When I saw the headline “Earth to have new mini-moon for two months”, I was pretty intrigued. I may be over the moon coverage, but a second moon? Now that I can get into. Or I could, if it were bigger than 10 meters across, anyway. That’s closer to a micromoon, and it won’t even be visible with a telescope, let alone the naked eye. Sorry to raise your hopes and then dash them so quickly.

Back in August, I noted that Boeing’s Starliner issues had left astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded on the International Space Station. Since then, the Starliner returned home empty, and without incident. I’m not sure how Wilmore and Williams felt about that. It seems likely there may have been some amount of regret at not having been allowed to take their originally planned ride.

Last week, the pair did a livestream and talked about their experiences, which have been “trying at times”. I can only imagine. On the plus side (?), they’ll soon be part of a record, when the ISS hits a new peak in population with 14 people later this month.

On June 5, Boeing’s Starliner launched Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS. The two astronauts were supposed to be in space for about eight days, but multiple problems which occurred after reaching orbit led NASA to lose faith in the Starliner. Now, the decision has been made to return the vehicle to Earth empty, with Wilmore and Williams stranded on the ISS until February, when a SpaceX vehicle will retrieve them. That’s quite the change of plans.

Sometime in the next decade, Americans will hopefully once again land on the moon. When they do, they’ll have a Lunar Terrain Vehicle to tool around in. Three groups are now competing to make that vehicle, with a focus on the design of the wheels.

Stick your standard rubber car tires on the moon—especially at its south pole in the middle of the lunar night, where temperatures can reach –300 degrees Fahrenheit—and nothing good will happen. The tires will sink into the loose lunar soil, and the intense solar radiation on the moon, which lacks a protective atmosphere, will instantly begin to break down the rubber. Then the extreme cold will freeze the tires, rendering them unable to deform or compress, and making them harder to roll. They’ll get brittle and shatter.

The issues only get worse over time. The moon’s soil, or lunar regolith, is extra abrasive, says Florian Vilcot, an innovation expert and designer at Michelin. That abrasiveness threatens to quickly tear up any unequipped material. That’s particularly important for the LTV because Michelin is designing a tire to last 10 years and travel more than 6,200 miles. (By comparison, the Lunar Rover Vehicles or “moon buggies” involved in the Apollo missions in the early 1970s each traveled about 18 miles.)

As with all things related to space travel and NASA, an incredible amount of planning is being done years in advance. By contrast, the headline on the linked article appears to have not even gotten the second pass it badly needed:

• Humans Are Going to the Moon’s South Pole. This Is How They’ll Drive There

The proposed wheels for the LTV are high-tech, but they’re not so high-tech that it’s somehow possible to drive through space from the Earth to the moon.

Speaking of lonely things in space, Voyager 1 is the most distant object humanity has ever sent out into space. It’s proved to be useful decades beyond its original mission, but now, it may finally be dying.

Way back in 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless performed the first untethered spacewalk in history. Here’s a picture from that mission:

NASA featured the image on the fortieth anniversary last week. I find it amazing and horrifying.

When NASA needed to test a laser-based deep space transmission earlier this month, they had a little fun with the video.

The contents of the video didn’t matter for the experiment, so the team decided to have a little fun, using a cat video featuring JPL employee Joby Harris’ pet “Taters” chasing a laser pointer, along with graphics related to the Psyche mission.

You can see Taters in action right here.

Last year, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid. It was a good thing.

Nearly a year has passed since NASA deliberately crashed a $300 million spacecraft into an asteroid. In a first-of-its-kind feat, the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) craft slammed into the space rock Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour on September 26, 2022. Dimorphos orbits another asteroid called Didymos, and while neither object posed a threat to Earth, the feat showed the world that NASA could nudge an asteroid and alter its trajectory—an action that might come in handy if a planetary defense scenario were to materialize in the future.

The test was a success, and potentially means we won’t need to send Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, or any oil drillers into space to save the planet in the future. However, following last year’s impact, a high school class in California has discovered that the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos has degraded more than initially expected. In short, Dimorphos is acting strangely.

I can relate, Dimorphos. I can relate.