rockets are solved. Starliner is ready for another, hopefully more successful mission. This time NASA intends to just use Starliner as a cargo vehicle, carrying supplies to the ISS. The only problem now is that the ISS only has so many docking modules and they are all spoken for over the next couple of months. Nevertheless either late this year or in early 2027 it’s likely that Starliner will get one final test mission, almost certainly a make or break mission for the spacecraft.

The Cygnus cargo spacecraft has completed several supply missions to the ISS. Using the Starliner capsule for such a mission is kind of a waste, but NASA does not want to risk any more astronauts until Boeing can prove it has fixed Starliner’s problems. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Finally, on the 24th of June Space X conducted the 13th overall test flight of its massive Starship, the second test of its new version 3 model. Over the last several years Space X has had its share of problems with Starship but this latest test appears to have accomplished all of its mission objectives. Both of Starship’s stages are intended to be reusable and on this test both stages made controlled descents and hovered at their target locations before landing in the water of the Gulf of Mexico for the booster and the Indian Ocean for the upper stage.

Launch of Space X’s Starship 13. The most powerful rocket ever built Space X is getting close to ironing out all of the bugs in Starship! (Credit: Next Spaceflight)

After this test, lucky number 13, it seems that Space X needs to try to actually catch both stages in order to demonstrate that such a feat is possible. Both Space X and NASA are betting heavily on Starship. If a Moon landing is to be made in 2028 there’s a lot of work to be done and much of that work involves Starship.

NASA plans to use a modified version of Starship’s upper stage as a manned Moon lander. Space X still has a lot of work to do to make that a reality! (Credit: Wikipedia)

Before I go a late piece of news to relate. NASA and Space X have announced that the Crew 13 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has been delayed because of an oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of the Space X Dragon capsule. The mission, which had been scheduled to launch on September 13th will now take off no earlier than sometime in late September. Hopefully this delay will not be too prolonged!

What’s all this brouhaha about Data Centers, and what are Data Centers anyway? 

There have been a lot of news stories lately about Data Centers whether it be the large increase in the number of data centers being built, or all of the protests by people trying to stop data centers being built in their neighborhoods. Data centers have become the symbol of high tech companies like Meta, Google, Apple or Amazon and to many people they are the symbol of corporate greed because of how they are driving up the cost of electricity, using up scarce water resources along with just being noisy.

Data Centers are really nothing more than big buildings with lots and lots of computers all connected together inside them. Aside from a few employees to repair, or more often replace any computer that fails that’s it! However, the tech companies are making billions off of them! (Credit: Aterio)

So exactly what are data centers, why do tech companies love them, and why does it seem like everyone else hates them? Well, according to the US government in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 a data center is defined as “any facility that primarily contains electronic equipment used to process, store and transmit digital information…that uses environmental control equipment to maintain the proper conditions for the operation of electronic equipment.” That part about environmental control and proper conditions is really important because you see electronic devices don’t like heat. It’s a good rule of thumb to say that for every ten degrees Celsius that you raise the operating temperature of electronics you halve its operating lifetime.

A heat sink on top of a microprocessor ‘chip’. Every electronic device emits heat and that heat is usually the cause of their eventual failure. So electronic engineers spend a great deal of their time dealing with the heat! (Credit: Blog)

 The problem is that electronic equipment generates heat; a lot of it. So much of the work of electronic engineers is dealing with the heat that the device they design generates. In fact there’s a saying among electrical engineers that they go to college for four years to learn about circuits then spend the forty years of their career getting rid of the heat.

Just a small example of what electrical engineering majors study in college. I’ve taught things like that! (Credit: Math Tutor DVD)

Going by our definition the first data center would have been the basement of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s where ENIAC, the world’s first completely electronic digital computer was built. With 18000 vacuum tubes ENIAC generated a lot of heat, so it needed a lot of air conditioning to keep it cool. Between the air conditioning and the power needed for the computer itself ENIAC took up a lot of space and required a lot of electricity to operate.

The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The first real electronic computer was built in the basement of this building! (Credit: Wikipedia)

In the decades that followed Sperry-Univac and IBM built hundreds of large computers that used vacuum tubes. All of these computers needed large facilities with a lot of power and air conditioning. All of these facilities were data centers but back then they were so few in number that nobody really paid much attention to them.

This is how ENIAC was ‘programmed’ by routing a whole lot of cabling to connect different parts of its circuitry. We’ve made some progress since then! (Credit: American Physical Society)

Then, in the late 1970s the first computers that used transistors on integrated circuits were developed. Actually the first such computer was inside the Apollo Command Module that enabled the astronauts to navigate to the Moon and back. These microcircuit computers were much smaller, cheaper and required much less power to run, they were even called ‘Personal Computers’ (PCs) because an individual person could actually own one.

The very first Apple Personal Computer, now on display at the Smithsonian Institute. Using transistors to build computers was a revolution called miniaturization. (Credit: Apple History)

During the 1980s and 1990s the advent of PCs greatly reduced the need for large data centers. Instead of a big room with a single big computer in it every employee could have a PC sitting on their desk. As time went on however, all of those PCs began to get ‘Networked’ together so that information could be shared between them. These networks required special computers called ‘Servers’, basically a PC with a large amount of memory, and these servers were kept in special rooms that as time went on got bigger and bigger until they resembled the big data centers of the 50s and 60s.

Remember when Hillary Clinton got in so much trouble because she had a private server to store all of her emails. Well, lots is people who think they are important have such servers. (Credit: Geek Wire)

As more and more kinds of information, books, pictures, movies, music etc, etc, etc got digitized there was an ever greater need for memory and in the early 2000s entire buildings containing thousands of computers began to appear. These new data centers soon became larger than the data centers of old as big tech companies like Apple or Google began to sell memory space ‘On the Cloud’ as it became known. That’s right, what the tech companies call ‘storing your information on the cloud’ is really nothing more than putting it on a memory computer, a server that’s located in a big building somewhere, a data center.

All of these techies talking about ‘the cloud’ well it’s really nothing more than a huge number of electronic devices all being connected together. That ‘networking’ takes a large number of computers to operate and those computers are put in data centers. (Credit: UX Collection)

If you buy a movie from Amazon Prime, well what you have actually bought is stored data that is on some computer in some data center somewhere. All of the images that you take with your iPhone are automatically uploaded to Apple’s cloud, that is one of the data centers owned by Apple. All of the new ‘Streaming Services’ with thousands of TV shows and movies for you to watch are completely dependent on data centers as will the coming revolution in driverless vehicles. We all store so much information today that the business of building and running data centers is now worth tens of billions of dollars and employs thousands of well paid IT personnel.

Do you subscribe to one or more of these ‘Streaming Services’. Well, they all only exist because of data centers where all of the programs you watch are stored! (Credit: VPM)

The problem today with data centers is really that it’s all too much, too quickly. As of the beginning of August there were 5,427 data centers in the US, about 60% of the world’s total, with another 802 under construction along with plans for another 3,969. As I have already mentioned several times data centers use large quantities of electricity and water for cooling and the mad dash to build more and more of them is causing the price of electricity to skyrocket in certain areas while at the same time making water shortages even worse. Currently data centers are consuming about 50 gigawatts of electricity and it is estimated that in just ten years that figure will more than triple to 180 gigawatts, just imagine what that will do you your electric bill.

Like everything else these days our electrical bills keep going up, and data centers are one of the big reasons. So right now, people are taking out their frustrations about the economy on data centers. (Credit: Fundamentals of Electricity)

But let’s be honest, much of the anger over data centers is also a reaction to all of the billions of dollars of profit being made by these big tech companies while most of the American people are finding it difficult to keep up with inflation, to pay for gas and put food on the table. Right now, the opposition to data centers is the one issue in the US that has support across the political spectrum with both democrats and republicans calling for moratoriums on data center construction. Polls show that just about half of all Americans strongly oppose data centers while only a fifth somewhat supports them. Both the states of New York and Texas have imposed moratoriums, as have another ten states. 

Recent polls show suppose for data centers is almost nonexistent while opposition to them is very high! (Credit: CNN)
Due to a large protest in Upper Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has become the latest state to place restrictions of the construction of data centers! (Credit: WPVI)

We need data centers, our economy and society are now fully dependent on computers and all of the growth in our economy will come with a proportionate growth in the numbers of computers. At the same time however we need data centers to be good citizens, not hogging resources and making life miserable for the actual human beings who live near them.

