Artemis II Just Broke a 52-Year-Old Human Distance Record

NASA's Artemis III Pushed to Late 2027 at Earliest

NASA's Artemis III mission now has a new target: no earlier than late 2027. That's the latest update on the agency's plan to land astronauts near the lunar south pole. The timeline has slipped, and the program continues to face development hurdles.

The Moon's south pole remains the destination because of its potential water ice deposits — a resource that could supply drinking water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for deeper missions. But getting there is taking longer than originally planned.

Meanwhile, pressure is mounting from outside NASA. Commentary in the Wall Street Journal warns the U.S. could lose the space race to China, and a Guardian piece asks directly whether China will beat the U.S. back to the Moon. The race is real, the clock is running, and America's flagship lunar program just moved its finish line further out.

Gobble's Take: Every delay on Artemis III is a gift to Beijing, and Washington should treat it that way.

Source: Faster, Please!

Iran Bought a Chinese Spy Satellite for $36.6 Million. It Worked.

When the U.S. struck Iran in early 2026, space was the first battlefield. U.S. Space Force chief Gen. Chance Saltzman described his guardians as the "first movers" in the campaign — waves of electronic warfare and cyber operations disrupted Iran's "ability to see, communicate and respond" before a single bomb fell. Iran's space command was eliminated as a functioning entity by March 2026. It wasn't, Saltzman admitted, "really a fair fight." The U.S. operates upwards of 500 military and intelligence satellites. Iran had 13 operational ones.

Iran knew the gap. So in late 2024, the IRGC secretly purchased operational control of a Chinese-built spy satellite — the TEE-01B — for $36.6 million. Operating at half-metre resolution, it was sharper than anything Iran owned. It imaged Prince Sultan Air Base, the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and bases in Jordan, Kuwait, and Oman in the days around Iranian missile strikes in March 2026. For $36.6 million, Tehran ran a near-complete ISR cycle against the most powerful military on earth.

The lesson isn't just about Iran. China had 36 satellites in 2010. By 2024, it crossed 1,000 — over 500 dedicated to intelligence and surveillance. In 2024 alone, China launched 260 space objects, including 67 ISR satellites. Gen. Stephen Whiting called China's pace "breathtaking," warning it had created a "kill mesh" in orbit.

Gobble's Take: Any adversary with $36.6 million and a credit line to Beijing can now run surveillance on the U.S. military — that should unsettle every defense budget conversation happening right now.

Source: Readon Substack

A Comment Section Takes Stock of Why Space Colonies Never Happened

The source is a reader comment responding to a book about stalled technological progress. The commenter raises several reasons why ambitious visions like O'Neill's space colonies never materialized — and the critique is pointed.

First, the commenter argues that space colonization enthusiasm predated serious understanding of how damaging the space environment is to human health. The irony isn't lost on them: many space colonization enthusiasts they've personally known are also obsessive about their own health and consume what the commenter calls "life extension quackery."

The comment also takes aim at Eric Drexler's nanotechnology, calling Drexler "an incompetent STEM dabbler who got the physics wrong." The commenter notes that none of MIT's core STEM departments would validate Drexler's dissertation — it was accepted through MIT's Media Lab, which the commenter associates with the School of Architecture and Planning. Their test: if Drexler's ideas made physical sense, someone would have built working nanoassemblers by now. Beyond technical failures, the commenter points to two cultural forces: a deliberate dismantling of industrial civilization by elites beginning in the 1970s, and the rise of Christian end-times belief in the United States, which the commenter argues undermines motivation to improve life in the present world.

Gobble's Take: The comment section is doing more honest reckoning with failed futures than most op-ed pages.

Source: Faster, Please!

The Moon's Far Side: 65 Years Between Humanity's First Blurry Glimpse and What We See Now

In October 1959, Soviet engineers crowded around a radio receiver waiting for signals from Luna 3, a spacecraft the size of a washing machine tumbling through cislunar space. What came back were grainy, barely legible photographs — the first images ever taken of the Moon's far side, the hemisphere that is permanently turned away from Earth due to tidal locking. The images were so degraded by transmission noise that Soviet scientists had to develop and scan the onboard film by remote command, a technique invented specifically for this mission.

What those blurry frames revealed was startling: the far side looks almost nothing like the face we see from Earth. The familiar dark maria — vast ancient lava plains — are nearly absent on the far side, replaced by a relentlessly cratered, pale highland terrain. The reason, planetary scientists now believe, involves the Moon's early thermal history and the slightly thicker crust on the far side that prevented volcanic lava from flooding the surface. A Reddit thread recently placed the original Luna 3 image beside NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photograph of the same region, taken 50 years later with resolutions millions of times sharper — the same craters, finally in focus.

One blurry transmission from 1959 forced humanity to accept that the Moon had been hiding half of itself all along.

Gobble's Take: Every time we build a better camera and point it at something familiar, we find out we were wrong about it.

Source: r/space

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• Blue Origin's New Shepard Grounds Itself Under Federal Investigation
• NASA Is Sending a Laser to the Moon — And It Could Change How We Explore Everything Beyond It
• ESA's Twin Satellites Can Now Create a Solar Eclipse Whenever They Want