2026-03-04 23:00:26
In their recent announcement, NASA has made official what pretty much anyone following the Artemis lunar program could have told you years ago — humans won’t be landing on the Moon in 2028.
It was always an ambitious timeline, especially given the scope of the mission. It wouldn’t be enough to revisit the Moon in a spidery lander that could only hold two crew members and a few hundred kilograms of gear like in the 60s. This time, NASA wants to return to the lunar surface with hardware capable of setting up a sustained human presence. That means a new breed of lander that dwarfs anything the agency, or humanity for that matter, has ever tried to place on another celestial body.
Unsurprisingly, developing such vehicles and making sure they’re safe for crewed missions takes time and requires extensive testing. The simple fact is that the landers, being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, won’t be ready in time to support the original Artemis III landing in 2028. Additionally, development of the new lunar extravehicular activity (EVA) suits by Axiom Space has fallen behind schedule. So even if one of the landers would have been ready to fly in 2028, the crew wouldn’t have the suits they need to actually leave the vehicle and work on the surface.
But while the Artemis spacecraft and EVA suits might be state of the art, NASA’s revised timeline for the program is taking a clear step back in time, hewing closer to the phased approach used during Apollo. This not only provides their various commercial partners with more time to work on their respective contributions, but critically, provides an opportunity to test them in space before committing to a crewed landing.
Given its imminent launch, there are no changes planned for the upcoming Artemis II mission. In fact, had there not been delays in getting the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket ready for launch, the mission would have already flown by now. Given how slow the gears of government tend to turn, one wonders if the original plan was to announce these program revisions after the conclusion of the mission. The launch is currently slated for April, but could always slip again if more issues arise.
At any rate, the goals for Artemis II have always been fairly well-aligned with its Apollo counterpart, Apollo 8. Just like the 1968 mission, this flight is designed to test the crew capsule and collect real-world experience while in the vicinity of the Moon, but without the added complexity of attempting a landing. Although now, as it was then, the decision to test the crew capsule without its lander wasn’t made purely out of an abundance of caution.
As originally envisioned, Apollo 8 would have seen both the command and service module (CSM) and the lunar module (LM) tested in low Earth orbit. But due to delays in LM production, it was decided to fly the completed CSM without a lander on a modified mission that would put it into orbit around the Moon. This would give NASA an opportunity to demonstrate the critical translunar injection (TLI) maneuver and gain experience operating the CSM in lunar orbit — tasks which were originally scheduled to be part of the later Apollo 10 mission.
In comparison, Artemis II was always intended to be flown with only the Orion crew capsule. NASA’s goal has been to keep the program relatively agnostic when it came to landers, with the hope being that private industry would furnish an array of vehicles from which the agency could chose depending on the mission parameters. The Orion capsule would simply ferry crews to the vicinity of the Moon, where they would transfer over to the lander — either via directly docking, or by using the Lunar Gateway station as a rallying point.
There’s no lander waiting at the Moon for Artemis II, and the fate of Lunar Gateway is still uncertain. But for now, that’s not important. On this mission, NASA just wants to demonstrate that the Orion capsule can take a crew of four to the Moon and bring them back home safely.
For Artemis III, the previous plan was to have the Orion capsule mate up with a modified version of SpaceX’s Starship — known in NASA parlance as the Human Landing System (HLS) — which would then take the crew down to the lunar surface. While the HLS contract did stipulate that SpaceX was to perform an autonomous demonstration landing before Artemis III, the aggressive nature of the overall timeline made no provision for testing the lander with a crew onboard ahead of the actual landing attempt — a risky plan even in the best of circumstances.
The newly announced timeline resolves this issue by not only delaying the actual Moon landing until 2028, to take place during Artemis IV, but to change Artemis III into a test flight of the lander from the relative safety of low Earth orbit in 2027. The crew will liftoff from Kennedy Space Center and rendezvous with the lander in orbit. Once docked, the crews will practice maneuvering the mated vehicles and potentially perform an EVA to test Axiom’s space suits.
This new plan closely follows the example of Apollo 9, which saw the CSM and LM tested together in Earth orbit. At this point in the program, the CSM had already been thuroughly tested, but the LM had never flown in space or had a crew onboard. After the two craft docked, the crew performed several demonstrations, such as verifying that the mated craft could be maneuvered with both the CSM and LM propulsion systems.
