Bob Ewing

mood

The coolest orbital animation I've seen of Artemis 2 Just really shows you how far away they're flying today and also how precise they need to be to go to the moon

What will the Artemis-2 astronauts do during the entire 10-day mission? Day by day overview: Day 1. Launch. Launch on the SLS rocket, stage separation, orbital insertion. Maneuvers around the spent stage, initial system checks, change from spacesuits to everyday clothing. Day 2. Beginning the journey to the Moon: Simulator exercises, then the main maneuver—translunar injection (TLI), which places Orion on a trajectory to fly around the Moon and return to Earth. Day 3. Preparation Rehearsals for lunar observations in zero gravity, corrective maneuver, emergency procedures training (e.g., CPR). Day 4. Course correction Second minor maneuver, communication with Mission Control, media sessions, photography of Earth and the Moon at the midpoint. Day 5. Lunar Entry For the first time since 1972, humans will be in cislunar space. Spacesuit tests: rapid pressurization, life support systems checks. Another course correction. Day 6. Lunar Flyby The main day: The Orion spacecraft will fly at an altitude of 6,400–9,650 km above the lunar surface. This distance is approximately 15–24 times greater than the orbital altitude of the ISS. Plus, the Moon itself is smaller. Visually, the Moon will look like a basketball at arm's length to the astronauts. There will be only three hours for observations during closest approach. The astronauts will take photographs and record geological data. Depending on the launch time, the Artemis 2 crew could break the record for the longest distance from Earth. Day 7. Lunar Exit Data transfer to scientists, psychological and physical debriefings. Symbolic call with the ISS crew. First maneuver of the return trajectory. Day 8. Demonstrations Radiation protection training (using water and thermal protection as barriers). Testing the Orion attitude control systems in various modes. Day 9. Preparing for reentry The last full day of the flight. Technological demonstrations, course corrections, fitting of compression suits to help the body adapt to weightlessness. Day 10. Return Final maneuver, atmospheric reentry, during which the temperature will reach 1650°C. Parachute deployment, splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off San Francisco. Crew pickup by US Navy ships.

Perhaps my favorite Supreme Court exchange in recent memory: Solicitor general: “It’s a new world." John Roberts: "It's a new world. It's the same Constitution." Into my veins 😌

Best classroom April fools prank ever This professor has a policy that if your phone rings in class, you must answer it on speakerphone, so the students arranged to have a friend call on April fools’ day...

Depending on launch time and conditions, those within the white range rings may be able to spot #ArtemisII on its way to space 🚀 (Map via @Dillonshrop06)

"God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth." One of my fondest childhood memories: the balletic launch, the moving message to all of humanity, the most beautiful photograph ever taken. nytimes.com/card/2026/04/0…

Give your children more autonomy earlier. They’re making micro-decisions every day. Let them pick their clothes. Get their own cereal. They could figure it out at seven. Credit them with what they can do. But also structure. You need structure and respect in balance. Manners matter. Mutual respect is nonnegotiable. You can honor autonomy and set boundaries at the same time. Neither extreme works.

Actually, quite a bit has changed

Neil Armstrong and David Scott looking cool while their Gemini 8 Capsule is being recovered, 1966

Every single time a human being has left low earth orbit has been between Richard Nixon's first election and his impeachment.

The cartoon is from 1894, when the average hourly wage for production workers was 13 cents per hour, or about $5/hour in Feb 2026 dollars using the CPI for inflation adjustment. Average hourly compensation was $38/hour in 2024, or 7.5x higher. Data from @MeasuringWorth.

A huge advantage of live Socratic dialogue (especially in smaller classes of 15:1 or less) is that there is nowhere to hide and no way to fake it. Either the student can come up with a coherent argument or not (in real time). Over time, they become much better at arguing for their own positions in live conversations, much better at thinking on their feet, and ultimately much better at writing, because they are accustomed to generating arguments that they believe in and find defensible. As a consequence, at @socraticexp we have a vibrant writing culture and very little use of AI to cheat on writing assignments. Writing is crafted first in live conversations and then transferred to formal writing but based on ideas that were brought to life in the discussions.

Tomorrow, humans return to the path of the Moon. NASA is set to make history as the Artemis II mission lifts off from Kennedy Space Center at 6:24 p.m. EDT. This landmark flight marks the first time in more than 50 years that humans will venture beyond low Earth orbit toward the Moon. Aboard the powerful Space Launch System rocket, four astronauts will ride the Orion spacecraft on a daring ten-day journey that will take them nearly 250,000 miles from Earth. Unlike the Apollo missions, this flight will be broadcast live around the world in stunning high definition. A new generation will witness the thunderous roar of liftoff and the dramatic ascent into space in real time. The crew will fly a precise loop around the far side of the Moon before returning home — a high-stakes test of the Orion spacecraft’s life-support systems, navigation, and deep-space capabilities. Though Artemis II will not land on the lunar surface, it is the critical dress rehearsal for humanity’s return to the Moon later this decade. This mission is more than a flight — it is the bridge between our past achievements and a future of sustained human presence on the Moon and beyond.

Writing is thinking, and people who outsource the full writing process to AI will find their screens full of words and their minds empty of thought. But also: All writing involves and has always involved “outsourcing”—reaching outside of the writer’s mind to pull in pieces of the world, before and after the work of making words. Writers draw their ideas from other people, books, articles; after writing they often rely on outside copy editors, fact checkers, transcribers. Some of this stuff is just going to be done by AI in the future, and the boundaries between “good behavior” and “bad behavior” will have some blurry lines, and we should be honest and open about the blur rather than declare everybody with an open Claude window a part of the slopclass. Anybody who says AI transcription of long interviews obliterates the identity of a writer is being a little silly. But what about copy editing? Claude is a fast and decent copy editor, but it is inhuman to rely on it for that function? Is it moral to google “Econ papers on income transfers for child poverty” but immoral to write the same thing as an AI prompt? What about throwing 500 muddled words into ChatGPT and saying “does this make any sense? what do you think I’m trying to say here?” That’s going to be useful for some people. At an aesthetic level, I don’t like copy-pasting AI paragraphs into articles and pressing publish. That feels like me cheating myself. It feels like de-skilling. But the idea that “using AI” is anathema to the identity of being a writer is, in a few years, going to sound an awful lot like claiming that “using a computer” is a violation of the craft of writing. (Which, haha, maybe it is and we should all just go back to Steinbeck and his pencils; but talk about ships that have sailed.)

The moon is 1,000x further away than the international space station. In the entire history of the world there was only a 4 year period when humans went further than 870 miles from earth, and that was 50 years ago. This week they will go 250,000 miles.

The first self portrait in space, taken by Buzz Aldrin in 1966

I started this career~7 years ago as a guy that just loved taking photos of the moon I had no idea one day I’d be taking photos of people going to the moon. 2 days.

“It is our strong hope that this Artemis mission is the start of an era where everyone, every person on Earth can look at it and think of it as also a destination,” said Artemis II Mission Specialist Christina Koch.

April is the month of America's Big Four. Starship, New Glenn, Falcon Heavy and SLS are all launching this month!