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Tag: moon

moonbase: 25mar26

Published March 25, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I noticed yesterday that NASA announced “President Trump’s Moon Base” will be commenced before the end of 2028, therefore the end of the President’s term. Given that the delayed Artemis 2 mission is a lunar flyby and Artemis 3 was reconfigured from a lunar landing to a low earth orbit test of new spacesuits and the dock/undock of a lander – and note that Apollo did those missions the other way around, Apollo 7 crew-rated the boat and lander configuration in LEO, Apollo 8 was the lunar flyby – this may get a little scary/deathy. Twenty-five launches between now and the end of 2028, ten lunar launches next year alone, is a hell of a swing.

I took this ten minutes before the HAIL started.

Absolutely dismal day out there, with a “feels like” of -4 C and 40mph winds. The mancub has made it clear that he blames me – he hates the wind, and is punishing me for taking the sun away. For some reason, he made the very specific decision, not long after we got him, that the weather is always my fault.

Accessions:

OPERATION PAPERCLIP: NAZI SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+)

BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+) – PRE-ORDER

OPERATIONS: Zoom call later, and I need to ship out eight pages, review some story documents and get 500 words down on another thing, as well as start Sunday’s newsletter.
STATUS: 7hrs sleep.
READING: NETTLES AND PETALS, Jamie Walton (UK) (US+), which I got given for Xmas and I’m opening now because food growing season has begun. THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+), re-reading REALITY HUNGER, David Shields (UK) (US+)

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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rewarded by a return to the earth: 22feb26

Published February 22, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Sky Hopinka

Yesterday I reduced a viburnum by half, hacked back salvia and holly, raked a bed, dug a trench in it, mixed a hundred litres of compost into the trench, and planted three cherry trees. Today I am actually less achy and knackered than I expected, especially bearing in mind that I still have this plague in my system. Once I have some charge in my phone, I’m going to check the weather and see if I’m going to have the space to plant some apple trees today.

Today it’s the Swatch Metropolis, yesterday it was the G-Shock G-Rescue because it was a day of working with saws and chainsaws and other implements of destruction.

New newsletter is out.

And my fourth leather notebook cover arrived, so now I have a system that can contain everything I’m working on with space to accommodate more.

TODAY:

“Kiyoshi Awazu［KIYOSHI AWAZU SCPAP BOOK］.published by Tabata Shobo.1970.”

Accessions: The complete works of Plato


READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

When asked why he had made death the penalty for most offences, Draco replied that he considered the lesser offences to deserve it and had no harsher punishment for the greater ones.


LISTENING: Monument Podcast (MNMT 506 : Síoda Rua) – listened to a lot of it yesterday while working in the garden and it’s an amazing mix

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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eaten by pigs: 9feb26

Published February 9, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Bruno Pontiroli

I started to feel a little better yesterday, managed to overextend myself by cleaning out the chicken coop and turning the compost bins, and then got mild food poisoning. I’m ready to lay down on the edge of the property and get eaten by pigs like in DEADWOOD.

I have remembered, for the first time in a week, to do my short stack: 2000mg liposomal nicotinamide riboside with TMG and Pterostilbene, Vit D3 and K2, 1 Floradix for insurance, taken with a bowl of blueberries, blackberries, almonds and honey.

TODAY:

  • How Japan’s prime minister will use her massive new mandate
  • SpaceX shifts focus from Mars to Moon, which seems from here to be about Musk working hard to realign himself with the White House. Also, since the US is all about the Moon in terms of space policy right now, the money is right there, and SpaceX has its eye on ramping to 10,000 launches per annum, largely in pursuit of lofting space-based AI compute. It’s also worth nothing that Japan have now started beaming space-based solar power back to earth via microwave.
  • PROJECT HAIL MARY trailer. People are saying it contains spoilers. It does not. A trailer for a buddy movie that introduces both buddies does not constitute a spoiler.

Bought myself a leather notebook cover that can contain up to six Field Notes notebooks, from InkitLeather here in the UK.

I also had my eye on the covers from Veyrona, but it looks like they might be winding down.

Additionally, I saw something unusual on MUJI, of all places: a Vietnamese variant on the French chore jacket, long-cut/fingertip-length, in a blend of denim and kapok, which I picked up in a medium grey with matching wide-leg trouser.

I’m wearing a new ribbed grey 100% cotton henley that I picked up for a song from a site that didn’t appear to know they were selling it, under a black Carharrt work shirt I’ve had for a dozen years and which seems to be indestructible, paired with a black Carharrt utility pant. I love workwear and I cannot lie. I fell back in love with clothes a few years back and am enjoying it a lot.

STATUS: siiick
READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+) , M SON OF THE CENTURY, Antonio Scurati (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Just discovered Duo Ruut via Night Tracks on Radio 4:


Had to hunt around a bit, but it is on CD.

About to switch on the Retro Nano and stream some podcasts from the phone: I deleted hundreds of episodes of stuff from the app that I know I will simply never get to.

LAST WATCHED: bit of Ibsen’s THE DOLL’S HOUSE on BBC 4.

THINKING ABOUT: continuing the shift away from devices to writing on paper for everything

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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Orbits: 28jan26

Published January 28, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Hugo Canoilas

I’ve been reading newsletters. Lots of different kinds. I did that awful thing last night where I disappeared into my phone for four hours, just reading and studying and appraising. I’ve been having to rejig my own newsletter a bit this month, due to a dose of Best Laid Plans being laughed at by the universe. Because the universe is mostly dark matter.