The two craft then separated, and the LM was flown independently for several hours before once again docking with the CSM. The crew also performed a brief EVA to test the Portable Life Support System (PLSS) which would eventually be used on the lunar surface.
While the Artemis III and Apollo 9 missions have a lot in common, there’s at least one big difference. At this point, NASA isn’t committing to one particular lander. If Blue Origin gets their hardware flying before SpaceX, that’s what they’ll go with. There’s even a possibility, albeit remote, that they could test both landers during the mission.
After the success of Apollo 9, there was consideration given to making the first landing attempt on the following mission. But key members of NASA such as Director of Flight Operations Christopher C. Kraft felt there was still more to learn about operating the spacecraft in lunar orbit, and it was ultimately decided to make Apollo 10 a dress rehearsal for the actual landing.
The CSM and LM would head to the Moon, separate, and go through the motions of preparing to land. The LM would begin its descent to the lunar surface, but stop at an altitude of 14.4 kilometers (9 miles). After taking pictures of the intended landing site, it would return to the CSM and the crew would prepare for the return trip to Earth. With these maneuvers demonstrated, NASA felt confident enough to schedule the history-making landing for the next mission, Apollo 11.
But this time around, NASA will take that first option. Rather than do a test run out to the Moon with the Orion capsule and attached lander, the plan is to make the first landing attempt on Artemis IV. This is partially because we now have a more complete understanding of orbital rendezvous and related maneuvers in lunar orbit. But also because by this point, SpaceX and Blue Origin should have already completed their autonomous demonstration missions to prove the capabilities of their respective landers.
At this point, the plans for anything beyond Artemis IV are at best speculative. NASA says they will work to increase mission cadence, which includes streamlining SLS operations so the megarocket can be launched at least once per year, and work towards establishing a permanent presence on the Moon. But of course none of that can happen until these early Artemis missions have been successfully executed. Until then it’s all just hypothetical.
While Apollo was an incredible success, one can only follow its example so far. Despite some grand plans, the program petered out once it was clear the Soviet Union was no longer in the game. It cemented NASA’s position as the preeminent space agency, but the dream of exploring the lunar surface and establishing an outpost remained unfulfilled. With China providing a modern space rival, and commercial partners rapidly innovating, perhaps Artemis may be able to succeed where Apollo fell short.
2026-03-04 20:00:30
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.
2026-03-04 17:00:32
You may or may not be reading this on a smartphone, but odds are that even if you aren’t, you own one. Well, possess one, anyway — it’s debatable if the locked-down, one-way relationships we have with our addiction slabs counts as ownership. [LuckyBor], aka [Breezy], on the other hand — fully owns his 4G smartphone, because he made it himself.
OK, sure, it’s only rocking a 4G modem, not 5G. But with an ESP32-S3 for a brain, that’s probably going to provide plenty of bandwidth. It does what you expect from a phone: thanks to its A7682E simcom modem, it can call and text. The OV2640 Arducam module allows it to take pictures, and yes, it surfs the web. It even has features certain flagship phones lack, like a 3.5 mm audio jack, and with its 3.5″ touchscreen, the ability to fit in your pocket. Well, once it gets a case, anyway.
This is just an alpha version, a brick of layered modules. [LuckyBor] plans on fitting everything into a slimmer form factor with a four-layer PCB that will also include an SD-card adapter, and will open-source the design at that time, both hardware and software. Since [LuckyBor] has also promised the world documentation, we don’t mind waiting a few months.
It’s always good to see another open-source option, and this one has us especially chuffed. Sure, we’ve written about Postmarket OS and other Linux options like Nix, and someone even put the rust-based Redox OS on a phone, but those are still on the same potentially-backdoored commercial hardware. That’s why this project is so great, even if its performance is decidedly weak compared to flagship phones that have as more horsepower as some of our laptops.
We very much hope [LuckyBor] carries through with the aforementioned promise to open source the design.
2026-03-04 14:00:04
Old desk phones are fairly useless these days unless you’re building a corporate PBX in your house. However, they can be fun to hack on, as [0x19] demonstrates by porting DOOM to a Snom 360 office phone.
The Snom 360 is a device from the early VoIP era, with [ox19] laying their hands on some examples from 2005. The initial plan was just to do some telephony with Asterisk, but [ox19] soon realized more was possible. Digging into a firmware image revealed the device ran a Linux kernel on a MIPS chip, so the way forward became obvious.