Much of the anger directed against data centers is due to all of the money tech companies are making while consumers are getting poorer. Nevertheless. data centers themselves need to learn how to be good neighbors as well! (Credit: PCMag)

A few common sense regulations are therefore in order. First, since data centers are large buildings, many are over 100,000 square feet in floor space with flat roofs; those roofs should be covered in solar panels so that the data center actually generates much if not all of its own electricity! Recycling the water that is used for cooling should also be a requirement for any large data center. Also, large data centers should simply not be built in a residential area, they can be noisy and basically a headache to anyone living nearby. All of these problems can be settled reasonably, without a lot of political fighting. As I said, right now everyone, conservative and liberal alike wants to get data center construction under control. The political will is there. Who knows maybe for once we can get a problem solved without screwing it all up!

The Vaccine debate: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) continues to undermine public health policies even as the number of Americans catching infectious diseases continues to grow. 

Ever since Edward Jenner performed the first vaccination in 1796 the very idea of using a disease to fight disease has been extremely controversial. Jenner had noticed that the young milk maidens who got cowpox on their hands never seemed to get the much more dangerous smallpox. To test this idea he deliberately inoculated a young boy named James Phipps with cowpox to see if he would become immune to smallpox. It worked but Jenner’s experimenting on a human being, risking a young boy’s life upset many people.

Edward Jenner performing the first vaccination. The idea of injecting a disease directly into people in order to prevent them from catching that disease has always seemed bazaar to many people, however it actually works! (Credit: New York Times)

In the 230 years that followed vaccines had their ups and downs. Inoculations seemed to be effective against some diseases like smallpox, even though sometimes the vaccine could cause the patient to catch the disease instead of becoming immune to it. For some other diseases, like syphilis for example, vaccinations appeared to have no effect. At the same time methods for preparing vaccines where anything but standard, since no one knew how vaccines actually worked, no one really knew how to prepare a good vaccine.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw was very anti-vaccination, but remember in his time doctors didn’t understand the difference between a bacterial and a viral infection. We’ve made a lot of progress since then and vaccines are now thoroughly tested and monitored to make them as safe as possible. (Credit: Amazon.com

It wasn’t until 1955 that Jonas Salk succeeded in developing a vaccine for polio and in doing so he established a strong methodology for the creation of vaccines. What Salk did was to first isolate the poliovirus; viruses themselves had only been discovered 24 years earlier. Then he grew large amounts of the polio virus in chicken eggs before killing the virus with formaldehyde. By injecting the dead virus into a human being that person’s immune system would then develop antibodies to fight polio without any risk of that person actually catching polio.

Jonas Salk with a vial of the polio virus. Salk’s development of a vaccine against polio is one of the greatest success stories in the history of medicine and science in general! (Credit: BBC)

I can still remember the campaigns in the early 1960s to get everyone vaccinated against polio. I was vaccinated, as was every member of my family. The vaccine worked so well that now the terrible disease of polio is all but non-existent in the United States. In the years that followed vaccines became a public health policy that every citizen was expected to follow and which did in fact greatly improve the health of the country as a whole.

I remember that day, my entire family got the sugar cube. We were all just grateful to not have to worry about being paralyzed by polio! (Credit: Facebook)

Nevertheless, there were still many people who felt that injecting a disease, even a dead disease into a healthy person was simply wrong and there was just no arguing with them. At the same time there are a small number of people who are just so scared of needles, or who simply can’t be bothered to get the vaccine. Because of these people there is still the occasional case of polio in the US.

Nobody likes getting a shot, and in that moment we don’t think about what the disease could do to us. Most people however are wise enough to understand that a slight, and I do mean slight pain now will prevent something much worse later on! (Credit: Economy)

The success of the polio vaccine was followed up by vaccines for such diseases as measles, mumps and rubella, the so-called MMR vaccine, which unfortunately for me was only developed after I had gotten all three diseases. At the same time vaccines were developed for influenza, but because that disease mutates so rapidly it turned out that a new flu shot is needed every year.

The infamous MMR vaccine. There is no credible evidence that MMR causes autism, but many people believe it does with a religious fervor. That’s the beginning of how we got in this mess! (Credit: Wikipedia)

There were still problems however; occasionally a person might have an allergic reaction to a vaccine, especially if they are allergic to eggs. This is what happened with the swine flu vaccine in 1975. Also, for some infectious diseases a vaccine simply could not be found, that’s true of the HIV virus that causes AIDS. These rare problems were ammunition for the anti-vaccination minority that continued to claim their right to freedom of choice, in other words their right to get sick and possibly infect others.

When you do get sick the best thing you can do both for yourself and others is to stay home, or go to the hospital! (Credit: Facebook)

Then starting in the 1990s there were stories about how the MMR vaccine caused autism, the anti-vaxers pointing to an article by British physician Andrew Wakefield, an article that has since been declared fraudulent. Wakefield it was discovered, was pushing his own formula for a measles vaccine, so claiming that MMR had problems was in his financial interest. Nevertheless the new Internet had created a fertile field for conspiracies and the anti-vaxers keep the myth going that MMR caused autism. A myth that has been gaining strength ever since.

Anti-vaxers claim that Drug companies make millions off of vaccines that cause autism but it was Andrew Wakefield, the author of the fraudulent article about MMR and autism who stood to gain millions from his lies! (Credit: CNN)

Things have gone so badly that President Trump, in his infinite insanity, has seen fit to put an anti-vaxer, Robert F. Kennedy jr., in charge of our nation’s health services as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is not just an anti-vaxer, he distrusts the medical establishment in general, preferring healthy eating and exercise to a doctor’s care. Never mind the fact that the medical establishment itself recommends healthy eating and exercise. While some of Kennedy’s ideas are sound many of his ideas however verge on psuedo-science.

The traits of Pseudo-science are all over the actions of the Trump administration. Not only in the department of Health and Human Services but in other key government departments as well! (Credit: Skeptical Science)

As a part of his campaign to “Make America Healthy Again” or MAHA Kennedy has advised pregnant woman to not take Tylenol for their pain, encouraged people to eat more red meat as well as working to make childhood vaccinations ‘optional’. At the same time he has withdrawn the US from international medical organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) while firing legitimate medical researchers at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and replacing them with his own handpicked anti-medical establishment followers.

As a part of his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ campaign RFK jr. has inverted the Food Pyramid, to the great concern of most medical professionals! (Credit: NPR)

The results of all these upheavals is clear to see, in 2025 the state of Texas saw the largest outbreak of Measles in the US since 1990, only to be surpassed in 2026 by an outbreak in South Carolina. In both outbreaks over 90% of those infected were unvaccinated. In the last two years the US has now seen more cases of measles than it had seen in the years 2000-2024 combined, and remember 2026 isn’t over yet!

Last year it was Texas, early this year it was South Carolina now it’s Pennsylvania that is seeing an outbreak of Measles, a disease that we had eradicated decades ago. (Credit: 6ABC)

Meanwhile the Trump administration’s attitude towards vaccines has also led to a decline in the number of people getting their yearly flu shot, a result of which is an abnormally high number of people coming down with the flu. Over 18 million cases were recorded this past flu season with 230,000 hospitalizations and close to 10,000 deaths. Will things continue to get worse? Only time will tell. However, so long as pseudo-science and conspiracy theories are given credence in the halls of government the basic health of the people of the United States is in great danger.     

Space News for June 2026. 

There’s been a lot going on in space exploration this past month, much of it dealing with both the US and China’s Lunar ambitions but also in robotic probes exploring the Solar system. Let’s get to it!

‘Space, the final frontier’. That’s still as true today as it was back in 1967. But only if we here on Earth can learn to work out our differences without fighting will we ready to ‘seek out new life and new civilizations’ (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

The recent success of NASA’s Artemis II mission had given hope that Artemis III, scheduled for 2027, might actually return human beings to the surface of the Moon. However, delays in the development of the Lunar lander vehicle by both Space X and Blue Origin have caused NASA to alter the schedule. Instead of landing on the Moon Artemis III will now rendezvous with and check out the Lunar landing module in Low Earth Orbit (LOE). So the Artemis III mission will be an updated version of the Apollo 9 mission just as Artemis II was an update of Apollo 8.

