Longtime listener, first-time caller: Wishing you nothing but the best. Your work is terrific, and I'm sorry you and your colleagues have to deal with this uncertainty and chaos.

I find Artemis so fascinating because of all the decisions that led to this moment. Orion is 2 decades in the making. SLS is a contrivance to preserve the space shuttle's supply chain. 5 admins, 20+ years of Congress, global partners, hundreds of thousands of people, 4 astronauts—all for this.

Whew! It feels so good to breathe a sigh of relief for the Artemis II crew.

Splashdown of Integrity space capsule in the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by 3 orange and white parachutes

Splashdown confirmed for Artemis II!

Crow on the Orient Express

History and mystery surround NASA’s 2028 nuclear Mars mission Fission-powered space flight, a 60-year dream, would supercharge outer Solar System exploration

BIG story out now from @science.org on SR-1 Freedom, a highly ambitious nuclear Mars mission that NASA wants to launch in 2028. @hannah-richter.bsky.social has scoops on how the mission came together—and where its reactor is probably being built. www.science.org/content/arti...

Watching Artemis II has been bittersweet. I have done a huge amount of reporting on the program, including attending Artemis I and previewing Artemis II. But by coincidence, Artemis is also tied up in a deeply traumatizing experience—and those feelings have rushed back with surprising intensity.

Almost: Jeremy Hansen (at left) is onboard, and Jenni Gibbons (at right) was Hansen’s backup and will serve as a voice link at Mission Control. The other Artemis II mission specialist is NASA astronaut Christina Koch.

Based on estimates from Apollo* and modern missions like Crew Dragon Demo-2, the first crewed launch of a spacecraft garners ~10x more attention than the first uncrewed launch of that same spacecraft.

*Text n-gram frequencies for Apollo 4, 6, 8, and 11, 1967-1970. books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

And we're at least 8x over the *big* media push around the Artemis I launch attempt in late August 2022, which Kamala Harris attended as VP (which drove extra attention). trends.google.com/trends/explo...

To keep myself honest, here's the Google Trends data for US searches for "Artemis" November 2022 to today. Data for this week are incomplete, but we're looking at at least a ~12.5x bump over the Artemis I launch in November 2022. trends.google.com/trends/explo...

I cannot wait to have numbers tomorrow for Google Trends search volume for Artemis II. Based on estimates from Apollo and other rocket launches such as Demo-2, my prediction is a ~15x uptick in interest going from Artemis I, which would put it in the range of the Stanley Cup Final / World Series.

NASA's Artemis II Crew Launches To The Moon (Official Broadcast) YouTube video by NASA

Artemis II launches at 6:24pm ET. Watch live here: www.youtube.com/live/Tf_UjBM...

Artemis II will provide a key test of how the human body responds to radiation in deep space, a major concern for future human space exploration. Read more in @science.org: www.science.org/content/arti...

NASA once touted the diversity of Artemis II's astronauts. Now? Not so much The Artemis II mission crew contains four people -- including one woman and one Black man, both of whom will be the first on a lunar mission. But NASA hasn't been talking about these milestones much.

The #ArtemisII crew includes the first person of color, the first woman, and the first non-American to (hopefully) fly beyond Earth orbit. You won't hear much on this from NASA, which has rolled back DEI initiatives over the past year.

www.npr.org/2026/03/31/n...

Whether this vision will really yield a sustained human presence on the moon, let alone Mars- bound astronauts, is an open question. Artemis is still in its early days. Starship’s first full test flight exploded minutes into launch in April. There’s also public support to consider. Since 2019, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, multiple polls have found that less than a quarter of Americans thought that sending people to the moon should be a top NASA priority. Even during Apollo’s days, human spaceflight attracted criticism for spending billions that could address earthbound concerns. Now we’re returning to the moon at a time of climate and biodiversity crises, rising political extremism, glaring racial inequalities, and war between Russia and Ukraine. Against this grim backdrop, NASA astronauts are acutely aware that they’re not just public figures but also inspirational symbols: of explo- ration, of science, of the national spirit. Koch has wrestled with how to handle these expectations. For 328 days, she lived and worked aboard the ISS, setting a record for the longest spaceflight by a woman. Her impulse was to downplay the milestone. Then a former colleague reminded her that her achievement might give people a sense of greater possibilities. There’s nothing inevitable about us venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere, let alone going to the moon. In microgravity our blood breaks down. Our bones get brittle. Our eyesight worsens. Without constant vigilance, we can perish in an instant. Overcoming our biological limits, hundreds of thousands of people have dreamed, planned, and built for decades to make the journey outward not only possible but routine. If Artemis’s vision is realized, that could extend all the way to the moon—and maybe even farther. As Koch sees it, these launches are hard-won victories, with setback after setback giving way to one of the purest of human emotions: joy at surpassing our limits. “How awesome it is that as a species, as…

Today is the launch of Artemis II. It's a mission defined by expanding possibilities, including sending the first Black person, the first woman, and the first non-U.S. citizen beyond low Earth orbit. It also comes at a challenging time back on terra firma. I wrote about this tension back in 2023:

Tricky tricky

They're making the cold calculation that they can freelance the whole reporting operation—and that the brand has more audience cachet than the existing reporting staff.

The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with being a ciphertext by attempting to develop a historically pl...

Read the full description of the Naibbe cipher here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

One neat thing about publishing research is seeing other people build on your work. If you want to play with the Naibbe cipher — my attempt at building a cipher benchmark for the #VoynichManuscript — someone has made a site where you can encrypt and decrypt with it. voynich.science?vw_panel=nai...

NASA administrator talks to Science about studying the Moon, Mars—and Earth Jared Isaacman says agency may accelerate lunar science program and could tackle a new Mars mission in 2028

My latest: in an interview with @science.org, new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman promises a big uptick in lunar robotic missions, another potential Mars 2028 mission beyond comms, and continued support for earth science observation.

(Sorry astro and helio folks, time went fast.)

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text Discovery sheds new light on how famed astronomer came to lead a scientific revolution

A historian has discovered that a 16th century printing of The Almagest—a highly influential ancient astronomy text—contains extensive annotations from Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who later overthrew that text’s conception of a geocentric cosmos.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aMAwRm

A New Spy Radio Signal Has Appeared. It's Broadcasting in Farsi. A new shortwave numbers station appeared the day the bombs fell. Nobody knows who's running it.

This is fascinating.

open.substack.com/pub/theicema...

Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”

This is a nice contrast to all the awful behavior confirmed through the Epstein files. Proud of @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social & @seanmcarroll.bsky.social for picking up on the sexism & charlatanism right away.

Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”

After endless revelations about people in the Epstein files, it's refreshing to see one about three people who were invited to something by Epstein and were like "nope" ... including Bluesky elder @seanmcarroll.bsky.social

www.science.org/content/arti...

As always, it was a blast working with @joshuasokol.bsky.social on this story. What a cool find: a young Galileo taking notes in the margins of the ancient astronomy text he'd make obsolete two decades later.

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Divorced from authorial intent and curation, we risk the vast streams of "content" merging into a river of algorithmically personalized actionable intelligence. Sports media collapsed to betting advice. Business news collapsed to stock tips. Health coverage collapsed to diet and exercise tips.

To be clear: I'm not looking forward to this version of the future! But someone somewhere will try it.

I sometimes wonder whether we are heading for a future where journalism becomes a series of 10-second clips made by hype houses with Vtuber avatar host-mascots. The New York Times as a Hatsune Miku-ified "Gray Lady," a thousand times over.