I have a feeling I’ve seen a few people comment that there is more writing out in the world than at any time in human history. And, of course, print literature now has to jostle for money with paid Substacks and the like, just as broadcast TV now has to wrestle with streamers for every eyeball. Lots of launches, lots of decaying orbits. Space is weird right now and I’m wondering what it looks like and what’s next.

TODAY:

I did a show about dark matter once and all that still fascinates me.

Accessions:

I have a feeling I briefly met Aleks Krotoski in Brighton once, when having coffee with Ben Hammersley? Anyway, this book seems to tie into some work I’m doing right now (which I am dreadfully late on).

What was once a wild west of experimentation has wormed its way into Washington’s corridors of power. Award-winning broadcaster and academic Aleks Krotoski journeys from cult fringes to the heartlands of government to meet the moguls, effective altruists, geroscientists and entrepreneurs who are disrupting death. Along the way she encounters radical life extensionists transfusing their teenage son’s blood, transhumanists who want to upload consciousness to the cloud, biohackers flogging AI-powered wellness apps and billionaire kingmakers building brand-new nations.

THE IMMORTALISTS: THE DEATH OF DEATH AND THE RACE FOR ETERNAL LIFE, Aleks Krotoski (UK) (US+)

OPERATIONS: yesterday was a clusterfuck so today I am all in until midnight
STATUS: I am well aware that I am behind on a hundred emails
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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18jan26

Published January 18, 2026 by Warren Ellis

One thing I love about January is that all the summer clothes are cheap. And, as my family frequently have been heard to observe, when it comes to spending money on myself, I am in fact very cheap. So I just bought a bunch of linen and summer weight denim clothes for very little. This is, of course, the equivalent of Groundhog Day in the US, in that it guarantees that winter will extend into June. But I just got notification of a royalty cheque from Marvel, so fuck it. If I’m very lucky, the clothes will even fit. Online shopping, right?

Newsletter went out this morning. Minimum Viable Newsletter, as all the things I’d planned to do with it blew up on me last week. Having to pivot barely three weeks into the new year is not ideal but what’re you going to do? Not that I’ve fully landed on the pivot yet. I’ve been writing newsletters since the 1990s, and never figured out how to turn them into a “business” or any kind of useful cultural pursuit. It’s weird for me to have so much inbox competition now – every fucker has a newsletter, or an email list as we once called it. People earn millions off newsletters now, and all I ever used them for was to say hello to people, tell them what I was doing and show them stuff I was interested in. I feel faintly stupid and obsolete these days. Let’s face it, I still write on a “blog” (which is actually just a searchable database for things I’ve read, listened to or brought into the house). May as well be knapping flint like Will Lord.

TODAY:

TELEMETRY:

STATUS: Apparently I’m losing the afternoon to helping to hang curtains somewhere and it’s all very confusing. I’m putting an analogue watch on today, which is how I signal to myself that I am offline for a while.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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morning computer moon walk

Published October 13, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Murmure.

In a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, researchers report a sulfuric surprise in rock samples taken from the moon‘s Taurus Littrow region during Apollo 17. The analysis shows that volcanic material in the sample contains sulfur compounds that are highly depleted of sulfur-33 (or 33S), one of four radioactively stable sulfur isotopes. The depleted 33S samples contrast sharply with sulfur isotope ratios found on Earth, the researchers say.

Michael Davydov.

NASA’s Artemis II Mission Is Crucial as Doubts Build That America Can Beat China Back to the Moon

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer making the moon compute

Published April 24, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Assuming progress in industrial automation, humanoid robotics, artificial intelligence, and space technology continues as currently envisioned by these industries, we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.

The Moon thus transformed will come to resemble something out of science fiction concepts of planet-sized factories or Factorio—a popular video game among engineers working on these very technologies. This level of compute would effectively turn our Moon into a planet-scale supercomputer and represent a giant leap in Man’s capacity to control our destiny.

That ACCELERANDO point.

“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”

Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. “Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”

“Very long-term – at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.”

Published 2005, written circa 2001.

CONNECTED:

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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light25 4

Published January 7, 2025 by Warren Ellis

There are plans, I have read, to send humans to the south pole of the moon. That’s where the water is, and it presents a more stable communication position with Earth. The new issue it presents to human exoplanetary habitation is to do with light.

At the South Pole, the sun never rises more than seven degrees off the horizon. That means the shadows are long and deep black, and the sun will always be in people’s eyes. Moving around on the moon will mean moving from pitch black to bright white in a single step, and human eyes can’t adapt to that.

Everyone’s going to be blind on the moon.

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A tower on the moon could provide astronauts with light, power and guidance

Published August 5, 2024 by Warren Ellis

A tower on the moon could provide astronauts with light, power and guidance

“Technologies for enabling NASA’s Artemis mission are coming thick and fast, as plenty of problems must be solved before a permanent human presence on the moon can be established. A novel idea from Honeybee Robotics, one of the most prominent space technology companies now owned by Blue Origin, could solve plenty of them with one piece of infrastructure.

“The Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution, or LUNARSABER (which must have been named by someone who really likes Star Wars), is a 100 m tall pole that can hold 1 ton of equipment on top of it. It could serve as a central power, communications, and lighting hub of an Artemis base and part of a mesh network with other places of interest on the Lunar surface.”

August 05, 2024 at 03:44PM

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