Coming Soon – US  Federal Red Ink Barfing Skyward Like You’ve Never Seen

by David Stockman | Apr 9, 2026 | 

Self-evidently, the news has been overwhelmingly focused on Washington’s current endeavor to unload $200 billion of imperial destruction upon Iran and its neighbors around the Persian Gulf. Well, and also upon all other users of petroleum products, LNG, LPGs, nitrogen fertilizer, food, helium, semiconductors, manufactured goods and most everything else anywhere on the planet.

Accordingly, comparatively scant attention has been given to another recent milestone on America’s headlong dash to fiscal disaster. To wit, the public debt crossed the $39 trillion mark and nearly in the blink of an eye, too. Just four years ago, we were at the $29 trillion level and nine years ago at the $19 trillion mark.

Needless to say, the “peacemaker” in the Oval Office has played no small role in this skyward ascent of the public debt. During his first term, the public debt grew by a staggering $8 trillion and already another $3 trillion has been racked-up during his second go-round.

Stated differently, the King of Debt has surely earned his place in the history books. The $11 trillion of new debt on his watch to date already accounts for 28% of all the public debt incurred in America since George Washington!

Then again, he still has got nearly three years to go, and the debt impact of both the OBBBA and the impending financial and human bloodbath in the Persian Gulf are just getting started.

Indeed, as to the latter it’s as clear as the orange glow around his cranium that the Donald is doing another round of fake rope-a-dope negotiations with the Iranians. That’s to buy time to get the 82nd Airborne, various amphibious landing ships and other invasionary forces in place for his next “win”.

That’s right.The fool in the Oval Office is actually going to attempt to seize the Alamo Kharg Island. That will mean military chaos in the Gulf, unprecedented turmoil in the global economy and soaring military expenditures, which will make the pending $200 billion DOD supplemental look like a mere down-payment.

With respect to the latest round of Rope-A-Dope-With-Donald, the always astute Shanaka Anslem Perera noted this AM:

The 15-point plan was never a negotiating document. It was a pressure document:

• Zero enrichment contradicts NPT Article IV.
• Full HEU surrender contradicts 20 years of centrifuge investment.
• Proxy cut-offs contradict the IRGC’s regional architecture.
• Missile restrictions contradict the only conventional deterrent Iran has left after 25 days of decapitation.

The plan asks Iran to dismantle every strategic pillar simultaneously while receiving revocable phased relief. No government in history has accepted such terms without military occupation.

Iran knows this. The US knows Iran knows this. The plan exists not to be accepted but to be rejected, so that the rejection justifies the next phase of strikes, the pause expiry, and the eventual escalation to power-plant targeting that Trump threatened and temporarily paused on March 23. The rejection is the plan.

Meanwhile, down in the weeds of the budgetary figures for FY 2026 through February, we already have warning signs that a veritable fiscal conflagration lurks just around the corner. To wit, February YTD outlays of $3.102 trillion were already way the hell higher than revenues, which posted at just $2.097 trillion

So the resulting five-month deficit of -$1.004 trillion amounted to damn near 48% of revenues. And, again, the double-whammy of OBBBA and hot war in the Persian Gulf has not yet barged its way into the budget numbers.

Yet and yet. The sleepwalkers in Trumpian Washington are actually giving a one-hand clap for a declining deficit, owing to short-run timing aberration that has caused the FY 2026 YTD red ink to come in slightly below the -$1.146 trillion level posted in the first five months of FY 2025.

Then again, even in budget land it’s not over until the fat lady sings. In this case, there are some very shrill discordant notes in the YTD figures – one-time revenue gains and a temporary lull in defense spending growth – which will soon reverse and send the red ink totals soaring far higher in the months ahead.

On the revenue front, the table below tells you all you need to know. When you look at the small corner of the receipt pie accounted for by customs revenue, non-withheld income taxes on capital gains and other income of the wealthy and estate and gift taxes, there has been a cornucopia of gains. These items are up versus FY 2025 by +308%, +36% and +30% respectively, accounting for a YTD revenue gain of $194.6 billion.

Now, that’s 95% of the entire YTD Federal revenue gain of $205.2 billion, and its accounted for by revenue lines that generated just 15% of YTD collections during the ordinary year of FY 2025.

