Happy Moon Day! 57 years ago (!) on July 20th, Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the Moon. We haven’t been back there since 1972, or 54 years. Hard to believe. I think we’ll get back on the Lunar surface in the next 3-4 years, either via NASA’s Artemis or independent flights of SpaceX and Starship. I’m happy to have lived long enough to see us venture back into space, even though the motivation is now profit and colonization rather than national pride. I’m fine with that. It’s unlikely I’ll live long enough to see the establishment of a permanent lunar colony, but I can hope.

The title picture above was taken on July 20, 1969, from the Apollo 11 mission. Earthrise…it’s still profound.

Today could also be called Mars Day, as it’s been exactly 50 years since NASA landed the Viking 1 probe onto Mars. July 20…interesting day for space exploration. The Mars rover/probe landing 50 years ago strikes me as even more sad about the lack of progress we had from 1980 to 2010-ish. Thirty or more years where we decided space exploration was too tough, too expensive to be pursued. Short-sighted, though perhaps we just needed the technology to catch up to aspirations.

Viking 1 wasn’t the first object to soft-land on Mars – the Soviets did it in 1971, but were unable to communicate with their Mars 3 probe after touchdown. Viking 1 provided telemetry from Mars for over six years, and vastly increased our knowledge of the Red Planet.

With all this space exploration in mind, I tuned into the expected launch of another Falcon 9/Starlink mission from Vandenberg this morning. It aborted at T-0, just like Starship a couple of days ago. Weird coincidence…you don’t see many Falcon 9 launch aborts these days. But an abort at T-0 is a helluva lot better than a RUD (rapid unplanned disassembly, aka explosion). So I’ll hang on until Thursday the 23rd, when Starship is now scheduled to launch.