For the first time since 1972 the Artemis 2 mission succeeded in taking humans beyond Earth orbit and to the vicinity of the Moon. (Credit: NPR)

Which of the two landing modules Artemis will rendezvous with, perhaps both (?), has yet to be determined but now the plan is for Artemis IV in 2028 to be the first to land on the Lunar surface. The change in mission profile will also cause a few changes in the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket itself. Artemis III was to be the first mission to employ NASA’s new Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) but since Artemis III is ‘only going’ to LOE that stage will not be included as a part of the launch system. The good news however is that the core stage of the SLS has arrived at Kennedy Space Center where it is now being prepared at the Vehicle Assembly Building. Currently the launch of Artemis III is scheduled for no earlier than March of 2027, and no later than June. Of course all that could change depending on the progress of the lander modules.

The Lunar landers proposed by Blue Origin (l) and Space X (r). Whether either of them will be ready by the scheduled time for Artemis 3 is questionably at the present time. (Credit: Gizmodo)

And this time NASA plans to not just visit the Moon a few times as the Apollo program did. No indeed, on the 26th of May the space agency’s manager for Moon Base program’s Carlos Garcia-Galán announced plans and scheduling for the construction of a Lunar base near the Moon’s south pole over the next decade.

NASA’s plans for a Lunar base consist of three phases beginning with the first landings and leading to a permanent human presence on the Moon’s surface. (Credit: CBS News)

Phase One of the program will consist of gathering detailed information about the terrain of the moon’s south pole while ‘securing reliable access’ to the Moon’s surface, in other words completing several manned landings. Phase Two will then follow by establishing the base’s ‘initial operating capability’ while Phase Three will be a long term, permanent occupation of the base.

Artist’s impression of what the final, permanent Lunar base could look like. (Credit: Reddit)

One interesting aspect of NASA’s plans is the large-scale employment of drones in establishing the base. In fact, before any humans land at the chosen base site NASA intends to land two lunar rover vehicles, which are being designated as Lunar Terrain Vehicles or LTVs. Unlike the lunar rover from Apollo however, the LTVs are also going to be capable of autonomous movement on the lunar surface. In a sense the LTVs will be a combination of the old Apollo rover and the current Mars rovers. The idea is that the rovers will scope out the planned area of the base, giving detailed information to scientists back here on Earth. Then, once the exact spot for the base is chosen the rovers will drive there to greet the first astronauts as they land.

One concept for a Lunar Terrain Vehicle or LTV to be landed on the Moon before the astronauts and which will scout the surface while waiting for humans to arrive. (Credit: SpaceNews)

Meanwhile China has been keeping mostly secret about progress towards its goal of landing a Taikonaut on the Moon by 2030. However on May 24th the Chinese did succeed in launching their Shenzhou 23 mission to their Tiangong space station. This mission is the eleventh manned mission to China’s station in LOE where the crew will relieve the Shenzhou 22 crew who has been manning the station now for over 200 days. The Chinese space agency has also announced that one member of the Shenzhou 23 crew will remain in space for an entire year making it the longest stay in space for any Taikonaut and one of the longest for any human.

Launch of the Shenzhou 23 spacecraft to China’s Tiangong space station. (Credit: Space Launch Schedule)

And speaking of Space X, on May 22nd the Hawthorn based company carried out a test flight of its enormous Starship rocket, the new version 3. After a couple of less than optimal tests of version 2 last year Space X was hoping for a much better outcome this time and despite the failure of an engine on each of the first stage (33 engines total) and second stage (6 engines) the mission was completed as planned with the second stage simulating a landing in the Indian Ocean after reaching orbital velocity. It now remains for Space X to conduct a full simulated mission with a capture of both the first stage, already accomplished, as well as the second stage.

While Space X has yet to actually catch the upper stage of Starship, they have now made several controlled splashdowns in the Indian Ocean. (Credit: Instagram)

Space X has big plans for its starship rocket, not only for use as NASA’s Lunar lander but going forward as the main vehicle for the company’s ambitions for the planet Mars.

Space X still intends for Starship to be the vehicle that takes them to Mars. (Credit: Space X)

In a bit of breaking news, on the 28th of May a New Glenn rocket from Blue Origins was undergoing a test of its first stage rocket motors when the entire rocket exploded in a huge ball of fire. This is the second major problem in a row for the New Glenn launch system as just back in April a launch left a satellite in the wrong orbit owing to an engine failure. While it is too soon to determine just what went wrong to cause the rocket to explode thankfully no one was injured and the engineers at Blue Origin are already investigating the disaster.

Fortunately, it was only the New Glenn rocket that was destroyed during a test of the rocket’s engines. Still Blue Origin will have to figure out what went wrong before it can attempt another launch! (Credit: ABC7)

There’s also news concerning robotic probes in interplanetary space with NASA’s Psyche spacecraft on its way toward the asteroid of the same name. On May 15th the spacecraft successfully used the gravity of the planet Mars to slingshot the probe towards the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Psyche spacecraft is expected to reach it target asteroid in the summer of 2029.

The Psyche spacecraft is on its way to the asteroid of the same name. During its flight the probe used the gravitational field of Mars to give it a boost towards the asteroid belt. (Credit: Space)

One last little news item concerns NASA’s oldest operating spacecraft, Voyagers 1 and 2. Next year the two probes will reach the 50th anniversary of their launch back in 1977 and both are now getting quite low on power as the nuclear material powering their Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) continues to decay. The spacecraft lose about four watts of power every year.

The Voyager spacecraft, almost 50 years old and still sending back data. The Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) that powers the aging probe is at bottom left. (Credit: NASA-Science)

Each spacecraft began the journey with ten scientific instruments taking data but because of the power loss Voyager 1 is now only operating its magnetometer and its plasma wave detector. Voyager 2 meanwhile has both of those instruments operating along with its cosmic ray detector.

NASA’s listing of those instruments aboard the voyager spacecraft that are still operating. (Credit: NASA)

Right now NASA is quite confident that both probes will reach their 50th birthday and that Voyager 1 will reach another milestone, that of traveling one full light day from Earth, the farthest that any man made object has ever traveled. The engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL) have an idea however that may allow the Voyagers to stay alive much longer, maybe even allow them to turn some of their unused instruments back on!

The engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory are among the best in the world. They’ve kept both Voyagers operating for almost 50 years and who knows, maybe for years yet to come! (Credit: NASA JPL)

The most critical system on the Voyagers are the thrusters that orientate the probes so that their antennas point toward Earth, otherwise we would quickly lose all contact with the spacecraft. Three heating elements are needed to keep the fuel for those thrusters warm and together they use up a good bit of Voyager’s power. What the engineers are planning is to do is to turn off those heaters and replace them with three other devices, devices that use 10 watts less power.

In order to keep in contact with the Voyager probes that big parabolic antenna has to be pointed straight at Earth. Therefore, the thrusters that keep the spacecraft oriented correctly are the most critical system on the probe! (Credit: Nature)

If this plan, which has been given the unofficial name ‘Big Bang’, succeeds each Voyager could turn on another instrument and in the long run this could extend the amount of life span left to the spacecrafts. The engineers at JPL have managed to keep the Voyagers alive and sending back data for 49 years now. Let’s hope they can work their magic one more time!

A Spring to Remember: High Temperatures Records are Smashed the World over as Climate Change Accelerates. 

According to actual measured data from around the world the three hottest years ever recorded were, starting with the hottest, 2024, 2023 and 2025. It’s true, the last three years have been the hottest, at least the hottest since human beings developed the instrumentation to accurately measure temperature. In fact the last ten years have been the hottest ten years ever recorded, undeniable evidence that Climate Change is real and accelerating.

In just a couple of hundred years our Earth has gone from a beautiful green world of life to a polluted graveyard, and we’re to blame! (Clima)

So far it looks like 2026 could surpass them all. For one thing the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere continues to grow, reaching a level of 428 Parts per Million (PPM) in late 2025, the highest amount ever measured. As the year began it was winter in the northern hemisphere, which gave some respite from the heat, but in the southern hemisphere it was summer and 2026 was already setting heat records.

