Artemis II: A Milestone In Space Exploration

Godspeed to the Artemis II crew who launched yesterday.  The mission marks mankind's first return to the moon in over 50 years and paves the way for the ultimate colonization of the moon as well as future Mars exploration.

• First crewed lunar mission in over 50 years — Artemis II marks the first time humans have headed beyond low Earth orbit since NASA’s Apollo missions in the early 1970s.

• Historic human return to deep space — four astronauts are set to travel around the Moon and back on a roughly 10-day journey. 

• Diverse and record-setting team — the four astronauts include Americans Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

• First woman to go around the Moon (Christina Koch)

• First Black astronaut in cislunar space (Victor Glover)

• First Canadian on a Moon mission (Jeremy Hansen) 

🛰️ The Spacecraft & Rocket

• Space Launch System (SLS) — a 322-foot-tall (≈98 m) super-heavy booster will propel the Orion spacecraft into a translunar trajectory.

• Orion spacecraft — designed for deep-space missions with advanced life-support, navigation, and communications systems. Tonight’s flight tests these critical systems with crew aboard. 

🌕 The Mission Profile

• No lunar landing — Artemis II is a lunar flyby: the crew will loop around the Moon and return to Earth, not land on its surface.

• Free-return trajectory — the spacecraft’s path uses the Moon’s gravity like a slingshot, taking the crew farther from Earth than humans have ever traveled before.

• Pacific splashdown — the capsule is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and splash down at the end of the mission. 

  📅 Launch Details

• Launch window opening: ~6:24 p.m. EDT (≈18:24 Eastern) from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

• Two-hour window: extends until ~8:24 p.m. if conditions are good.

• Backup opportunities: additional daily windows are available April 2–6 if needed. 

🌍 Why It Matters

• Builds toward future lunar landings — Artemis II is a crucial test for hardware and procedures that will enable surface missions like Artemis III and beyond.

• Gateway to Mars — NASA sees sustained lunar exploration as a stepping stone toward eventual human missions to Mars. 

How to Redirect HamClock to OHB - and Also Understand HamClock's SDO, Solar Wind, and Solar Flux Info

(No, this is not an April Fool's Day bit!)

Here's some great follow up videos to my March 25 post about some of HamClock's radio propagation features.  These videos cover both  HamClock's SDO, Solar Wind and Solar Flux information as wella s how to redirect your HamClock's backend to OHB in general.  

These videos are courtesy of the open source Open Backend (OHB) project, the open source successor to Clear Sky Institute (CSI), the originator of HamClock.  (CSI's backend was shut down due to the unfortunate January 2026 passing of the pioneering  of its original creator, Elwood Downey, WB0OEW.   Note that "backend" refers to the engine that gathers all the changing data that HamClock uses and presents.)

Video 1

Confused about how to redirect your HamClock to the OHB backend in the first place?  Check this out:

Video 2

Radio Operator's "Forbidden" German Impersonation Saved 300

The cold in the Ardennes didn’t feel like weather that night. It felt like intent.

It cut through wool, through canvas, through gloves already stiff with old mud and frozen sweat. Snow drifted through the black fir trees in long ghostly sheets, softening the earth while hardening everything that breathed on it. Men slept in foxholes because exhaustion was stronger than fear for a few hours at a time. They slept curled in mud, under damp blankets, beside rifles gone numb with frost, while somewhere out in the dark the war kept moving.

Corporal Eddie Voss was not sleeping.

He sat in a narrow foxhole east of Bastogne with a headset pressed hard against his ears, listening to the enemy breathe through static.

Before the war, Eddie had worked on electrical systems in Milwaukee. He was the kind of man who could hear trouble before anyone else could see it. A transformer didn’t just fail to him. It warned. A line under strain carried a different hum. A damaged switch gave itself away in tiny irregular clicks. He had built his life on paying attention longer than other people did.

Then the Army discovered he spoke German.

Not school German. Not phrasebook German. The real thing. The language of his immigrant parents, the language of kitchen arguments and whispered family grief after Pearl Harbor made every German word feel dangerous in public. So the Army handed him a radio and pushed him into war.

