Space news comes fast and furious these days. There’s so much exploration going on, it can be hard to keep track. For example, ESA has approved a search for the gravitational echoes of the big bang. Countries that you might not expect, like Mexico, are going to the moon.  Japan is already there. In the USA, here’s some of the many things NASA is up to including going to the moon. Mind you, not everything is going well with the American space program.

Privately, here’s what Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is doing. (Here’s more on that.) Not to be outdone, this is some of what SpaceX is trying to accomplish.

Besides the engineering problems of exploring space, there’s also the human problem. For example, can astronauts deal with the isolation of Mars? Space is hard on astronauts physically as well as mentally, as that piece shows.

Not news, but here’s some more good space articles. This is a good piece on the early universe: it’s bananas. 🙂 This, on gamma ray bursts, caught my eye. As did the milky way photographer of the year (shown at the top). Finally, here’s a good story on Jean Pierre Luminet (the man in the photo), who did some first work on black hole imagery.