Over the last 800,000 years the highest CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was 300 PPM. But thanks to human activity it is jumped up in just the last two hundred years to over 400PPM and is still climbing. (Credit: Climate)

In Australia during January the southeast of that country saw a heat dome develop that led to numerous days of temperature surpassing 45ºC in dozens of cities including Melbourne the state capital of Victoria. The all time state record for Victoria was smashed on the 27th of January when the small towns of Hopetoun and Walpeup both saw temperatures of 48.9ºC. On the same day in the state of New South Wales a temperature of 49.7ºC was recorded in the village of Pooncarie. In all over 50 weather stations across south Australia saw their all time high temperature reading.

In Australia 2026 began with a heat dome setting itself up in the southeast of the country causing hundreds of all time high temperature records. (Credit: LinkedIn)

With those extreme temperatures came wildfires that raged across the southeast destroying both property and wildlife. In the state of Victoria over 1.1 million acres of land were burned. Even sporting events were not exempt from the heat with sky resorts in the Australian Alps seeing temperatures over 30ºC and the Australian Open tennis tournament having to operate under extreme heat protocols. It’s thought that the January heat wave cost the tennis tournament as much as $1million in lost ticket sales.

The heat dome in Chile and Argentina led to numerous wildfires throughout Patagonia. (Credit:Reuters)

Meanwhile in South American there was another heat wave in the nations of Chile and Argentina in South America with temperatures rising to over 38ºC. Just as in Australia, the record temperatures sparked wildfires, those in Chile consumed 21,000 acres and caused the death of 8 people. Argentina meanwhile also had numerous wildfires in Patagonia, which is fortunately a much less populated area.

The reason that the Easter third of the US saw a fairly cool winter was because of the heat dome that baked the wester two thirds of the country. (Credit: Weather Channel)

 Summer in the southern hemisphere is supposed to mean winter in the northern hemisphere, and at least cooler temperatures. Here in my home of Philadelphia it was an unusually cold winter. Notice my wording there, unusual, not extreme or unprecedented, just unusual. It was the coldest, and snowiest January and February in the last five years but no record lows were set nor were there any huge blizzards that paralyzed the city for days. The same was true of much of the US east of the Mississippi, an unusually cold winter.

In the first two months of 2026 Nine western states saw their hottest ever winter while another five saw their second hottest. Basically, the entire western US didn’t get to have a winter.

Out west however it was a different story as nine states recorded their hottest ever winter, along with four states recording their second warmest. This excessive heat out west was actually part of the reason that the eastern US was unusually cold, as a huge high pressure system, another heat dome, established itself over the western third of the country creating a clockwise flow of air around it that brought cold Canadian air south into the eastern US. The high temperatures and high pressure out west combined to severely limit the amount of snow that fell on the Rockies and Sierra Nevada’s, in fact the west as a whole saw little precipitation throughout the entire winter. 

Like Salt Lake City shown here, many parts of the west saw little or no snow. And since much of the west depends on melting snowpack for their water during the rest of the year the water crisis out west is only going to increase in magnitude. (Credit: Weather Channel)
Thanks to a very warm and very dry winter the snowpack in both the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas was far below average. That means the water situation out west is going to be especially difficult this year. (Credit: Weather Channel)

Then in March, as winter turned to spring the high pressure in the west grew in strength and the entire country saw record-breaking high temperatures. Here in Philly we had three days setting records on the 10th, 11th and 31st of March. Salt Lake City beat us however with six record high temperatures while Las Vegas endured five straight days of record highs. In fact the all time high temperature for the entire U.S. in the month of March was set near Martinez Lake in Arizona with a measurement of 43.3ºC. Across the entire country 8,201 daily high temperature records were set in March along with 2,027 monthly records!

During the month of March virtually the entire country experienced well above average temperatures. No where was the temperature below average! (Credit: Weather Channel)
In fact the highest ever US temperature for the month of March was recorded along the border between Arizona and California. Imagine a temperature of 110 degrees Fahrenheit in March! (Credit: Weather Channel)

The winner however had to be Phoenix, Arizona, which saw 14 all time daily high temperature records set. Think about that, almost every other day in Phoenix during the month of March set a record for all-time high temperature for that day. Prior to this year the highest temperature ever recorded in Phoenix in March was a 37.8ºC (100ºF) measured back in 1988. This year Phoenix endured nine days that hot or hotter.

Imagine a month where almost every other day was setting a record for high temperature. This March Phoenix endured eight straight days of 100 degrees F or higher. Ugh! (Credit: Weather Channel)

In April the temperature in the west moderated somewhat while the temperatures in the east increased. Philadelphia saw its fourth warmest April while cities in the southeast were even hotter. In addition to the heat many of the states east of the Mississippi saw very little rain during March and April, joining the west in a nation wide drought. Reservoirs in California are at historic lows ever as the snow pack in the Sierras and Rockies is almost non-existent. The lack of water out west has already led to major wildfires but it’s the wildfires in Georgia and Florida that are making the headlines. With almost the entire country in a drought of some extent this summer’s wildfires could be unprecedented.

Drought conditions across the SE US in April. Georgia and Florida were especially dry. (Credit: Weather Channel)
And with drought comes wildfires, some of the worst these states have ever seen. (Credit: Weather Channel)

The coming of May didn’t bring much change, except the very hottest temperatures moved to Europe. Oh, the US was still hot, with daily records being set almost every day, but on the 25th of May Kew Gardens in London measured a temperature of 34.8ºC the hottest May temperature ever recorded in the entire United Kingdom. The next day Ireland set its all time heat record for May with a 29.7ºC measurement. Meanwhile a heat wave in France caused the death of at least nine people. According to the French weather service a heat dome had set up over Western Europe, so our planet is now in a condition where there is a heat dome at least somewhere all the time!

In May the worst of the heat seems to have moved to Europe, where they aren’t used to such high temperatures even in mid0summer. That doesn’t mean that the US isn’t still experiencing higher than average heat however! (Credit: Threads)
Will a ‘Super’ El Nino develop this year? We won’t have long to wait and see! (Credit: Instagram)

I’ll end this litany of disasters with one more grim thought, the signs are growing that another El Ninó is growing in the Pacific and right now it is forecast to be a very strong one, perhaps the strongest in over a century. Could this be the proverbial straw that breaks the Camel’s back? If this year is significantly hotter than 2024, currently the hottest ever recorded, the consequences will be devastating across the entire planet. We won’t have to wait long to see!   

The VIP-2 Experiment in Italy has set new constraints on the Exclusion Principle. And what is the Exclusion Principle anyway? 

There was a time when Physicists thought that the ‘Laws’ they observed in nature were exact and without exception. That’s why they called them laws after all. That all changed around the year 1900 when physicists discovered that things that moved very fast, or were very small didn’t quite behave the way Isaac Newton thought they would. Classical physics was a good approximation, they found, but it wasn’t the final answer.

Isaac Newton with just a few of his discoveries. Newton thought that his ‘Laws’ were the final answer on some questions about the Universe but today we know that they were only good, very good approximations to reality. That begs the question of whether the ‘Models’ we have today are also just better approximations! (Credit: National Geographic)

The revolutions of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics taught physicists to always make more precise measurements of even their most cherished theories because if an experiment found even a tiny discrepancy, that could be new physics, a new understanding of the Universe. Recently a team of physicists working deep underground at Italy’s Gran Sasso National Labouratory has published the results of their VIP-2 experiment intended to test the exactness of the Exclusion Principle.

The VIP-2 experiment at the Gran Sasso labouratory in Italy. The Gran Sasso lab is buried deep underground in order to eliminate as much as possible interference from cosmic rays. (Credit: INFN-LNF)

So, just what is the exclusion principle and why is testing it so important. Now, we’re all familiar with the idea that no two objects can exist in the same space at the same time. Well, at the quantum level, the world of tiny, sub-atomic particles that idea becomes the exclusion principle, which was first proposed by physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in 1925.

