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Sending Your Name to Space: A Cosmic Journey of Connection
Imagine your name orbiting the Moon or resting on the surface of Mars. NASA has turned this fanciful idea into reality through its “Send Your Name to Space” campaigns. By simply signing up online, people around the world can join NASA missions symbolically – their names encoded on microchips or memory cards that hitch a…
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Comet 3I/ATLAS: Interstellar Visitor, Not Alien Invader
An Interstellar Comet Crashes the Party Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third known object from beyond our solar system ever observed passing through it . Discovered on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile, this celestial interloper was immediately recognized as interstellar from the extreme, open-ended shape of its orbit. In plain terms,…
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Reading a Rock for Ghosts: On Defining “Life” and Inferring It from Mars
NASA’s news release reports that Perseverance cored a mudstone in Jezero Crater whose chemistry and textures may record potential biosignatures—not proof of life, but suggestive clues. What follows are my thoughts about why, if we struggle to define “life” at all, the attempt to infer past life from such clues is far more complex—and why…
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Flight 10, Starship, and the Art of Learning by Fire
If learning is doing, and doing spaceflight is doing really hot doing, then SpaceX is having a masterclass. The tenth integrated test flight of Starship (also called IFT-10) pushed a number of boundaries: new heat shield tiles, mock payload deployment, booster landing experiments, engine relights, etc. Many things succeeded; others revealed gaps (literally) – especially…
