China Is Shooting For The Moon Sooner Than You Think

April 14, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 55 Comments

Humanity first reached the moon in 1969. We went back a few times, then lost interest within three short years, and we haven’t been back since. NASA has just flew a quartet of astronauts around the moon last week, and hopes to touch lunar soil by 2028. But the American space program is no longer the only game in town.

China has emerged as another major player in the second race for the Moon. Having mastered human spaceflight 23 years ago, the country’s space program has been moving from strength to strength. A moon landing is on the cards, with the country hoping to plant its boots, and presumably flag, in 2030.

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From Lunar Dust To Breathable Air

April 13, 2026 by Ian Bos 26 Comments

Moon missions are hot again for the first bit since the space race. While the previous period had us land on the big lunar rock, the missions of tomorrow have us living on it. The initial problem of landing in one piece has been solved, but there are many more puzzles to solve. One major issue of living in the vacuum of space is the lack of breathable air, because, ya know, it’s space.

This brings us to today, where [Blue Origin] has announced a prototype method of turning Moon dust into the valuable gas we call oxygen. [Blue Origin] hasn’t posted much about the actual process behind this feat, terming the system “Air Pioneer”. What we do know is that it requires melting the regolith and then passing current through to release the O2 molecules from their rocky prison.

While some publications on this matter have been calling this a first in its entirety, this isn’t entirely true. NASA has worked on this technology for the past couple of years, called “Gaseous Lunar Oxygen from Regolith Electrolysis”, or (GaLORE). What [Blue Origin] has done, however, is complete the task under a for-profit motive. Perhaps this can introduce the drive needed to accelerate the development of the tech? (If anyone knows any more detail about the Blue Origins system, please let us know.)

Private space is certainly an exciting and quickly moving space in nearly all regards. It’s important to see how far we have come from the initial moon missions. If you want to check out some of the wackier lessons from that era, be sure to read up on the fight for moon cockroaches!

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A Nebula Straight From The Stars To Your Table

March 31, 2026 by Ian Bos 3 Comments

Space may truly be the final frontier, but maybe that frontier can be closer than you thought. Pictures of nebulae and planets bring the colorful sights of deep space right to your screen. You may even have models of some of the rockets used for those missions on a shelf. However, did you know that you could even have a model of those nebulae or planetary surfaces from [NASA]?

While we have covered some distributed models from [NASA] here before, the catalog has expanded far past what 2016 had in store. Additionally, the catalog has been sorted into a more user-friendly, filterable interface than a simple GitHub repository. Most models even have a description attached, giving some basic background information on what the Crab Nebula is, for example.

There could always be more; there don’t appear to be many models of the space shuttle or some other expected files, but what is there is incredible. Some non-3D model files can also be found from star maps to full planetary maps.

While this file repository is cool and all, it’s not all [NASA] does. When not sending rockets deep into space for cool pictures, [NASA] has to make sure the Moon doesn’t explode. Was that a possibility at some point? Of course it has been!

Artemis II Agenda Keeps Moon-Bound Crew Busy

March 19, 2026 by Tom Nardi 34 Comments

With the launch of Artemis II from Cape Canaveral potentially just weeks away, NASA has been releasing a steady stream of information about the mission through their official site and social media channels to get the public excited about the agency’s long-awaited return to the Moon. While the slickly produced videos and artist renderings might get the most attention, even the most mundane details about a flight that will put humans on the far side of our nearest celestial neighbor for the first time since 1972 can be fascinating.

The Artemis II Moon Mission Daily Agenda is a perfect example. Released earlier this week via the NASA blog, the document seems to have been all but ignored by the mainstream media. But the day-by-day breakdown of the Artemis II mission contains several interesting entries about what the four crew members will be working on during the ten day flight.

Of course, the exact details of the agenda are subject to change once the mission is underway. Some tasks could run longer than anticipated, experiments may not go as planned, and there’s no way to predict technical issues that may arise.

Conversely, the crew could end up breezing through some of the planned activities, freeing up time in the schedule. There’s simply no way of telling until it’s actually happening.