One of the major developers of Quantum Mechanics, physicist Wolfgang Pauli not only developed the Exclusion Principle but also predicted the existence of the Neutrino. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In the quantum world there are known to be dozens of different particles that make up what is called the ‘Standard Model’. However all of those particles can be divided in two basic types called fermions and bosons. What distinguishes these two types of particle is simply that no two identical fermions can exist in the same quantum state at the same time, sound familiar. On the other hand you can put any number of bosons into the same quantum state at the same time.

The exclusion Principle is actually pretty easy to say. Only two electrons can exist in the same quantum state, and they have to have their spins in opposite directions. It is this fact that makes matter solid because the electrons in one object cannot invade the ‘space’ of the electrons in another object. (Credit: Chem Talk)

The electrons, protons and neutrons that make up the ‘normal’ matter around us are all fermions, which is the reason why no two objects can exist in the same space at the same time. Literally, when you press your hand against an object it is the electrons in the atoms of your hand that can’t occupy the same quantum state as the electrons in the object. This is what gives us the sense of ‘solidarity’.

Here we see hard evidence that no two objects can exist in the same space at the same time, evidence for the exclusion principle in everyday life! (Credit: Atlanta Personal Injury Lawyer)

On the other hand light is made up of particles called photons and photons are bosons. That means that you can put any number of photons into the same quantum state, which is one of the things that makes the light from a Laser so unusual.

One of the things that makes the light from a Laser so unusual is the many of the photons in that beam are all in the same quantum state, so photons, like all particles called Bosons, do not obey the Exclusion Principle. (Credit: Walmart)

As you can see the exclusion principle is pretty important, it’s what gives objects we call matter their shape and stability. It’s not surprising therefore that physicists have been searching for violations of exclusion ever since Pauli first proposed his principle. One of the possible ways that exclusion could be violated slightly would be if the electron had internal structure, that is if it was made up of even smaller particles, an exciting idea in itself. If that were true, then part of an electron could violate exclusion for a very short period of time before the entire electron would have to obey it!

Today we know that Protons and Neutrons are actually made up of smaller particles called Quarks but as far as we know the electron has no internal structure, it is not made of anything smaller. If there is even the smallest violation of the exclusion principle however that could be evidence of the electron being made up of even tinier particles! (Credit: Matt Strassler)

As you can guess making such measurements requires a lot of planning, a lot of precise, sophisticated equipment, much of it designed just for the experiment, and a lot of time in order to just be very careful. One problem in particular that the VIP-2 team had to contend with is radiation from outside interfering. That’s why VIP-2, like so many similar particle experiments, was conducted deep underground in Italy’s Gran Sasso National Labouratory. At a depth of 1400 meters interference from cosmic rays is minimized. What the researchers did in the VIP-2 experiment was to take a target made of copper and inject extra electrons into it. Those added electrons would try to attach themselves to a copper atom but since the atom’s electron shells were already filled the exclusion principle would force the extra electrons to stay at the very outer parts of the copper atom. Only if the exclusion principle were violated could one of the extra electrons occupy a position inside the atom’s shells.

Type of X-Ray emission searched for by the VIP-2 experiment. An extra electron in an atom, even a temporary one would cause the emission of an X-ray but after two years no such X-Ray was detected setting a strong constraint on the exactness of the Exclusion Principle. (Credit:

If that happened the electron would give off a photon of light, actually an X-ray photon. So what the physicists were looking for were x-rays of just the right energy to indicate that a violation of the exclusion principle had occurred. In two years of data collection no such x-rays were observed which corresponds to violations happening less than two times in 1043, that’s a one followed by 43 zeros. This is the strongest constraint yet on violations of exclusion and has effectively eliminated several theories of beyond the standard model physics.

The Standard Model of Particles consists of six Quarks, six Leptons, one of which is the electron along with four ‘Gauge’ Bosons along with the Higgs Boson! Physicists know that this model is incomplete, however we still haven’t found any real problem with the model that would give us a clue on how to expand it! (Credit: Science ABC)

Another thing that the results of the VIP-2 imply is that the electron has no inner structure, that the electron, and presumably neutrinos and quarks, really are fundamental particles. However just to be sure the physicists who designed and ran the VIP-2 experiment are already at work on the next generation VIP-3 experiment.

Still in the design phase the VIP-3 experiment will not only be larger but also more complex in order to provide an even stronger constraint on the exclusion principle, or perhaps find new physics!!! (Credit: MDPI)

That’s because the only way to be certain that something is true is to continually try to see if you can find evidence that it is false.

Everyday Physics: Electrical Coronae on Tree Leaves during a Thunderstorm and the screeching sound Cellophane tapes makes when you pull it. 

The science of physics is usually thought to be concerned with the study of strange, esoteric objects that are either very small, like sub-atomic particles, or very large, like black holes and the Universe itself. It didn’t use to be that way, back in the 18th century physicists put their efforts into investigating the behaviour of everyday phenomenon like the trajectories that cannon balls followed through the air or the swinging motion of pendulums.

It was Galileo who first described the mathematics of how a pendulum worked! (Credit: Science Facts)

Even today there are physicists who are using modern instruments to actively study the behaviour of commonplace objects under unusual circumstances or during very short periods of time. I have posted about these studies several times before, see my posts of 30 March 2024 and 5 April 2025. In this post I’ll be reviewing studies about what happens to the leaves of trees during a thunderstorm and why cellophane tape makes that loud screeching sound when you pull it off of its roll.

Another important problem that was solved in the early days of Physics was the path, or trajectory that a projectile took when fired from a cannon. (Credit: YouTube)

I’ll start with tree limbs during a thunderstorm. We’re all familiar with the story of how Ben Franklin demonstrated that lightning is really a massive discharge of static electricity that builds up during a severe storm. He did this by flying a kite during a thunderstorm and using the kite’s cord to capture some of the static charge onto a key.

It was just a couple of miles from my house that Ben Franklin really did fly a kite to demonstrate that lightning was just static electricity! The cherubs shown here were not actual witnesses to the experiment; they were added later by artist Benjamin West. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Franklin was also one of the key proponents of the Two-Fluid theory, which is the idea that there were two forms of electricity, which he called ‘positive and negative’. Both these types of electricity were thought to be contained in many, today we know all objects.

The electric field is composed of two kinds of ‘charge’, called by Ben Franklin ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’. Opposite charges attract each other while similar charges repel each other. (Credit: SparkFun Learn)

Scientists like Franklin were experimenting with electricity and discovering that similarly charged objects, both positive or both negative would repel each other while oppositely charged objects, one positive one negative, would attract each other. Franklin also argued that when you had an equal amount of positive and negative charge in an object the charges would cancel each other out and that object would be neutral.

In an atom the Electrons are negatively charged while the Protons are positively charged. A normal atom has equal numbers of both, so it is uncharged or neutral! (Credit: SCE Kids)

Rubbing two different objects against each other is what causes an imbalance in the electric charges. The classic example of this is amber and rabbit fur with the amber picking up a negative charge while the fur becomes positively charged. The Greek word for amber is Electra and that is how we get the word electricity. By the way Franklin could just as easily have called the amber positive and the fur negative, it made no difference to him although if he had done so today we would have to reverse the names of the sub-atomic particles electron and proton!

We’re all familiar with static electricity but the classic version first mentioned by the Greeks is rubbing a piece of amber with rabbit fur. By the way the Greek word for amber is Electra, which is where we get the term electricity! (Credit: sites.physics.unt.edu)

Getting back to what happens during a thunderstorm where the air masses are moving against each other and having different humilities. This movement generates huge amounts of electric charge, which is usually discharged by cloud to cloud lightning. Sometimes however a charged mass of air will generate an opposite charge to build up in the ground beneath it and if the buildup is enough you can get cloud to ground lightning, which often causes fires or other kinds of damage.

Rapid movements of humid air cause huge amounts of static electricity to build up causing several types of lightning to occur. Cloud to cloud is the most common but cloud to ground is the most destructive! (Credit: Britannica)

Even when there isn’t cloud to ground lightning you can still often get a charge to build up in the ground during a thunderstorm and therefore a charge to build up in anything on the ground. This is especially true of trees, because they are taller and therefore closer to the charge in the air, opposites attract remember.