They set about hacking the phone to run DOOM on its ancient single-color LCD. Doing so was no mean feat. It required compilation of custom firmware, pulling over a better version of BusyBox, and reworking doomgeneric to run on this oddball platform. It also required figuring out how the keyboard was read and the screen was driven to write custom drivers—not at all trivial things on a bespoke phone platform. With all that done, though, [0x19] had a dodgy version of DOOM running slowly on a desk phone on a barely-legible LCD display.
Porting DOOM is generally a task done more for the technical thrill than to actually play the game on terribly limited hardware. We love seeing it done, whether the game is ported to a LEGO brick or a pair of earbuds. If you’re doing your own silly port, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline—just make sure it’s one we haven’t seen before.
2026-03-04 11:00:11
Running a nuclear power plant isn’t an easy task, even with the level of automation available to a 1980s Soviet RBMK reactor. In their continuing efforts to build a full-sized, functional replica of an RBMK control room as at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant – retired in the early 2000s – the [Chornobyl Family] channel has now moved on to the SKALA system.
Previously we saw how they replicated the visually very striking control panel for the reactor core, with its many buttons and status lights. SKALA is essentially the industrial control system, with multiple V-3M processor racks (‘frames’), each with 20k 24-bit words of RAM. Although less powerful than a PDP-11, its task was to gather all the sensor information and process them in real-time, which was done in dedicated racks.
Output from SKALA’s DREG program were also the last messages from the doomed #4 reactor. Unfortunately an industrial control system can only do so much if its operators have opted to disable every single safety feature. By the time the accident unfolded, the hardware was unable to even keep up with the rapid changes, and not all sensor information could even be recorded on the high-speed drum printer or RTA-80 teletypes, leaving gaps in our knowledge of the accident.
Setting up a genuine RTA-80 teletype is still one of the goals, but these old systems are not easy to use. Same with the original software that ran on these V-3M computer frames, which was loaded from paper tape (the ‘library’), including the aforementioned DREG program. This process creates executable code that is put on magnetic tapes, with magnetic tape also used for storage.
The workings of the SKALA system and its individual programs including KRV, DREG and PRIZMA are explained in the video, each having its own focus on a part of the RBMK reactor’s status and overall health. Interacting with SKALA occurs via a special keyboard, on which the operator enters command codes to change e.g. set points, with parameters encoded in this code.
Using this method, RBMK operators can set and request values, with parameters and any error codes displayed on a dedicated display. There is also the Mnemonic Display for the SKALA system which provides feedback to the operator on the status of the SKALA system, including any faults.
Although to many people the control system of a power plant is just the control room, with its many confusing buttons, switches, lights and displays, there is actually a lot more to it, with systems SKALA and its associated hardware an often overlooked aspect. It’s great to see this kind of knowledge being preserved, and even poured into a physical model that simulates the experience of using the system.
The long-lived nature of nuclear power reactors means that even today 1960s and 1970s-era industrial automation system are still in active use, but once the final reactor goes offline – or is modernized during refurbishing – a lot of the institutional knowledge of these systems tends to vanish and with it a big part of history.
2026-03-04 08:00:17
If you’ve ever used a ballpoint pen with a clip on the top, you’ve probably noticed they bend pretty easily. The clip relies on you only bending it a small amount to clip it on to things; bend it too far, and it ends up permanently deformed. [Craighill] decided to develop a pen clip that didn’t suffer this ugly malady.
The problem with regular pen clips comes down to simple materials science. Bend the steel clip a little bit, and the stress in the material remains below the elastic limit—so it springs back to its original shape. Push it too far, though, and you’ll end up getting into the plastic deformation region, where you’ve applied so much stress that the material is permanently deformed.
[Craighill] noted this problem, and contemplated whether a better type of clip was possible. An exploration of carabiner clips served to highlight possible solutions. Some carabiners using elastically-deformed closures that faced the same problem, while others used more complicated spring closures or a nifty bent-wire design. This latter solution seemed perfect for building a non-deforming pen clip. The bent wire is effectively a small spring, which allows it to act as a clip to hold the pen on to something. However, it’s also able to freely rotate out from the pen body, limiting the amount of actual stress put on the material itself, which stops it entering the plastic deformation region that would ruin it.
It’s some neat materials science combined with a pleasant bit of inventing, which we love to see. Sometimes there is joy to be had in contemplating and improving even the simplest of things. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!]