More importantly, this 70% Y/Y revenue gain in this small corner of the revenue pie ain’t gonna last. The Supreme Court has already nullified the Donald out-of-this-word tariff impositions under the IEEA of 1977 and will actually be specifying refund arrangments in short order.

Likewise, the big gains in the stock market last year are surely over and done, as we plunge into a global energy, fuel, fertilizer and manufacturing dislocation that will make 1973 and 1979 look like a walk in the park. About the only replicable piece of the aberrant first subtotal shown in the table below is the possibility that during the balance of FY 2026 rich people will keep dying at the same rate as thru February, and also that their stock portfolios don’t take a whopping between now and then.

By contrast, if you look at the 85% of the Federal revenue pie that includes the workhorses of the governments ordinary course extractions from the people – withheld income taxes from 160 million workers, payroll taxes from even more workers and the corporate income tax – the year-to date figure is most definitely not something to write home about: it’s up by only $10.6 billion or just 0.7% from last year.

That’s right. We have a Federal budget that was on track to spend 7% more than last year, owing to built-in entitlement increases like the 8.3% rise in YTD spending for Social Security retirement and soaring interest expense. But spending growth is now headed toward double digits owing to the defense spending explosion already underway – even as baseline revenues are barely tracking the flat line.

And that’s before we get a wide-open outbreak of stagflation—falling paychecks and rising inflation.

February YTD Federal Revenues, FY 2026 Versus FY 2025

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

Trump’s Looming War With China…Ain’t Gonna Happen

Eve Ottenberg

 April 2, 2026

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If there’s one thing the Iran War has taught us – with its terrifyingly destructive hypersonic missiles, its record-time eviction of the U.S. from the Gulf and torching of all U.S. bases – it’s that a war with China would be ten times worse. Because who do you think supplied Tehran with all that scarifying military hardware and the unbeatable Beidou satellite data on U.S. bases and troops? Beijing, that’s who. Even though on March 28, China halted its ships exiting Hormuz. Did the Iranians warn them that things were about to go south in a big way or did the U.S. make China an offer it couldn’t refuse, i.e. avoid Hormuz or we zap your tankers? How long will Beijing tolerate this? The Chinese could begin strangling rare earths to the U.S. at any moment. Then keep your ears open as U.S. weapons producers scream.

Besides, how, exactly, would a U.S. assault on China go down? I’ll tell you in two words: It wouldn’t. Our vaunted aircraft carriers, which couldn’t get close to Iran’s coasts and still got hit, would have to lurk even further away from China, and even then, they’d still be sitting ducks. One of them suffered from a supposed laundry fire as it “approached” Iran; well, “approaching” China that would be a laundry fire tornado. So our multi-billion-dollar aircraft carriers would be sidelined – unless we wanted them destroyed. Which raises the question – how would we get close enough to the Chinese coast to attack it? All evidence suggests this would be much more difficult than zeroing in on Iran’s coast – and we couldn’t even do that.

So maybe we’ll use our famous stealth technology? Ho, ho! As China Pulse recently posted on X: “Goodbye to American air superiority. Chinese defense company Jingan Technology announced that its system intercepted radio signals emitted by a U.S. Northrop Grumman B-2Spirit stealth bomber over Iran…Jingan’s system successfully captured radio signals emitted by the aircraft as it returned from a mission in Iran.” This was before the news that Iran shot down several F-35s – the biggest stealth bomber boondoggle of all time. If Iran can “see” F-35s and China can “see” B-2s, the supposed stealth advantage of these weapons dissolves, though I must say any advantage to the F-35 was always opaque to me, what with its multiple takeoff and landing accidents and its finicky need for constant stroking and care.

Meanwhile there’s the American weapons production problem. Unlike the Five-Thousand-Year-Old-Civilization, we here in the U.S. don’t actually produce much anymore. Oh, we create financial instruments, but not much actual stuff, due to our thoroughly financialized version of late capitalism – unlike China’s industrial capitalism. What does this mean for war? Happily, that the U.S. can’t really wage it. At least not as effectively as the generally pacific Eurasian behemoths.