With the understanding that it’s all somewhat tentative, a look through the plan as it stands right now can give us an idea of the sort of highlights we can expect as we follow this historic mission down here on Earth.

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Fictional Moon: Reality TV And SciFi Don’t Mix

March 17, 2026 by Al Williams 33 Comments

It is a safe bet that nearly all Hackaday readers like to at least imagine what it would be like to build and live in an orbital station, on the moon, or on another planet. Moon bases and colonies show up all the time in fictional writing and movies, too. For the Hackaday crowd, some of these are plausible, and others are — well — a bit fanciful. However, there’s one fictional moonbase that we think might have been too realistic: Moonbase 3.

If that didn’t ring a bell, we aren’t surprised. The six-episode series was a co-production between Twentieth Century Fox and the BBC that aired in 1973. To make matters worse, after the initial airings in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the video master tapes were wiped out. Until 1993, there were no known copies of the show, but then one turned up in a US television station.

The show had many links to Dr. Who and, in fact, if you think the spacesuits look familiar, they made later appearances in two Dr. Who episodes.

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Creating An Ultra-Stable Lunar Clock With A Cryogenic Silicon Cavity Laser

March 4, 2026 by Maya Posch 1 Comment

Phase-coherent lasers are crucial for many precision tasks, including timekeeping. Here on Earth the most stable optical oscillators are used in e.g. atomic clocks and many ultra-precise scientific measurements, such as gravitational wave detection. Since these optical oscillators use cryogenic silicon cavities, it’s completely logical to take this principle and build a cryogenic silicon cavity laser on the Moon.

In the pre-print article by [Jun Ye] et al., the researchers go through the design parameters and construction details of such a device in one of the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the Moon, as well as the applications for it. This would include the establishment of a very precise lunar clock, optical interferometry and various other scientific and telecommunication applications.

Although these PSRs are briefly called ‘cold’ in the paper’s abstract, this is fortunately quickly corrected, as the right term is ‘well-insulated’. These PSRs on the lunar surface never get to warm up due to the lack of an atmosphere to radiate thermal energy, and the Sun’s warm rays never pierce their darkness either. Thus, with some radiators to shed what little thermal energy the system generates and the typical three layers of thermal shielding it should stay very much cryogenic.

Add to this the natural vacuum on the lunar surface, with PSRs even escaping the solar wind’s particulates, and maintaining a cryogenic, ultra-high vacuum inside the silicon cavity should be a snap, with less noise than on Earth. Whether we’ll see this deployed to the Moon any time soon remains to be seen, but with various manned missions and even Moon colony plans in the charts, this could be just one of the many technologies to be deployed on the lunar surface over the next few decades.

A Stylish Moon And Tide Clock For The Mantlepiece

December 2, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

Assuming you’re not stuck in a prison cell without windows, you could feasibly keep track of the moon and tides by walking outside and jotting things down in your notebook. Alternatively, you could save a lot of hassle by just building this moon and tide clock from [pjdines1994] instead.

The build is based on a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which is hooked up to a real-time clock module and a Waveshare 3.7-inch e-paper display. Upon this display, the clock draws an image relevant to the current phase of the moon. As the write-up notes, it was a tad fussy to store 24 images for all the different lunar phases within the Pi Pico, but it was achieved nonetheless with a touch of compression. As for tides, it covers those too by pulling in tide information from an online resource.

It’s specifically set up to report the local tides for [pjdines1994], reporting the high tide and low tide times for Whitstable in the United Kingdom. If you’re not in Whitstable, you’d probably want to reconfigure the clock before using it yourself. Unless you really want to know what’s up in Whitstable, of course. If you so wish, you can set the clock up to make its own tide predictions by running local calculations, but [pjdines1994] notes that this is rather more complicated to do. The finished result look quite good, because [pjdines1994] decided to build it inside an old carriage clock that only reveals parts of the display showing the moon and the relevant tide numbers.

We’ve featured some other great tide clocks before, like this grand 3D printed design. If you’ve built your own arcane machine to plot the dances of celestial objects, do be sure to let us know on the tipsline!