These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond.

Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, and expanded thoughts from this edition of the programme:

Artemis II: Four Humans At The Moon Right Now

Artemis II launched on 1 April. As I write this on Sunday morning, four astronauts are about 169,000 miles from Earth and closing on the Moon. They go behind it tomorrow. This is the first time humans have left low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972, fifty-four years ago.

The crew on the Orion capsule (named Integrity) is Reid Wiseman commanding, Victor Glover as pilot, and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen as mission specialists. Three NASA, one Canadian Space Agency. They went up on NASA’s Space Launch System, about 98 metres tall, currently the most powerful rocket ever flown, with around 15% more thrust than the Saturn V. The pad was Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy, the same one Apollo used.

A lot of records get broken this week. Most people beyond low Earth orbit at once: four, breaking Apollo 8’s three (set in 1968). First woman near the Moon: Koch. First person of colour near the Moon: Glover. First Canadian: Hansen. Farthest any human has ever travelled from Earth: about 252,757 miles, breaking Apollo 13’s distress-record of 248,655 set in 1970.

They’re not landing. Artemis II is the shakedown flight. It’s the first time Orion has carried humans at all, and NASA needs to verify the spacecraft can keep a crew alive in real deep space, not a simulator: radiation, temperature extremes, life support, communications, the toilet. Koch fixed a fault light on Day 2 and called herself “the space plumber”. The mission audio is full of moments like that.

The trajectory is free-return: the Moon’s gravity curves Orion back toward Earth without an engine burn. Apollo 13 used the same thing as a survival manoeuvre. Tomorrow afternoon (EDT) the closest approach is about 4,000 to 6,000 miles from the lunar surface. The Moon will appear at the windows the size of a basketball held at arm’s length. Forty minutes of communications blackout when they pass behind the far side. Six hours of photography and naked-eye observation. Splashdown in the Pacific is targeted for 10 April.

Why fifty-four years?

Apollo was a Cold War sprint. Once America beat the Soviets in 1969, the political will dropped away fast. Apollo 17 flew in 1972 largely on momentum. Then the Space Shuttle was built for low Earth orbit only, so for thirty years NASA couldn’t reach the Moon even if it wanted to. Subsequent attempts collapsed: George W. Bush’s Constellation programme aimed for 2020; Obama cancelled the Moon-specific parts in 2010. Artemis began under Trump’s first term in 2017 and has now survived three administrations.

What changed: China announced it wants to land taikonauts on the Moon before 2030. Both programmes are aiming at the same place, the south pole, where permanently shadowed craters hold water ice that can be split into drinking water, breathable oxygen, and rocket fuel.

The heat shield question

After the 2022 uncrewed Artemis I returned, post-flight inspection found the AVCOAT ablative heat shield had eroded in an unexpected pattern. It came off in larger chunks than the models predicted. NASA investigated for years. In January 2026, the administrator reviewed the analysis, met with engineers and outside experts, and approved flying Artemis II with the existing shield. Some engineers remained openly uneasy. The design has been changed for the next mission.

Whether that was the right call, we’ll know when they hit the atmosphere at about 25,000 mph next Friday. Exterior heat shield temperature, roughly 2,760°C.

Wiseman, just after launch: “We have a beautiful moonrise. We’re heading right at it.”

Project Hail Mary

While four real humans fly around the Moon, Project Hail Mary is in cinemas. It’s Andy Weir’s 2021 novel, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie, Spider-Verse), with the screenplay by Drew Goddard (who also wrote The Martian). Ryan Gosling plays the lead and co-produced. It opened in Australia on 20 March, has done $339 million worldwide, sits at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and is the second-highest grossing film of the year so far.

Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a science teacher and former molecular biologist, who wakes alone on a spacecraft light-years from Earth with total amnesia. His memory returns. The Sun is dimming. An alien microorganism called Astrophage (Greek for “star-eater”) has colonised it and is absorbing its energy. Earth has decades. Grace was sent, on a one-way trip, to Tau Ceti, the one nearby star not affected, to find out why.

He’s not alone. Another spacecraft is in the same system, carrying Rocky, an alien from the 40 Eridani system whose civilisation faces the same crisis. The two work across a language and biology barrier, beginning with mathematics. The result is a science procedural, a survival story, and a buddy comedy in deep space, in roughly equal parts. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus calls it a “near-miraculous fusion of smarts and heart.”

Real science

Weir is sometimes considered unusually rigorous for a fiction writer; he describes himself as a hobbyist of relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and spaceflight history. The film keeps most of that.

Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani are both real stars. Tau Ceti is about 12 light-years from Earth and has several candidate planets. “Tau Ceti e” appears in astronomers’ catalogues; Weir calls it “Adrian” in the story. 40 Eridani is a real triple-star system about 16 light-years away. Weir picked them deliberately, because similar stars have similar chemistry.

The artificial gravity works correctly. The Hail Mary spacecraft generates 1.5g by accelerating, with the floor at the back of the ship. This is Einstein’s equivalence principle: acceleration and gravity are physically indistinguishable. Former NASA astronaut Drew Feustel was a technical consultant on the film.

The time dilation is handled correctly. At 0.9 times the speed of light, time passes differently for Grace than for people back on Earth. This is testable physics. GPS satellites have to account for relativistic effects or their navigation would drift by kilometres a day.

Rocky is properly weird. Astrophysicists like Rocky’s design. He’s blind to visible light, uses echolocation, has ammonia-based biology, and communicates through sound harmonics. If intelligent life exists elsewhere, the probability it looks anything like us is vanishingly small. Weir leans into that.

The Chernobyl fungi. Scientists found black fungi growing inside the Chernobyl reactor, growing toward the radiation, not away from it. They appear to use ionising radiation as an energy source, in a process called radiotropism. It’s documented and still happening at the reactor. This directly inspired Astrophage’s ability to feed on electromagnetic radiation.

Other extremophiles back it up. Deinococcus radiodurans survives 12,000 grays of radiation; 5 grays kills a human. Tardigrades have been sent into the vacuum of space and lived. Methanopyrus kandleri, in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, reproduces at 122°C.

Where it bends physics

Weir knows where the cheats are. Astrophage has to survive the Sun’s surface at around 5,500°C, and the hottest organism Earth has ever produced reproduces at 122°C. That gap isn’t bridgeable by any known biology, so Weir invents fictional membranes. The story dims the Sun by 10% in 30 years; in reality the Sun’s output changes by about 0.1% over its 11-year cycle, and only increases by 10% every billion years. The story is millions of times faster than physics allows. The energy budget required for microbes to absorb enough sunlight to meaningfully dim a star is also physics-breaking.

Weir flags the cheats rather than waving past them. He’s also good on the process of doing science. Grace hypothesises, tests, fails, revises, tests again. Linguists consider the maths-then-chemistry-then-language first-contact protocol he and Rocky improvise to be plausible. Real astronauts on long missions lose around 1% of bone density per month, plus serious muscle mass without exercise countermeasures. Weir acknowledges that rather than hand-waving it. The psychology of long isolation works.

A weird good week

This week, four real humans are near the Moon and a film about a fictional human near a different star is in cinemas. I got into technology partly because of Spock and Data on Star Trek as a kid, and plenty of engineers and astronomers will tell you something similar: a book, a show, a film. We don’t often get the fiction and the real thing in the same week.

Next month I’ll be back on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania with Lucie for more space news.

View the archive of Space News.