Because unlike China, our weapons production system doesn’t operate 24.7. We have arms manufacturers sure, but they’re not on the same sked as the ones in China. And then there are the rare earths and Beijing’s near monopoly of them. The U.S. can’t make weapons without rare earths. But it gets them all from…drumroll, where? You guessed it – China. And what do you think happens to that supply of rare earths if Washington attacks Beijing? It dries up instantly, as it did when Trump threatened tariffs – causing him to back off tout de suite. So the U.S. depends on China for its weapons – not a good arrangement for a hyper-capitalist terror state, because it’s essentially planning to bite the hand that feeds it. When it bites, that food will just…stop.

So the smart money would be on the U.S. ditching its plans to attack China over Taiwan and focusing instead on bullying tiny countries like Cuba in its backyard. Since it’s already shown it can’t beat Iran. But Cuba – yep, that’s where the smart money is; or so you’d think, but you would be wrong. Not that Donald “Blockade Barbarian” Trump intends to leave the Cuban commies alone – oh, no way. But that’s not the martial focus of the imperial people who really count. “Iran Is Real, But Defense Techies Still Prefer War Gaming China” reads a Responsible Statecraft headline March 27. If your response to that isn’t “uh-oh,” then all I’ve got to say is there is something wrong with you.

From a recent forum, “one can’t help but conclude that Silicon Valley’s founders are far more comfortable wargaming a confrontation with China than tying their mission to an actual hot war in the Middle East that has a rising death toll and no clear exit strategy.” Some attendees claimed the Iran Was “was just a distraction from American’s main adversary: China. As one weapons company founder said: ‘If the U.S. is sending its munitions stockpile to the Middle East that undercuts deterrence in the Pacific.’”

The view from la la land, i.e. the Trump white house, is different. There, the Washington Post reported March 16, the Trump-Xi Jinping summit got postponed because el jefe wants Xi to help open Hormuz. Ain’t gonna happen. Who does Trump think gives Tehran the satellite data on U.S. troops and bases, data that effectively helps Iran keeps the Strait closed? Duh, China. And whose ships does the great mind in the Oval Office think are allowed to pass through the Strait while western ones aren’t? Uh, Chinese and Russian ships – oh and vessels of any country that expels the Israeli and U.S. ambassadors. And if Washington (ahem, Jerusalem), won’t let those ships pass, I predict turbulence ahead for the Empire. Meanwhile, white house megabrains have delayed Trump’s March trip to China to pressure Beijing to send warships to help the U.S. reopen the Strait. Well, be sure to send me a memo on how that is going. Beijing, I bet was very impressed by this delay (not). Incidentally, Beijing – unlike the white house – “had not publicly confirmed the March 31-April 2 visit.” Ouch.

Then airhead commerce secretary Scott Bessent took to the airwaves to clarify that this delay is not due to Trump insisting “China police the Strait of Hormuz.” One Wendy Cultler, former U.S. trade negotiator told us, “this evolution in explanations seems to be an effort to lessen tensions with Beijing by providing a more generic non-China-focused reason for any postponement.” Anything you say, Wendy, but from my perch in the peanut gallery it looks like Don Corleone in the white house still smarts from attempts to slap tariffs on the Five-Thousand-Year-Old Civilization, which because of its rare earth monopoly proved to be tariff-proof.

According to Sino-expert Brian Berletic on X March 13, the actual U.S. objective regarding Iran maybe “can’t be said out loud (destroying the global economy, hoping to kill off China, while only weakening the U.S. in the process).” This would fit with strangling Beijing’s oil lifeline from Caracas, though whether it amounts to a coherent, unified policy is doubtful. Berletic sez not exactly: “The whole point of the U.S. invading Venezuela, attacking Iran, strangling China technologically for years is to strangle China completely.” But “even with a U.S.-imposed blockade in place, China is likely to achieve energy independence in 5-10 years albeit at much greater cost – at which point the U.S. will have lost its remaining leverage over China.”

Who exactly is the villain here? Well, it’s NOT the country that donated 15600 tons of rice to Cuba during a barbaric U.S.-imposed blockade that is killing infants in hospital NICUs; that country was China. The monster here is the country that initiated an unprovoked, stupendously stupid war on Iran, whose purpose, again per Berletic on March 27 “is toppling Iran and stopping the flow of energy from Iran and the rest of the region to China.”

Will the gaggle of Trump imbeciles succeed in throttling that flow of energy to Beijing? Doubtful. Because even if they interdict vessels headed to China in the Strait…there’s always Russian oil and gas. So if the Trump gangsters can’t block energy to China, will they at long last do what Washington has been threatening since maybe the Obama administration and its pivot to Asia, with an eye to a military assault? Well, let’s see how their attack on Iran goes. Last I checked, it was a big loser, with Eurasian behemoths China and Russia assisting Iran, which now wants nukes, and with North Korea offering to open its arsenal to Tehran, and you know what that includes – nukes.

So Trump’s idiotic Iran War looks like a flop. And if Washington can’t beat Tehran, please, pray tell, how will it arm-wrestle bigger, stronger, scarier Beijing into submission?

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Old Man Alone. She can be reached at her website.

SPACE/COSMOS

Artemis will take NORTH Americans to the moon for the 1st time since 1972. Why has it been so hard to go back?

Five reasons human space flight is a bigger challenge today than it was during the Apollo era.

Andrew Romano, Reporter
Tue, March 31, 2026 

Updated Tue, March 31, 2026
Yahoo 


Astronaut Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin during an Apollo 11 moon walk in 1969.(Heritage Space/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

On Sept. 12 1962, President John F. Kennedy famously declared that the United States would “go to the moon … and do it first, before this decade is out.”

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy said, “not because they are easy but because they are hard.”

Then America followed through. Less than seven years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended from their lander and left humankind’s first lunar footprints.

Today that pace of progress might seem impossible. On April 1, NASA is scheduled to launch Artemis II — America’s first crewed lunar spaceflight in more than a half century. Its mission is clear-cut: Send four astronauts around the moon and back in 10 days.

But Artemis II’s mission is also … familiar. In 1968, three Apollo 8 astronauts circled the moon without landing, then traveled back to Earth.

In other words, NASA already pulled off a version of Artemis II nearly 60 years ago — and did so without the long delays that have plagued Artemis II itself (which was previously scheduled to lift off, and then delayed, almost every year since 2021).

How can going to the moon be so difficult if we already did it? Here are five reasons human space flight is such a big challenge today.
Rustiness

The last time humans set foot on the moon was in 1972, with Apollo 17. That was also the last crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit — period. Even uncrewed lunar landers fell out of favor soon after, with more than 35 years elapsing between one successful robotic landing on the moon’s surface (the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976) and the next (China’s Chang’e 3 in 2013).

“There were decades when people were not developing landers,” one expert told the Guardian in 2024. “The technology is not that common that you can easily learn from others.”

Turns out that it’s hard to resume human space exploration after a multi-decade hiatus — especially when complex new technologies need to be integrated with older ones.

“We stopped, and then we forgot,” Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, recently told Scientific American. Just because you ran an Olympic marathon 50 years ago, Pace went on to explain, doesn’t mean you could do it again tomorrow.

The Space Launch System (SLS), with the Orion crew capsule, at Kennedy Space Center in 2026.(Steve Nesius/Reuters)

Ambition

Despite some superficial similarities, the Artemis program isn’t really Apollo, part two. Apollo sought to put people (briefly) on the moon. Artemis aspires to establish a permanent base there — a base that astronauts can later use as a stepping stone to Mars.

That’s a much more ambitious goal, and it defines every facet of Artemis: the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that propels the astronauts beyond Earth’s atmosphere; the Orion spacecraft in which the four of them can spend 21 days; separate next-generation space suits for launch and entry as well surface exploration; robotic landers carried on commercial rockets that deliver equipment to the moon itself; and finally, the reusable rocket-and-human-lander system — either SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin's Blue Moon — that will eventually orbit the moon and dock with Orion before transporting the Artemis crew to and from the surface.

In short, there are more moving parts now than there were in the 1960s, which means more potential delays.

Motivation

In the 1960s, the U.S. was competing with the Soviet Union in an existential space race. Cold War conventional wisdom decreed that whichever superpower arrived on the moon first would reinforce its military dominance — and project precisely the kind of soft power that could sway newly independent countries to choose democracy over communism.

There’s a certain clarity about one-on-one competition, and the U.S. immediately mobilized around beating the Soviets to the moon. Now that clarity is gone. In its place is a more nebulous (and less pressing) objective: international cooperation in the name of scientific discovery. Japan, Canada, the United Arab Emirates and the European Space Agency are all collaborating with the United States on Artemis.

As a result, one president’s spaceflight plans are often canceled by the next, only to be resurrected later in a different form, and delays accrue while countries do the important work of getting on the same page about the future of space and contributing hardware to the cause.

Money

Between 2012 and 2025, the U.S. spent roughly $93 billion on the Artemis program. Total spending is expected to top $105 billion by 2028, the year the first Artemis astronauts are supposed to land on the moon.

That’s no small sum. But Apollo cost more than three times as much: about $320 billion in today’s dollars, according to the Planetary Society. Likewise, about 4% of the federal budget went to NASA in the Apollo era. Today the space agency is lucky to get 1%.

Experts say that shift is sensible. “There’s no reason to spend money like it was a war,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and founder of the Space Policy Institute, told Scientific American. “There’s really no national interest or political interest that provides the foundation for that kind of mobilization at this point.”

But sensible or not, less funding almost always means slower progress.

Left to right, the Artemis II crew at Kennedy Space Center in 2025: pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of CSA (Canadian Space Agency), commander Reid Wiseman and mission specialist Christina Koch.(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)More
Safety

Given the scientific, cooperative nature of today’s moon missions — not to mention all the advances in computer modeling since the 1960s — it would be irresponsible for NASA not to consider every possible safety consequence of Artemis — to the astronauts themselves and to the broader environment.

This wasn’t quite the case during the Apollo era. Back then, swashbuckling fighter pilots were converted to astronauts and rocketed into space much in the way they’d previously been deployed to war: with the knowledge that they were doing something very, very dangerous. The risk was worth the reward (i.e., winning the space race).

But today engineers can run detailed simulations on Orion’s materials and the stresses the capsule will be under, including high temperatures and intense acceleration forces — and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for years.

Even then, Artemis I — an uncrewed moon-orbiting mission launched in 2022 — showed that Orion’s heat shield broke down differently than predicted; that bolts on the spacecraft faced “unexpected melting and erosion”; and that the power system experienced anomalies that could endanger the future crew.

It took time for NASA to resolve these issues — just as it will take time to address any issues with, say, Orion’s life support systems that arise during its first crewed mission. Building earthbound infrastructure is slower and more expensive today than it was in the 1960s; so too is exploring the cosmos.

Some would argue that the tradeoff is worth it. “For Artemis, having a more robust rocket system, asking people what they think, keeping people safer and working with global partners are probably better for this world — even if they don’t result in expedience off-world,” Scientific American concluded in its recent story on the subject.

Put another way: At least NASA is still doing hard things, even if they’ve gotten (a lot) harder.

Why are NASA's Artemis astronauts wearing orange? What are they bringing to space? What to know about the preparation for their moon mission.

The custom suits are equipped with survival gear in case the crew has to exit the spacecraft after splashdown — and are easily visible in the ocean.

Dylan Stableford, Reporter
Updated Tue, March 31, 2026
Yahoo 



Left to right: Artemis II NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.(Frank Michaux/NASA)More


The four astronauts preparing to take part in NASA’s Artemis II moon mission will be wearing bright orange spacesuits on the Orion spacecraft for this week’s historic launch.

Officially called the Orion Crew Survival System, NASA says the spacesuits can help keep astronauts alive if they lose cabin pressure.

“Astronauts could survive inside the suit for up to six days as they make their way back to Earth,” the space agency explains on its website.



The suits are also equipped with survival gear should they have to exit the spacecraft after splashdown.

Each suit comes with its own life preserver that includes a personal locator beacon, a rescue knife, and a signaling kit with a mirror, strobe light, flashlight, whistle and light sticks.


And the reason they’re neon orange? “To make crew members easily visible in the ocean,” NASA says.

The astronauts will also be equipped with another spacesuit “that functions as a self-contained personal spaceship,” and is designed to be worn outside the spacecraft.
When is Artemis II scheduled to launch?

A full moon is seen shining over NASA's Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft at Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 1.(ASSOCIATED PRESS)More

After weeks of delays, NASA is targeting April 1 for the launch of the Artemis II mission — the first U.S. human lunar spaceflight in over 50 years.

The countdown clock officially started on Monday afternoon, and a two-hour launch window opens Wednesday at 6:24 p.m. ET, with additional launch opportunities through Monday, April 6.

The crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — won’t be landing on the moon. Instead, they’ll venture 600,000 miles around the moon and will return at 30 times the speed of sound, according to NASA.

During their 10-day trip, they’ll test life support systems in the Orion capsule for future crewed missions to the moon’s surface. A moon landing would occur during Artemis III, which is targeted to launch in 2027.
How else is the crew preparing for the mission?

The Artemis II crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday and have been in quarantine ahead of launch.

The four astronauts have spent months getting to know each other while preparing for the launch, which Wiseman says has helped him as the mission's commander.

“I can just watch my crewmates here. I know their facial expressions. They know mine,” Wiseman said during a virtual press conference on Sunday. “We know when we're tense. We know when an immediate decision needs to be made.”

Wiseman also said that the crew has practiced restraint.

“We try to remind ourselves — every single time we fly, we say, ‘No fast hands in the cockpit,’” he explained. “You do not want to do anything too quick in this vehicle. You need to take your time. You need to process everything.”

He added: “We're going to go slow and we have the ultimate trust in each other. And that's how we will get through this.”

Is the crew bringing anything special to space?

The astronauts will have a mascot named Rise, designed by Lucas Ye, a second-grader from Mountain View, Calif., which will serve as a zero-gravity indicator to visually indicate when they are in space.

Ye’s design was selected from more than 2,600 submissions from over 50 countries, according to NASA.

Inside the mascot is an SD card with the names of more than 5.6 million people who participated in the “Send Your Name With Artemis” campaign.
What will the crew eat?

The quality of airline food is often the butt of jokes, but NASA’s menu for the Artemis crew is enough to make even Earth-bound diners jealous.

A total of 189 unique food items will be brought along for the journey, including beef brisket, macaroni and cheese and cobbler. The food brought on board isn’t just chosen for its taste, however. It’s carefully chosen to meet the astronaut’s needs.

“Food selections are developed in coordination with space food experts and the crew to balance calorie needs, hydration, and nutrient intake while accommodating individual crew preferences,” NASA wrote.

Everything also needs to last without being refrigerated, and be easy to prepare and safe to eat in microgravity — that means minimal crumbs. Even with those restrictions, NASA is able to send a surprising variety of options, including 10 different drinks; five hot sauces; nine condiments, spreads and spices; and a variety of sweets.
Why does NASA want to go to the moon again?

The Artemis program is NASA’s long-term mission to return humans to the moon to establish a continuous human presence. The goal is to develop a lunar settlement at its south pole, a region where it’s believed water ice is abundant and could be used for drinking, breathing and as a source for rocket fuel.

Another long-term mission of Artemis is to lay the foundation for future crewed missions to Mars. The program is building on the legacy of the Apollo-era missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Artemis program is named for the ancient Greek goddess of the moon — the twin sister of Apollo.

“It is our strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone — every person on earth — look at the moon and think of it as also a destination,” Koch said.

Scientists Investigating Whether Object NASA Is Approaching Is Core of Destroyed Planet

Victor Tangermann
Tue, March 31, 2026
FUTURISM

Researchers tried to figure out whether asteroid 16 Psyche, which NASA is visiting in 2029, is the remnant of a planet's core.
Key takeawaysPowered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.
Scientists are studying the asteroid 16 Psyche to determine if it is a core of a planetesimal or a homogeneous mixture of iron and rock.See more


Scientists have long been intrigued by an enormous potato-shaped asteroid, dubbed 16 Psyche, that they suspect to be teeming with metal — and therefore potentially worth a ludicrous amount of money to future asteroid mining operations.

The 173-mile object, which orbits the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, features two enormous crater-like depressions, which researchers say could be closely related to its still largely unknown origin story.

In a new paper published in the journal JGR Planets, an international team of researchers tried to get to the bottom of one of the key questions regarding 16 Psyche that remains unanswered. Is it a core of a planetesimal, a billions-of-years-old building block of a planet, in which case it would have a “large metallic core buried under rocks,” or is it a “homogeneous mixture of iron and rock?”

Put differently, could 16 Psyche be the ancient exposed remains of a planetary core whose crust and mantle were blown off, or is it a separate primordial lump of far less dense and potentially riddled-with-holes rock that either started out metal-rich or became blended with metal after colliding with other asteroids?

While the latest paper doesn’t necessarily exclude any of these possibilities — its simulations support both hypotheses — the goal was to know what to look out for once NASA’s mission to the space rock, which launched in October 2023, arrives roughly three and a half years from now.

Once there, the spacecraft could finally allow us to solve the mystery surrounding 16 Psyche’s history once and for all. As Universe Today points out, 16 Psyche’s size makes it far more approachable than the thousands of miles we’d have to drill into the Earth. (So far, we’ve only made it around 0.2 percent of the way to our own planet’s center.)

For their paper, the researchers took into consideration 16 Psyche’s unusual dented shape, previous findings that concluded it may be teeming with metal material, and its porosity.

“Large impact basins or craters excavate deep into the asteroid, which gives clues about what its interior is made of,” said first author and University of Arizona doctoral candidate Namya Baijal in a statement. “By simulating the formation of one of its largest craters, we were able to make testable predictions for Psyche’s overall composition when the spacecraft arrives.”

“One of our main findings was that the porosity — the amount of empty space inside the asteroid — plays a significant role in how these craters form,” she added. “Porosity is often ignored because it’s difficult to include in models, but our simulations show it can strongly affect the impact process and shape of craters left behind.”

A more porous asteroid would theoretically feature deeper and steeper-sided craters on its surface. The researchers are hoping that close-up observations by NASA’s Psyche mission could allow them to determine its porosity and therefore infer if its interior is metal clad in rock, or a more homogenous mix of both.

To explain their line of thinking, the researchers used the unusual metaphor of an abandoned pizza parlor.

“The cooks have long left, but you can look at what’s left behind — the ovens, scraps of dough, the toppings — and make inferences about how the pizzas were made,” said coauthor and University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory professor Erik Asphaug in a statement. “We can’t get to the cores of Earth or Mars or Venus, but maybe we can get to the core of an early asteroid.”

The team came up with two possible interior structures.

“One is a layered structure with a metallic core and a thin, rocky mantle, which likely formed if a violent collision stripped away the outer layers,” Baijal explained. “The other is a uniform mixture of metal and silicate, created by a more catastrophic impact that mixed everything together, like some metal-rich meteorites found on Earth.”

By simulating a series of asteroid belt collisions with objects of varying sizes, they tried to reproduce the known dimensions of 16 Psyche’s craters.

“We found that an impactor about three miles across would create a crater of the right dimensions,” Baijal said. “The crater’s formation is consistent with both scenarios of Psyche’s makeup.”

In short, while we’re only inching closer to answering the question of whether 16 Psyche is the ancient remains of a planetary core, we’ll be ready when NASA’s mission gets there.

“When the spacecraft arrives at Psyche in a few years, the geochemists, geologists and modelers on the team will all be looking at the same object and trying to interpret what we see,” said Asphaug.

“This work gives us a head start,” he added.



Oops! NASA Once Lost a $125 Million Spacecraft Because Engineers Forgot to Convert to Metric

Elizabeth Rayne
Tue, March 31, 2026



Epic math fail doomed a NASA spacecraft

NASA - Getty Images


Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

The Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) launched in late 1998 and was predicted to reach Mars nine months later. But that never actually happened.


As the MCO approached Mars, it ventured far too close and either burned up in the atmosphere or was lost to another orbit.


NASA’s postmortem later found that the failure of the mission was a result of their contractor, Lockheed Martin, neglecting to convert to metric units in the software.

December 11, 1998—launch day for the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) and the accompanying Polar Lander, both of which were part of a larger NASA initiative known as Mars Surveyor ’98. NASA had commissioned Lockheed Martin to design and build the MCO, which was was destined to gather data on Martian weather while communicating with the Polar Lander.

There was just one problem: The orbiter would never reach Mars.

Superficially, everything seemed to be going according to plan. Lockheed Martin was at the design helm, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was overseeing every aspect of the project. The MCO was equipped with eight thrusters intended to boost it into Mars orbit. It also had reaction wheels that could adjust its altitude and orientation, though they occasionally overdid the momentum, resulting in the MCO needing an angular momentum desaturation (AMD) event to reset itself. Once in orbit, the MCO was supposed to beam data back to specialized software on Earth, which would figure out its position and plan any necessary AMD events for the near future.