Tall trees provide a path for electricity to go to ground so trees are often struck by lightning during thunderstorms! (Credit: Facebook)

Electricity has another interesting aspect, it likes to collect near points in objects, like the needles of pine trees or the pointy ends of leaves in oak or maple trees. It has long been conjectured that this build up of charge, known as a coronae, should occur on tree leaves, especially leaves near the tree-top. The light from such coronae however is so weak that no one had ever seen it.

It has long been thought that individual leaves on trees should display coronae during thunderstorms, but the effect was so weak no one was able to actually film it, until now! (Credit: Science)

Until now that is. A research team from Penn State University led by meteorologist Patrick McFarland has put together an observational setup in a 2013 Toyota Sienna and has traveled from Florida to Pennsylvania confirming that many different species of trees do have electric buildup in their leaves during a thunderstorm. The equipment assembled included a portable weather station, an electric field detector, a laser rangefinder and an ultra-violet (UV) camera with a periscope lens.

Penn State researcher Patrick McFarland and his equipment. (Credit: Instagram)

Even as the team watched the live picture on the UV camera it was hard to see anything happening. On their first attempt the coronae were only discovered later when they reviewed their results and detected 41 coronae appearing on tree leaves during a 90 minute thunderstorm. The glows usually lasted only about 3 seconds and were often observed to dance from leaf to leaf.

Coronae discharges are quite common during thunderstorms on high voltage electrical cabling. (Credit: Nooa Electric)

The meteorologists speculate that these coronae occur on trees frequently and could involve thousands of trees during severe weather events. According to McFarland, “With superhuman vision I believe you’d see this swath of glow on the top of every tree under the thunderstorm.”

Meanwhile at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, a team of researchers led by Professor Sigurdur Thoroddsen has been investigating another strange phenomenon that everyone of us is familiar with, the loud screech that happens when we pull a piece of cellophane tape off of its roll. We’ve all heard that sound, but it all happens so fast that we don’t really understand what’s actually causing it.

Many people refer to any kind of cellophane tape as ‘Scotch Tape’ but in fact that is a single brand of adhesive tape! (Credit: Office Depot)

The physicists set up an experimental apparatus consisting of a pair of high speed cameras along with a synchronized sound recording apparatus. The first camera was pointed at the underside of the cellophane tape as it was being pulled. The second camera took a side view but it used a technique known as schlieren imaging to record tiny deflections in light rays caused by density changes in the air. This is the technique often used to photograph the shockwaves radiating out from explosions.

The experimental setup used to examine the screeching sound made when cellophane tape is pulled off of a roll. (Credit: YouTube)

What the researchers found was that the tape separated in a large series of slip-stick events. That is, a tiny area of tape, say a square micrometer, peals off the roll so quickly that parts of it actually exceed the speed of sound, causing a tiny sonic boom. Once that small piece breaks away the whole process comes to a halt for less than a microsecond before it is repeated with the next tiny area of tape. Hundreds if not thousands of such events take place in less than a second resulting in the unmistakable sound of cellophane tape being pulled off of a roll.

Moving faster than the speed of sound causes a pressure wave to build up around the moving object. This pressure wave is called a sonic boom. This sound is normally associated with jet aircraft, but it can be caused by any object, even tiny pieces of cellophane tape. (Credit: Physics Stack Exchange)

So you see that not all physicists are working with atom-smashers or cosmic-ray telescopes trying to discover the ultimate nature of reality. Some are still working to try an understand the behaviour of the everyday objects around us. 

Space News for April 2026. 

Of course, the big news in space this month is the Artemis II spaceflight that took human beings beyond Earth orbit and back to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time since 1972, fifty-four years ago. This mission has obviously been a long time in coming and I’ll have a great deal more to say about it later in this post but first I’m afraid that I have to talk about something even more important, if much less interesting, NASA’s budget! 

Back in the heady days of Apollo, NASA’s budget was over 4% of the total federal budget. Nowadays it’s less than 1/2% and will get even smaller if Trump gets his way! (Credit: NASA)

Back on the 31st of March NASA chief Jered Isaacman announced his agency’s grand plan for building a permanent base on the Moon in the early 2030’s. This Lunar base would then be followed by a mission to Mars aboard a nuclear powered rocket. The first nuclear powered rocket would be used for an unmanned mission to Mars taking a series of three small helicopters, upgrades of the Ingenuity helicopter that went to mars aboard the rover Perseverance.

The success of Ingenuity on Mars has inspired NASA to plan for more such airships on Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. (Credit: NASA Science)

Then, just a few days later, the Trump administration announced their planned budget for fiscal year 2027 that included an almost 50% increase for the Department of Defense while enacting severe cutbacks pretty much everywhere else. NASA’s budget is scheduled to be reduced by $5.6 Billion or 23%. Taking inflation into account this would make the 2027 NASA budget the agency’s smallest since 1961! The biggest cuts will come to the Science Mission Directorate, a whopping 47% decrease, so say goodbye to that nuclear rocket taking any helicopters to Mars.

From the very beginning of the space program, and for all of our science programs the budget has been dependent on support from a bunch of politicians who rarely understand and never care about science. (Credit: Yarn)

The Trump budget is going to make drastic cuts in many other parts of American science as well. If passed by congress and carried out it will undoubtedly mean the end of our nation’s leadership in science and technology. I’ll be writing more about the threat of Trump’s budget to our country in a later post.

About 90% of Americans think it’s important for America to lead the world in science, but few think it’s doing a good job of it! (Credit: Pew Research Center)

But let’s get back to some good news, the Artemis II mission that took human beings further from the Earth than even the Apollo program did. In short they’re back, safe and sound after a very successful mission.

Launch of the Artemis 2 rocket and capsule taking four astronauts back to the Moon for tthe first time since 1972. (Credit: SpaceNews)

Launched on the first of April, April fool’s day, the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and effortlessly placed the Orion capsule and it’s Service Module into Low Earth Orbit (LOE). After spending a day checking out their spacecraft the four person Crew were given the go ahead for Trans Lunar Injection (TLI) a command that had not been given to any manned mission since 1972.

In December of 1968 the Apollo 8 mission was given the signal for TLI or Trans Lunar Injection. That was the first time that human beings ever truly left Earth. (Credit: PBS)

The voyage to the Moon was uneventful; so much so that the only problem the media had to talk about was a malfunctioning toilet. A malfunction that was quickly corrected by the way. On the mission’s fifth day the Orion capsule looped behind the Moon enabling the crew of Artemis II to set a new record for the farthest that any human being had ever been from planet Earth. The mission profile for Artemis II did not actually call for the spacecraft to enter Lunar orbit so the Orion capsule made only one loop around the Moon. As the Orion capsule swung behind the Moon radio contact with Earth was lost just as had happened with the command module in every Apollo Lunar mission. Forty minutes later communication with Artemis II was restored as the crew began their journey home.

Because they traveled higher above the Lunar surface than the Apollo astronauts did the Artemis crewmembers got to see parts of the Dark Side that no humans had ever seen! (Credit: Yahoo)

The journey home was if anything even more routine. On the 10th of April the Orion capsule separated from its Service Module and entered our Atmosphere. Splashdown came minutes later just off the coast of San Diego in the Pacific.

Splashdown! (Credit: European Space Agency)

With the success of the Artemis II mission it might seem like a landing on the Moon should only be a couple of months away. After all the Apollo 8 mission orbited the Moon in December 1968 while Apollo 11 landed there in July of 1969, just seven months later. However, while the SLS and Orion capsule have proven themselves capable of getting humans to the vicinity of the Moon, NASA still needs a lander to get them down to the Lunar surface, and the two companies assigned the task of building landers have been having more than a few problems.

The two planned Artemis Lunar landers compared with the old Apollo Lunar Module. Both are much larger to allow the astronauts to have a more extended stay on the Moon. But let’s be real, Starship is really a bit much!!!! (Credit: Human Mars)

One of the companies is Space X, who hopes to use a modified version of their starship upper stage as the landing vehicle. Problem is that over the last several years Space X has seen a series of problems in the development of their starship launch system. These problems have pushed back the timeline generating considerable doubt about Space X’s ability to deliver a lander by 2028, the current schedule for an Artemis Moon landing mission.