He was twenty-one years old and freezing in Belgium.

And for four nights in a row, he had been doing something he absolutely was not supposed to be doing.

Listening to enemy transmissions.

At first it was curiosity. That’s what he told himself. The front was chaos anyway. Units were cut off. Orders arrived late or garbled. Weather swallowed radio traffic and spit back static. In that kind of confusion, the enemy sounded less like a mystery than another piece of the weather. So Eddie tuned around, using a captured German set and a pair of seized headphones, and began listening to voices in the dark.

What started as boredom turned into pattern.

One German officer always cleared his throat before disagreeing.

Another clipped his consonants too sharply to be from the south.

A logistics man sounded bored no matter how desperate the message.

And one commander — the one Eddie heard most often — had the deep smoker’s rasp of a man who had been shouting over engines for years.

Eddie gave him a name.

Run Silent, Run Deep

The USS Massachusetts, the Navy's newest Virginia-class fast attack submarine, was commissioned this past Saturday (March 28) in South Boston.  The new nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN-798), is the first submarine named after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the eighth Navy vessel to bear the name. 

Historically, the name has been carried by eight other vessels including two battleships:

USS Massachusetts (BB-59): A South Dakota-class fast battleship commissioned in 1942, which served extensively in World War II (including the invasions of North Africa, the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and the Battle of Okinawa) before being decommissioned in 1947.  Since 1965, it has been preserved as a museum ship at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts, since 1965. 

USS Massachusetts (BB-2): An Indiana-class pre-dreadnought battleship commissioned in 1896 that served in the Spanish–American War and World War I before being renamed Coast Battleship Number 2 and scuttled off Pensacola, Florida, in 1921, where its wreck now serves as an artificial reef and diving spot. 

The current SSN-798, built by Newport News Shipbuilding, is a 377-foot-long vessel with a displacement of 7,800 tons and a complement of 135 crew members, featuring advanced stealth, surveillance, and special warfare capabilities.

Look closely, because this may be the last time you're able to see her.

Godspeed to the USS Massachusetts and her crew.

The Radio Geek’s Doomscrolling Antidote

Immerse yourself in a digital collection of amateur radio and communication artifacts

The internet has aged to the point where it is easy to fall into a rabbit hole, reminiscing about websites from decades past.

The site that fuels those scrolling endeavors is the Internet Archive — a nonprofit that hosts a digital library of internet sites and other artifacts in digital form. The project began in 1996 to archive the web.

Today, it contains one trillion web pages through its “Wayback Machine,” as well as 56 million books and texts. It also works with approximately 1,400 libraries through its Archive-It program to identify and preserve important digital history.

Kay Savetz (K6KJN) freely admits to having been an Internet Archive power user. Savetz used not just the archive.org website, but also its command line interface to upload many documents. 

A licensed amateur radio operator since 1989, Savetz’s own interviews with Atari 8-bit computer pioneers are among those early uploads.  So when the Amateur Radio Digital Communications foundation provided a significant grant to the Internet Archive to form a collection of the history of amateur radio and adjacent endeavors, the archive sought a lead curator. Savetz was a natural fit. 

The project was funded in 2022 and titled the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Today, DLARC has approximately 225,000 items, spanning magazines, newsletters and call books.

In computing terms, that’s about 26 terabytes of storage space, Savetz told us.

All you need is time.

Click this link to peruse the collection — and you’ll probably all of a sudden wonder where an hour of your day went. From QSL cards to logbooks to newsletters to even lectures on DX and related topics.

DLARC is a haven for radio amateurs, but also shortwave enthusiasts, long-distance radio reception clubs, early communication pioneers and more recently, college and community radio. 

Full runs of 73 Magazine are available, as well as early public-domain QST issues. There are also Aviation and Wireless magazines that date back to the early 1900s.

“We have Radio News from the early part of the 1900s, from back in the day when the hot new things were airplanes and radios,” Savetz said.

The items go beyond paper, as Savetz has helped digitize 35mm slides, reel-to-reel tapes, 16mm film, U-matic, Beta and various floppy disk formats. 

One of the approximately 150 searchable callbooks that are part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications.