The Discussion: Your last chance to get tickets to join Jen’s at Pint of Science on 20-22nd May in Cardiff, a couple of corrections for the last episode, listeners’ comments about our Moon 2024 musings and a listener’s email takes us into classic 50s sci-fi territory.

The News:

Rounding up the space exploration news this month we have:

- NASA’s new robot assistants and ‘Astrobees’ on the International Space Station.

- Portugal launches its national space agency in the Azores and plans an environmentally friendly rocket.

- Arianespace are to launch 42 satellites on a single rocket.

- NASA Administrator misses his April deadline to provide financial figures for a return to the moon in 2024. As if that was going to happen anyway...

- Space Force will likely cost $1.5Bn more each year than originally thought.

- India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission will launch to the moon in September this year.

Main news stories:

- Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been developing a giant lunar lander in secret

while...

- Elon Musk’s SpaceX has a setback to their human spaceflight plans. Boom.

The Debate:

A reminder that you can influence the Best Space Mission Ever debate season, starting next month. What do you think is the best current or historical space mission and why? We’ll shortlist the ten most popular and begin advocating to reach a winner. [email protected]

Q&A:

Could a device, with a magnetic field, be placed at the L1 Lagrange Point between the Sun and Mars to help to thicken the atmosphere? And could a device be placed at Earth’s L1 Lagrange point counteract the effect of global warming?

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Awesome Astronomy is a podcast beamed direct from an underground bunker on Mars to promote science, space and astronomy (and enslave Earth if all goes well).

 

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