100th Post!

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Hey, would you look at that! This is the 100^th post on the Spacing Out blog! Our first posting was all the way back on June 3, 2023. What’s that I hear some folks who are unusually good at calculating dates in their heads say, that’s far more than 100 weeks ago? Well for various reasons we wound up taking a bit of a hiatus from January to October of 2024, but apart from that we’ve been posting pretty regularly.

Speaking purely calendrically (a word which turns out to actually be a word, somewhat to my surprise), the time between June 2023 and March 2026 isn’t that long, less than three years. But what a set of years to be a space fan!

So in celebration of me spitting a lot of words about space out into the wilds of the internet because I wanted to and the Museum of Science decided it had no reason to stop me, I’m taking a look back at the last 99 posts and looking at all the crazy stuff that has happened within the last nearly three years.

How Far We’ve Come

One fun way to look back at the last three years is to look at my second blog post, also posted in June 2023. I called it “Rocket Roundup” and it was a survey of major rockets that were under development. I started off with SpaceX’s Starship, which at that point only had a single highly entertaining but unsuccessful test launch (the 12^th test launch is supposed to be coming up soon).

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That article also looked ahead to the first launches of Vulcan Centaur and Ariane 6, which each have made some progress in the last three years. Ariane 6 has several successful launches under its belt and Vulcan Centaur has a few of its own, even if only half of them can be said to be fully successful (to be clear, in all four launches Vulcan Centaur achieved its orbital objective, but in two of them it had to do so despite its side boosters acting up). 

The funniest part of that article is what I said about Blue Origin’s New Glenn. In fact, I’ll just quote the sum total of everything I said about it, because it wasn’t much: “I’m pretty sure this rocket is a myth, based on some big claims and a few hazy sightings of hardware in the wild. It’s the rocket version of Bigfoot. Theoretically this Blue Origins-built rocket exists, or will. Theoretically it’s going to be launching space missions by 2024. Theoretically it will be carrying Blue Moon lunar landers to orbit by 2029.  Seeing as one of these hasn’t seen the light of day yet, I’m gonna hold out for some hard evidence of its existence first.”

Of course now New Glenn has launched twice, and even carried NASA’s ESCAPADE mission into space! Ah, the difference a few years can make when you’re designing a new rocket.

Spacecraft Milestones

I do love me a good spacecraft. I also love writing about them, as the last three years have proven. Those past three years have included some epic birthdays, such as the 35^th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, a game-changing moment in astronomical history if there ever was one.

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I also chose to celebrate the 30^th birthday of SOHO, a premier solar observatory that has been quietly observing the Sun for three decades, despite only being designed for a two-year mission, with a lot less fanfare than Hubble tends to receive. And that’s despite the fact that we accidentally almost murdered it only two years into its mission (it got over it). 

There are the missions that got their starts in the last three years, such as Europa Clipper, launched in 2024 and currently on its way to the Jupiter system, and Psyche, launched in 2023 and currently on its way to the asteroid…Psyche. Yes, they have the same name. No, I still don’t think that was a particularly good idea, but I wasn’t consulted.

Then there are the spacecraft already in flight that had key mission milestones in the last three years. Autumn of 2023 was a particularly awesome time for asteroid missions. It included Psyche’s launch, of course, but the extremely ambitious Lucy mission also encountered its first asteroid, while the OSIRIS-REx mission dropped off its sample return capsule containing bits of the asteroid Bennu (hard-won since the asteroid tried to eat the spacecraft).

That Bennu sample, by the way, spawned a blog post all its own, while OSIRIS-REx has continued on a new mission, changing its name to OSIRIS-APEX as it heads for a 2029 rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis—a topic for a  future post.

And of course there are the friends we lost along the way. I did in memoriam posts for a few programs, missions and facilities that have been gone for a while (Shuttle-Mir, Cassini, Arecibo, an entire retrospective on 66 years of spaceflight on the anniversary of Sputnik because apparently I’m a crazy person), but I did a whole mourning post when we lost Gaia. Still not over that one.

Solar System Shenanigans

It’s been kind of a big three years for solar system discoveries. I mean, you could probably say that about any three-year stretch, to be honest, but there were some goodies that I got to dive into since my first post. While I do love getting to go over lots of news stories each week in the newsletter, sometimes you get a story that just desperately needs a deeper dive. 

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For instance, there was the day in 2023 when I got to indulge in my weirdly obsessive niche interest of Venusian geology because a study had found evidence that Venus once had plate tectonics like Earth. Which, it turns out, opens up an entire can of worms about Venus’s history, and ties into one of my favorite solar system theories (yes, I have a list): the possibility of Venusian life.

Of course if I’m not fixating bizarrely on what’s going on under Venus’s crust, you can probably find me being weird about what’s going on around Saturn, and I had a lot to obsess over these past few years. For one thing, Saturn went on a moon tear. In May 2023, Saturn’s moon count jumped from 82 to 145. As that was a few weeks before the first Spacing Out post, I didn’t get a chance to blog about it (though it did make the newsletter). However the blog was in full swing in March 2025 when the count jumped again, this time from 146 to 274 because Saturn clearly isn’t taking this moon thing lightly. And given that just last week we found more moons around both Saturn and Jupiter, there’s probably more moon posts in my future.

And a couple of weeks ago I got to go on an absolute tear about the Saturn system thanks to a new theory suggesting that so much of what we see out there today is because the moon Titan got a little too personal with another moon. I’m still savoring the exquisite nature of this theory and the perfect way it turns a single event into the progenitor of the most famous planet-moon system we have today. It’s just so…lovely! 

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Of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention two of the biggest solar system stories that have popped up in the last three years, even if both of them mostly came up only in the last six months (it was a good six months). There was, of course, our interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS, only the third interstellar object ever to be found passing through our solar system (though hopefully more will be discovered with the help of the newly opened Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which celebrated first light in 2025)!

Then there was that little piece of news to come out of Mars via the Perseverance rover back in September 2025. You might recall it, it was reported on from just about everyone with breathless excitement: the identification of a possible biosignature on Mars. There are still a lot of steps that would need to be cleared before the presence of these certain minerals in a rock on the rim of Jezero Crater could be taken as evidence of past life on Mars…but it’s entirely possible that those steps could happen. It’s possible that 2025 will prove to be the year we found our first slam dunk evidence that Mars once harbored life. Not guaranteed. But possible.

Higher, Further, Faster

Don’t even get me started on all the big discoveries we’ve been making outside of the solar system. Or even on the things that don’t count as discoveries, but just very interesting theories. Since this blog started we’ve found the gravitational wave background, gone back and forth on whether the exoplanet K2-18b is capable of supporting life, discovered a completely new way for massive stars to die, found a highly harmonic solar system, and went through somanydifferent ideas about dark energy! 

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Closer to home, I’ve been trying to keep on top of everything going on with human spaceflight! That includes getting excited about Artemis 2 (fly, baby, fly!) and the unexpected shakeup of the entire Project Artemis infrastructure going forward. We’ve even taken a look at what might follow the ISS after its demise (a noble death, which has also been covered in a blog post).

I’ve looked at sky events (eclipses! Planet alignments! Stars and star clusters!), anniversaries, and things to look forward to, responded to reader questions, and wrote a whole bunch of articles that were written because I happened to be thinking about some cool space thing that had absolutely nothing to do with current events but it’s cool so I had to gush about it.

And I’ve loved it all. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of it. I’m excited to keep the stories flowing, and I am very excited to see what amazing discoveries, theories, and events will unfurl during the next hundred posts of this blog. I hope you’ll join me for the ride!