Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Hello friend, family, and followers! This is Alex writing to today about something that is very special to my heart: Space!

Today at 6:24pm EST is the launch of Artemis II mission, which is the first mission taking humans back towards the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. I wasn’t there for the Apollo missions, but I know that there might be a few of you out there that remember watching it live. If you do remember watching those missions live, leave a comment on what you remember and what it meant to you and everyone else around you at the time!

Since 1972, the US space program has developed quite a bit, but outside the excitement of the Space Shuttle launches, I’d imagine all but the most avid space fans have largely tuned out any developments in space travel. I’m hoping to bring back some excitement to y’all about exploring the final frontier by writing this post by explaining why you should care about Artemis.

Mission Goal

To develop a permanent base on the moon

Why?

There’s a few reasons:

  1. The moons low gravity and lack of atmosphere allows for unique experiments to be performed that aren’t possible on Earth. Read the book “Project Hail Mary” to get an insight into how our science equipment is coded for Earth gravity.

  2. The Moon is most likely made out of the same material earth is made out of, and was most likely formed by a Mars sized planet slamming into earth about 4 billion years ago. As it has no atmosphere, it’s basically a sample of Earth that has remain untouched from plate tectonics and life in general.

  3. The moon has ice (aka water) at its south pole. Water is good for keeping people alive, but it’s even better for making rocket fuel if you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen.

  4. Preparing for future missions to Mars. The moon is a close enough place to remove some of the risks with testing out human habitats in a place where nothing lives. It’s also always going to be on the way to Mars, and with the water (aka fuel) that we can get from the moon, we can basically make a gas station with the moon on the way to Mars.

  5. The moon is a source of Helium-3. Helium is used for birthday balloons which is obviously important, but potentially more important is that it’s one of the fuels needed for fusion power. The Earth already has a helium shortage, so if we ever figure out how to make fusion power, to moon will be a valuable source of the raw inputs.

How?

The Lunar Gateway. The Gateway is the gas station on the way to the moon, and will be a main feature in the Artemis mission goals. When you travel somewhere far, you go to an airport and get on a plane, and then the plane takes you close to your final destination, but you still get in a taxi after you land to go the last few miles. It wouldn’t make sense for the plane to take you to your hotel directly, it’s way too big for that and not designed to drive in the highway.

The same goes for rockets. You need a MASSIVE rocket just to get off the Earth. And if you need to bring a bunch of dead weight with you to land on the moon, you need an even BIGGER rocket with even more fuel. And guess what! That extra fuel you just added to account for the weight of your lander also has its own weight, which in turn requires more fuel just to lift the fuel.

This is called the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation.

The Apollo missions were cool, but they were unsustainable mainly due to the nature of the launch vehicle required to get to the moon at the time. But today, we have companies making reusable rockets that can lift even more mass than the Saturn V. We’ve also learned a lot about assembling habitats in space through the ISS over the last 30 years.

Today is the start of all of this unsexy research work coming together into something real, and I hope you all are able to share a little bit of the excitement with me!

One final message here:

Fire is a the product of an energetic chemical reaction that releases a hot ionized gas. The ionized gas is hot enough to where the electrons jump around between different energy states, releasing photons which you see as light coming off the dancing flames, and they travel at the speed of light in a straight line until they hit something.

Dad was cremated, which means that through Einstein’s E=mc², some of the matter that was him became pure light. Almost all of those photons were absorbed immediately by the furnace walls. BUT, quantum mechanics tells us that particles have a nonzero probability of passing through any barrier, no matter how solid. The math demands it! So, some tiny faction of this light passed through the walls of the furnace, and then through the walls of the building, and then through the clouds and the rest of the atmosphere.

So, with all that being said, somewhere out there about a light-month away, a tiny fraction of the energy that once was part of Andy Snarski is cruising through the universe. Next time youre outside on a clear night, look up to the stars and say “Hey Andy!”. He’s about 4 years away from his first chance to pee at Alpha Centari, and we all know he’s not going to stop along the way if he doesn’t have to!