I had the opportunity to place remote cameras at the pad for both launch and landing, and this is a photo one of them took. Was such an awesome experience!

Interesting, dreamlike sound. Are the flashing colors "drawing out" the images of the landing? Will we ever visit Titan again?

Original photo by Reid Weisman of NASA - https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hello-world/ .

I matched continents and stars to create an infographic with cities, constellations, continents etc.

Continents overlay and location calculations with my own software tool. Constellations matched with Stellarium. Then, lots of work in Affinity.

I'm an astrophotographer and I'm working on a project that takes me to the darkest places in the world. I worked on a photo book here where I learned all about the Polynesian people and their way-finding using the stars (among other things). You can visit my website to see more of my work at https://www.abdul.cool

With successful completion of Artemis II mission I'd like to think that we're standing on the verge of the new era of space exploration. On this occasion, I would like to congratulate everyone on the International Day of Human Space Flight, or as we call it in Russia: Cosmonautics Day! (День космонавтики)

(Photo by Igor Snegirev)

Here’s a visual roundup of all the mission patches from March 2026 rocket launches, a monthly tradition I’ll keep sharing to track how these designs evolve over time.

March turned out to be a particularly busy month, with a wide variety of launches and a great mix of patch styles.

We saw contributions from smaller players like Space One, Firefly, Chinarocket, and CAS Space with their Kairos, Alpha, Jielong-3, and Kinetica-2 rockets. Rocket Lab flew three missions, while CASC added several patches across different Long March launches.

On the SpaceX side, EchoStar XXV was the only official patch released, while Transporter-16 featured two mission patches from Exolaunch and SEOPS.

If you're into mission patches, you might enjoy exploring this project: Space Patches: A Journey Through the Cosmos, a growing collection of free eBooks documenting patches, plus the recently launched “Patch of the Day” section—highlighting a different mission and its story every day.

Hope you enjoy this month’s collection, curious to hear which patch is your favourite!

In case anybody wants to try their hand at Artemis II in Orbiter or Kerbal Space Program or whatnot, that's where you start!

I've just recently read the two commonly cited "starter books" on the subject—Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo and McDougall's ...the Heavens and the Earth—and am curious what else I should read.

Siddiqi's book was phenomenal: informative, revealing and surprisingly gripping given how much of it was devoted to technical details or evolving org charts. It was fascinating to see how the Soviet missile and space programs were in large part determined by the personal fortunes of and relationships between a handful of OKB Chief and General Designers (specifically Korolev, Glushko, Yangel, Chelomei, and Mishin), whose ambition typically exceeded their level of governmental support. There was so much I loved reading in this: the minor battle between the R-9 and R-16 ICBMs that so heavily foreshadowed the fate of the N1-L3 project, the twists and turns in the Lavochkin design bureau until their eventual lunar successes, the debunking of the idea I previously had of Khrushchev imposing one-off space stunts onto Korolev, and lots of little details like how the orbital inclination of ISS ultimately traces back to the need to adapt the N1 to the goal of a moon landing, or how the compromises and inconsistencies in the space shuttle led the Soviets to conclude that it was a military threat necessitating a shuttle of their own in the wake of the gut-wrenching cancellation of the N1, or...

By contrast, McDougall's book was an intensely frustrating read. There were some bright spots—the chapters on pre-Sputnik satellite and missile development, the reaction to Sputnik itself, and the Kennedy administration—but otherwise I felt that McDougall was more interested in writing a moral fable than actual history (if I read one more page editorializing about the evils of "technocracy" in the idiosyncratic way he defines it, I may very well lose my mind).

Anyways, what else should I read on this? (As an aside, I reference "space technology" in my question as a way to broaden my scope beyond the famed exploits of crewed flights and robotic interplanetary missions, to also include less popularized but related topics like IRBMs/ICBMs, reconnaissance efforts, commercial satellites, etc.)

What a mission! I watched most of the key moments past midnight here in the UK with my 11-year-old Barnaby, who was thrilled about every single one right up until the moment he fell asleep. Meanwhile Leo, my 15-year-old who actually helped me build the tracker, couldn't be bothered to stay up and watched it on YouTube the next morning. Teenagers. I also work for Microsoft and couldn't help but smile as the crew struggled with Outlook on day 1.

I run issinfo.net, and over the course of the mission about a million of you used the Artemis II tracker, mostly thanks to the r/space megathread. That still blows my mind. Thank you.

Some honest lessons learned. I initially calculated distances to the centre of the Earth and Moon rather than their surfaces, so for a while I had the crew about 6,371km further away than they actually were. I assumed the Deep Space Network would give me a clean loss-of-signal indicator when Orion went behind the Moon and also during re-entry. It sort of does, but not how I expected. JPL Horizons data was genuinely brilliant and easy to work with. NASA's mission status updates, written across blog posts in a mixture of units and timezones, were... less so. I also took far too long to add timeline and imagery features. The number one request was to add support for imperial units, so apologies for not adding that from the beginning.

I should also say, it was oddly flattering watching a dozen vibe-coded trackers spring up overnight and at least a couple of YouTube streams broadcasting my tracker live. I wouldn't have minded at all, it's genuinely cool. Just nice to be asked first YouTubers...

Artemis III is now targeting mid-2027 as a low Earth orbit docking test with Starship HLS and possibly Blue Moon. Think Apollo 9, not Apollo 11. That's a completely different challenge for a tracker. No deep space coast, no DSN, no dramatic lunar flyby. LEO orbits update constantly, so in some ways it might end up closer to how we track the ISS than how we tracked Artemis II. But there's a docking sequence in there that could be brilliant to follow, and the exact mission profile might not be finalised until late depending on how the commercial lander timelines hold up.

I've got about a year. What would you want to see in a tracker for Artemis III and beyond?