Artist’s illustration of how the Orion Capsule will link up with the Starship lander in Lunar orbit. (Credit: NASA)

Another problem with the Space X lander is the fact that once the starship upper stage is in LOE it will require as many as 20 refueling missions before it can leave Earth and go to Lunar orbit, where it will rendezvous with the Orion manned capsule. With 20 refueling missions it just seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for something to go wrong!

Murphy’s law works in space just like it does here on Earth! (Credit: YouTube)

Meanwhile Blue Origin is the other company that has been developing a lander, they call theirs the Blue Moon Lander. The problem here is that the Blue Moon Lander was not scheduled for its first mission until 2032 but because of Space X’s difficulties Blue Origin has been asked by NASA to accelerate their lander’s development. Rushing the development of a spacecraft is just never a good thing.

Rushing to complete a job is the surest way to get behind schedule! (Credit: A-Z Quotes)

In fact on March 10th NASA’s Office of Inspector General released a report criticizing both the companies developing the lander as well as NASA’s own management of the lander program. So right now it is questionable if either lander will be ready by 2028.

Still, it’s good to be back to NASA’s prime mission of human exploration of the Universe! (Credit: Space)

Still, right now we can sit back and enjoy the fact that once again human beings are voyaging into deep space rather than just whirling around in LOE.

Archaeology News for April 2025: Ongoing Research in the British Isles. 

People who are interested in Archaeology recognize that the British Isles are a hotbed for the study of ancient peoples starting from the Neolithic ‘Stone Age’. As it happens I’m of Irish and Scottish ancestry so for me the archaeology of those islands is like family history. You’ll understand then when I use the occasional post to discuss some of the latest findings from those lands. As always I’ll start with the oldest and move forward in time.

One of the largest and best-preserved stone age sites in Europe is New Grange along the river Boyne in Ireland. It’s construction must have taken the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people. Strong evidence of ‘civilization’ of a kind in Ireland 5,000 years ago! (Credit: www.newgrange.com)

  Scotland is commonly known as a dark, misty, rocky sort of place. It is true that the population of Scotland has never been as large as the more temperate country of England to the south. Nevertheless Scotland has been a home for humans since the end of the last Ice Age and possesses a wealth of archaeological sites including stone circles, hillforts and burial sites.

The stone circle of Stennis in the Orkney Isles of Scotland. Again, the people who made this were hardly ‘Cave Men’! (Credit: Tripadvisor)

Recently the construction of a new access road to a wind farm called Twentyshilling in the area of Dumfries and Galloway has unearthed several previously unknown barrow type graves that are of the type common throughout the British Isles. One pit at the south was tentatively dated to between 2867-2504 BCE in the Neolithic period while the pit a bit further north was dated to 1439-1287 BCE, the Bronze Age. It was the Bronze Age site that drew the most attention as it contained five funeral urns that held the remains of at least eight individuals. The researchers are convinced that the five urns were buried at the same time because they were packed so tightly together in a hole at the center of the barrow.

The Twenty Shilling Wind Farm in Dumfries and Galloway in southern Scotland. Not exactly the sort of place where you expect to find evidence of ancient culture! (Credit: Statkraft)

The ancient Scots had a few curious customs when it came to burying their dead, for one they often placed the remains of an adult and a child in the same urn, as seems to be the case here. On the other hand Bronze Age Scots usually exposed their dead and only interred the bones in funeral urns buried in barrows. There is evidence that was not the case in the Twentyshilling barrow. The archaeologists who excavated the site conjecture that perhaps the relatives of the deceased were in a hurry to bury their kin for some reason, possibly disease? The fact that eight persons were buried at the same time is further evidence for this.

The Bronze Age burial at the Twenty Shilling wind farm showing the urns in which the dead were interred. (Credit: Guard Archaeology)

At about the same time as the Bronze Age barrow in Scotland was being laid down one of the largest ‘towns’ in the British Isles was being founded just across the Irish Sea in county Wicklow, Ireland. Brusselstown Hill has long been known as the site of an ancient hillfort but a recent survey from both the air and ground level has revealed just how extensive and densely populated the site was.

The Brusselstown hillfort as it is today. Archaeologists are now thinking that about 3,000 years ago this was the largest town in Ireland! (Credit: Facebook)

As can be seen in the image below the site consists of two concentric earthen rings containing numerous flat ‘platforms’, that is leveled areas where a hut or roundhouse once stood. The number of platforms within the inner ring has been numbered to be ninety-eight while the number within the outer ring is over five hundred. Based on this number the population of the hillfort must have been in the thousands making Brusselstown one of the largest ‘towns’ in the British Isles at that time.

The ‘Platforms’, i.e. homes at Brusselstown at its height. At least several thousand people must have lived here! (Credit: RTE)

The platforms themselves come in a variety of diameters indicating different sizes of roundhouse but there does not appear to be any clustering of bigger houses where the ‘nobility’ might live. Instead it appears that Busselstown was rather egalitarian in social structure.

In addition to several identified hillforts, County Wicklow is also known for other neolithic and Bronze Age sites like this stone circle. (Credit: Megalithic Ireland)

At ground level four test trenches were excavated over areas containing several of the platforms where both artifacts and organic remains were unearthed. Based upon carbon dating of the organic remains Brusselstown has been dated to between 1200 to 400 BCE, from the Bronze thru the Early Iron Age. By the way the artifacts discovered also showed no indication of any difference in social class or status.

Were Stone Age societies more equal than our present civilization? That’s what many anthropologists think but without written records how will we ever know for certain! (Credit: Vocal Media)

Because of the size of the site, along with the other hillforts and archaeological sites in the area, a full understanding of County Wicklow during the Bronze Age may take a long time and a lot of work to complete.

There are more than a dozen recognized hillforts in county Wicklow. It will take quite a while to investigate them all! (Credit: Tinahely.ie)

My final study comes from a more recent time, the so-called ‘dark Ages’ between the time when Roman troops abandoned Britain and the Norman Conquest, that is about 400-1100 CE. Researchers from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge University have used chemical analysis of the dental enamel from 659 skeletons dated to that period to determine the amount of migration both into and within the British Isles.

The people we call ‘English’ are actually a Germanic people who migrated to the British Isles starting in the 5th century. (Credit: StirytellingDB)

You see as a person grows up the enamel of their teeth absorbs various chemicals from the local environment and those chemicals can remain in their teeth for thousands of years after death. Archaeologists can then analyze the proportion of those chemicals to determine whether a person grew up in the place where they were buried. In particular the chemicals used in the study were oxygen and strontium. Most oxygen in nature comes in the form of isotope O16 with a nucleus of eight protons and eight neutrons. A small amount of oxygen, less than one tenth of one percent, comes in the form of O18 with eight protons and ten neutrons.

Teeth are the hardest part of the human body so they are preserved the best and retain the most information about the person whose teeth they are! Archaeologists are using teeth to learn a great deal about the lives of ancient people. (Credit: Archaeology Magazine)

The interesting part is that the amount of O18 in the environment depends on the climate, warm or cold and the altitude, mountainous or seacoast. A Cold or mountainous environment results in less O18 than normal while warm or seacoast gives more O18 than normal. If a person’s O18 differs from the region where they were buried, then they must have moved to the area where they died. Much the same is true for Strontium isotopes 86 and 87.

Most of the Oxygen in the world is O16, with 8 each Protons, Electrons and Neutrons. A tiny amount of Oxygen is O18 with two extra Neutrons. Chemically they are the same but O18 is a little heavier. (Credit: Climate Science Investigations South Florida)

What they researchers found was that while the degree of migration changed over time it was still quite large throughout the period 400-1100 CE. Over the whole period about 41.4% of people in the British Isles did not grow up in the place where they later died.

Human migration is nothing new. For millions of years now people have left the lands they grew up in to try to find a better life elsewhere. (Credit: World Bank)

Now once again many of these people were moving from Ireland or Whales into England or within England as well as Vikings coming from Scandinavia or people coming from modern France or Spain. What it does mean is that people in general were on the move during one of the darkest times in European history. The archaeology of the British Isles shows in microcosm just how the people of the past lived and died. Therefore by studying the archaeology of those isles we can learn how to study human pre-history in general. 

Space News for February 2026. 

Quite a few stories of interest this month, mostly dealing with manned spaceflight. So let’s get to it!