That communication was crucial, as it is for all active space missions. But soon after launch, software problems began to arise. During the journey, which was projected to last nine and a half months, the MCO’s software began acting up, requiring ground navigation data to be emailed to NASA for solutions. Even with corrections to the software, however, the MCO was still transmitting nonsensical data back to Earth.

In September of 1999, engineers computed and executed the final planned Trajectory Correction Maneuver (TCM-4) to refine the Mars Climate Orbiter’s approach to Mars. The intended trajectory would have produced a first periapsis (closest position to Mars) of about 140 miles (226 km) above the planet after orbit insertion. But navigators determined that the spacecraft’s predicted closest approach was lower than expected, revealing a serious trajectory error. The planet’s gravity was beginning to pull the orbiter in.

By the morning of September 23, 1999, the MCO had vanished with no way to reestablish communication. So…what happened?

According to NASA’s initial postmortem analysis, the spacecraft was only about 35 miles (57 km) from the ruddy surface of Mars when contact was lost. Engineers concluded that the orbiter either burned up in the Martian atmosphere or skipped off the atmosphere and was lost in space. When the agency investigated the following month and found a data issue, they noticed something suspicious about the small forces software that had been responsible for determining the MCO’s position and AMD: while everything else used metric units, this software was using Imperial units.

Lockheed Martin’s use of the wrong units in its software meant that the MCO was not even close to the trajectory it was supposed to be on. While NASA required Lockheed Martin to convert its measurements to metric units, the agency never verified which measurement system the company had employed before sending the MCO off to Mars, and there was reportedly no response from upper management when navigation staff voiced their concerns during the mission.

Investigators claimed that NASA was the party responsible for the failure of the mission, rather than Lockheed Martin. They stated that NASA officials had rushed everything to the detriment of the mission, neglecting to thoroughly test the small forces software as they should have, and that it was impossible to tell whether the systems engineering team had validated and verified the software to begin with.

Unfortunately, no matter whose fault it was, the Mars Polar Lander bore the brunt of the unit-conversion failure. Not long after this simple error pulled it disastrously away from its intended orbit, it was doomed to crash and bur



Starlink Satellite Explodes In Orbit, Yet Another Moment Of SpaceX Engineering Excellence

Ryan Erik King
Tue, March 31, 2026



The Headquarters of SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, with a Falcon 9 booster in March 2024. - Sven Piper/Getty Images

There are roughly 10,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, making it a crowded place due to Elon Musk's business ventures.

It would be ideal if satellites in a massive communications constellation didn't just spontaneously explode, but here we are. SpaceX announced that one of its Starlink satellites "experienced an anomaly on-orbit" on Sunday, which is a gentle way of saying that it blew to smithereens. This isn't the first time an Elon Musk internet box has detonated in low Earth orbit, with a similar incident in December. I would be surprised if Sunday's explosion was the last.

SpaceX claimed that the loss of Starlink satellite 34343 poses no new risk to the International Space Station or NASA's planned launch of Artemis II this week. According to The Verge, the incident created a debris field of "tens of objects." The debris should burn up in the atmosphere in a few weeks. Starlink satellites are already designed to die and completely disintegrate at the end of their service life. Hopefully, the debris doesn't cause any chaos in orbit before re-entry.

Space may be a near-perfect vacuum, but it isn't empty

Illustration concept of a fleet of Internet Starlink satellites in orbit above planet Earth. A line of communication satellites with the sun in the horizon. - xnk/Shutterstock

There are roughly 10,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, over a third of all the tracked objects in that part of space. Low Earth orbit is a crowded place, largely due to the business ventures of Elon Musk. It could get even worse. SpaceX filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission in January to launch one million AI data centers into orbit. Ignoring the fact that energy and cooling needs make that harebrained scheme impossible for even a single data center, the constellation would cut Earth off from the rest of space.

It would only be a matter of time before a SpaceX orbital data center exploded, spraying debris into neighboring data centers and triggering a chain reaction. The theoretical scenario was first posited in the 1970s by NASA scientists Donald Kessler. A Kessler syndrome event would destroy every satellite in low Earth orbit and smother the planet in a cloud of debris, making space launches impossible. While experimental technologies are being developed to capture space debris, it has already impacted human spaceflight: a Chinese crewed capsule was deemed unsafe following a debris strike in orbit last year.