In my last space post I talked about how the Crew 11 astronauts were forced to depart from the International Space Station (ISS) early on the 11th of January because of a medical issue with one of its four members. This emergency left the ISS with only a skeleton crew of three cosmonauts until the Crew 12 team could be readied and launched aboard their Space X Dragon capsule.

Launch of the Space X Crew 12 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on 13 February. (Credit: YouTube)

 Working quickly NASA and Space X succeeded in moving up the launch of Crew 12 from its original planned date to February 13th. As usual the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket went off without any problem and about a day later on the 14th the Dragon capsule was docked at the ISS. Thanks to Space X and its reusable Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon manned capsule NASA’s commercial crew program is an unqualified success as manned missions to Low Earth Orbit (LOE) are becoming routine.

Humanity’s first long term habitat in space the ISS has been manned for more than twenty years now and thanks to Space X, crew rotations are becoming quite routine! (Credit: ESA)

In fact manned missions are becoming so routine that they are no longer solely the province of national space agencies. Private companies or even individuals can, for a large amount of money, charter a manned space mission. There have already been four such missions to the ISS and several other missions that did not go to the ISS.

Launch of the first Axiom commercial mission to the ISS. Axiom has completed three other such missions now and has been granted a fifth mission. (Credit: The New York Times)

As a part of this growing commercialization of LOE, NASA and its partners in the ISS have signed contracts for a fifth and sixth private mission to the ISS. The fifth mission, scheduled for no earlier than January of 2027, was awarded to Axiom Space Corporation, the company that charted the first four private missions to the ISS. The sixth mission was awarded to a newcomer, Vast Corporation and is scheduled to launch no earlier than the summer of 2027.

In addition to arranging missions into space, Vast Corporation has plans to construct a private Space Station once the ISS is de-orbited! (Credit: Long Beach Post)

Both of these two missions will spend about 14 days at the ISS and will consist of four crewmembers. Axiom and Vast will purchase mission services from NASA including crew consumables and cargo delivery and storage. Both companies will also have to make flight arrangements with Space X including launch and re-entry missions. In exchange Axiom and Vast will each be allowed to sell four tickets to the ISS, although the private astronauts who are selected must be approved by NASA and will be trained by both NASA and Space X.

The training of a NASA astronaut can take years and even the training of a space tourist takes months! (Credit: YouTube)

NASA’s commercialization of space was not originally intended to become a Space X monopoly. The plan was for Boeing’s Starliner capsule to also transport both NASA and commercial astronauts to the ISS. However, as I have often mentioned in earlier posts, see my posts of 20July2024, and 12April2025, the Starliner capsule has suffered a seemly unending series of problems. Back in 2024 Starliner finally succeeded in getting two astronauts to the ISS but with so many issues that NASA deemed the capsule to be unsafe for the astronauts to return in. So, the Starliner astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore’s stay at the ISS went from being only a week to more than eight months before they could return to Earth aboard a Space X Dragon capsule.

Everyone expected Boeing’s Starliner capsule to reach the ISS before Space X’s Dragon, but things just didn’t work out that way. Starliner has been plagued by problems and has yet to complete a successful mission. (Credit: CNN)

On the 19th of February NASA released its final report on Starliner’s mission and the results were not good for Boeing. Officially Starliner’s mission has been categorized as a ‘Type-A Mishap’, the worst category possible and equivalent to the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters! The report details numerous failings that “revealed critical vulnerabilities in Starliner’s propulsion system, NASA’s oversight model, and the broader culture of commercial human spaceflight.” Hither to this report NASA’s Commercial Crew Program had been permitted to investigate itself but now that philosophy is considered to be “inconsistent with NASA safety culture.”

Space is trying to kill you! So anyone who goes into space has to practice a strict safety code if they want to come back alive!!! (Credit: X.com)

Nevertheless NASA still hopes that Starliner can fulfill some part of its original aspirations. The current plan is for Starliner to conduct one more test mission, to be designated Starliner-1, to the ISS. This test flight however will be unmanned; Starliner will only carry cargo to the ISS. This test flight is scheduled to be conducted no earlier than April.

In addition to sending astronauts to the ISS Space X also has the job of sending unmanned cargo missions to the station. Starliner’s next flight could be a similar such mission. (Credit: Space Connect)

If everything goes well in this latest Starliner attempt then it is possible that the next ISS crew rotation, planned for August, may be carried out with Starliner rather than a Space X Dragon. For that reason the four astronauts assigned to the next ISS mission are training on both Dragon and Starliner capsules. Whether or not this scheduled plan will be altered because of the 19th of February report remains to be seen.

Front cover of the actual report on Starliner’s mission to the ISS. NASA pulled no punches and detailed every problem Starliner had. Assuming there is a next Starliner mission any further problems would surely kill the entire program! (Credit: NASA)

So far all of my news in this post have dealt with space flights to LOE, begging the question of when will we be getting back into deep space, getting back to the Moon and beyond. Well, the Artemis II rocket and Orion capsule are currently sitting on their launch pad undergoing final testing before launching four astronauts out of LOE for a trip around the Moon similar to Apollo eight’s mission back in 1968.

The Artemis II launch vehicle and spacecraft being rolled back to the assembly building. Problems during final testing have provoked this delay. (Credit: NASA)

As a final test before launch NASA conducted a wet dress rehearsal on February 12th, that’s a full fueling of the rocket. Unfortunately during that test a series of hydrogen leaks occurred forcing the test to be terminated early. This same problem occurred during testing of the Artemis I unmanned mission back in November of 2022.

Hydrogen is the lightest and smallest of all elements so it can leak out of any hole no matter how small!!! (Credit: BYJU’s)

A second wet dress rehearsal was carried out from February 17th to the 20th and at first it appeared that the hydrogen leak problem had been resolved, the mission was put on a schedule for a launch on March 11th. However on the very next day the leak problem reappeared in the Artemis II’s second stage and the decision has been made to roll Artemis back into the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs. How long of a delay this will cause to the Artemis II’s launch is just guesswork at the moment.

The Artemis II mission, if it ever happens, will mark to first time in more than 50 years that humans have left LOE. (Credit: YouTube)

 All of the stories above concerned either NASA or American commercial aerospace corporations but there is also news coming from China’s space agency as well. On the 12th of February China successfully tested two components of their future manned Lunar exploration missions simultaneously.

Abort test of China’s Mengzhou capsule. Chinese astronauts going to the Moon will ride in this capsule. (Credit: Facebook)

Like NASA’s Artemis program China is designing a large rocket called the Long March 10 along with a crew capsule called the Mengzhou and a Lunar lander called the Lanyue. The test conducted on the 12th consisted of an abort systems test for the Mengzhou capsule along with a test of the re-usability of a scaled down version of the Long March 10 rocket.

China’s Long March 10 rocket will come in several variants for both LOE and deep space missions. (Credit: China in Space)

The abort test of the Mengzhou capsule is a standard test for manned spacecraft, both the Space X Dragon and Artemis’ Orion capsules underwent such testing. If during a launch anything should go wrong with the first stage rocket, or if there’s a problem with jettisoning the first stage and igniting the second stage, solid fuel rockets on the capsule will fire pulling it away from the launch vehicle and allowing the capsule and crew to safely land. The test of the abort system is usually carried out during the launch at what is called ‘Max Q’ which is the moment when aerodynamic pressure on the entire launch vehicle is greatest.

As I mentioned above both the Dragon and Orion capsules underwent this test and in those tests the launch rocket was simply jettisoned after the capsule was pulled away. The Chinese however wanted to try for more than that. Currently the Chinese are working very hard to develop a re-usable rocket similar to Space X’s Falcon 9. So they decided to conduct a full flight of the Long march 10 rocket, after the Mengzhou capsule was pulled away. Therefore, about five minutes after the Mengzhou capsule had completed its test the Long March 10 rocket re-ignited its engines and was able to make a controlled splashdown in the waters off China’s Hainan Island. Two successful tests for the price of one.

Space X has revolutionized space travel with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Now everybody else, especially the Chinese, want to have their own reusable rocket! (Credit: Via Satellite)

 The race to get back to the Moon is heating up, as is the effort to commercialize space. The future will belong not to whoever is first but whoever keeps going and finishes the job.