Make a movie better by adding one letter ... and a punctuation mark and a Roman numeral. (Having watched both Tron Ares and Ares I-X, they were both pretty enjoyable.)

Get your Christmas shopping done early. Both of my books (and lots of others) are half-price at @univnebpress.bsky.social through the end of October. Use code 6BB25 here: www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/search-resul...

When McDonald’s brings Monopoly back and your rocket is on the bag…

Fly your name around the Moon on Artemis II!

Randomly discovered today my contract has the domain yeswearerocketscientists.com, which I gotta say is rather cool.

I've seen a lot of beautiful tributes in the last few days on the loss of Jim Lovell as an astronaut, explorer, hero, and space ambassador, but no one's talking about the loss of a brilliant McDonalds training advocate: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLm3...

TIL the first webpage is still online: info.cern.ch/hypertext/WW...

The latest @univnebpress.bsky.social #OutwardOdyssey book is now available for pre-order – and on sale! Pick up Born to explore for half price using code 6SUMM25 by 7/31: www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/978...

Happy #Skylab reentry anniversary AND #Superman movie release day, as foreshadowed in a 1981 episode of Superfriends.

Randomly recalled today that @NASA commissioned a song in 2003 to celebrate the centennial of the Wright Brothers' first flight, and it contained this line: "Imagination, and amazing Grace, bring us closer to our home in space." Prophetic. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhmO...

Summer is time for summer reading, and my publisher is running a HALF-PRICE summer sale on their catalog, including the #OutwardOdyssey series on space history that includes my books. Use code 6SUMM25 at checkout. www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/search-resul...

Happy 500th wedding anniversary of Martin and Katie Luther.

I wrote an article for Mud & Magnolias about how the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty and Parthenon are all easy day trips from northeast Mississippi, and the same is true for Huntsville. www.djournal.com/mudandmagnol...

This may just be because it's been over a decade since I published a book. I'll see if I can't fix it with the next one, which will be pretty much 10 percent semicolons and em dashes by mass. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

This week I got to visit my favorite rocket engine for the 16th anniversary of when we first "met" – engine 2059 that powered the first shuttle mission I ever saw is now in the VAB ready to launch #Artemis II.

“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.” Happy birthday (and death day) to William Shakespeare. Everyone who has written in English for the last four centuries is living in his shadow. #ShakespeareDay

Today is #EncourageAYoungWriterDay. My first “Space Story” wasn’t all that great. They got better. Want to be a writer? Write. If you like what you write, write more. If you don’t, write twice as much. #Write #Writer #writinglife

Nine missions patches have adorned the suits of NASA crews that have visited the Moon. This will be the 10th.

Happy birthday to @rocketcenterusa.bsky.social, which turns 55 today!!

SPACE JOB – Someday in the not-too-distant future, a picture like this will be taken on the surface of the Moon. My contract is looking to hire a systems engineer that will be able to point to the equipment in that picture and say "I did that." www.amentumcareers.com/jobs/payload...

"We are part of something incredibly special." #Artemis #WeAreGoing www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix7v...

#OTD in 1970, Richard Nixon outlined 6 goals for the future of space: 1) Moon 2) Mars 3) Reduce costs 4) Sustain human presence in space 5) Encourage spin-offs 6) Cooperate internationally. To this day, human spaceflight basically follows the Nixon plan. spacecoastdaily.com/2017/03/nasa-h…

A couple of humble suggestions for people who look forward to the day that the first word in #WorldBookDay is no longer singular. amzn.to/2F64tyE

I hit a significant milestone on my next book tonight – I reached my publisher's max word count for the manuscript. From here out, for every word I write, I'll have to cut one later. Ouch. #AmWriting #KillYourDarlings

Before there was NASA, there was #NACA. @NASA was built in part on the foundation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, founded #OTD in 1915. Dr Orville Wright was on the committee for 28 years. history.nasa.gov/naca/overview.…

I've gotten used to Blue Origin flying celebrities on New Shepard, but I've gotta admit Katy Perry came at me like a dark horse. www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025...

The Salem Witch Trials started #OTD 333 years ago – half of 666! Did you know Huntsville has its very own Salem Witch House? Check it out here: huntsville.org/blog/list/po... #HistoryHsv #iHeartHsv

"People have been looking up at the skies for 10,000 years, wondering and dreaming. I hope we always do." – John Glenn On this day in 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on the Friendship 7 Mercury mission.

Happy #Pluto Day! Everyone’s favorite Kuiper Belt Object was discovered #OTD in 1930. x.com/davidhitt/st...

#OTD in 1984, Bruce McCandless became the first person to make an untethered spacewalk (and Hoot Gibson photographed it). The MMU "jetpack" was only used for a few months; the iconic image of a human being floating freely in the universe is timeless.

See, here's The Thing about Huntsville...

#OTD in 1994, the only astronaut from my high school alma mater, Huntsville’s own Jan Davis, launched on the first space shuttle mission to include a Russian cosmonaut! nasa.gov/mission_page...

Twenty-two years ago today, Columbia and her crew were lost. "The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.” #OTD #STS107 #HailColumbia

Thank you, @emilycarney.bsky.social, for the kind words about my book Homesteading Space on the This Week in Space podcast, and congratulations again to you and Bruce McCandless on the success of Star Bound, a great addition to the #OutwardOdyssey series! twit.tv/shows/this-w...

Today in space history: 1958 - Explorer I, the first US satellite is launched. 1961 – NASA launches Ham, the first chimpanzee in space. 1971 – Apollo 14 heads to the Moon, carrying the first person to play golf on the Moon.

It's always exciting to see Peggy Whitson getting recognized for her awesomeness. She's made incredible contributions to human spaceflight, and she's the reason I once found myself bouncing M&Ms off my face. www.linkedin.com/posts/wdavid...

This soccer ball flown by Ellison Onizuka for his daughter not only survived the loss of #Challenger on this date in 1986, it made its way into space 30 years later and spent half a year on the Space Station. espn.com/espn/feature... #OTD

#OTD 39 years ago, the 51L crew of #Challenger was lost during ascent into the void. They lost their lives in their dedication to a mission to explore, to learn, to inspire. We honor their memory not by merely remembering their mission, but by continuing it.

#OTD in 1967, NASA lost the crew of Apollo 1 in a fire on the launch pad during a test. In exploration, risk is a key ingredient for achieving great things. But so also is diligence, and in even greater measure. #NeverForget #NASARemembers

#OTD in the year 1921, the word “#robot” was introduced to the world. thevintagenews.com/2017/06/02/t... Also #OTD, in 1979, robots marked the anniversary by killing a human for the first time. wired.com/2010/01/0125... So, uh, have a happy Robot Anniversary Day, everyone! Or else!

I love seeing the cultural power of NASA and SLS that it just randomly pops up in the middle of an ad for Cheetos. (And this is my new head canon for why the earliest pictures of SLS were white and now it's orange.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCG6...

“Hello. I’m Macintosh.” #OTD 41 years ago, Steve Jobs revealed the #Macintosh, and put a dent in the universe. youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY #Apple #SteveJobs

Why were NASA's Apollo-era engineers no fun at the playground? They had too many slide rules.

I grew up with the original #StarTrek telling me we might be able to talk to computers in three centuries or so. My son thinks nothing of wandering around the house getting #Alexa to play random songs for him. We live in interesting times. #AI

There are few things on this Earth that can literally be stacked so high they’ll reach the Moon. You’re looking at two of them. The #Artemis II boosters are both now two segments tall, and rising. www.facebook.com/NASAGroundSy...

Sixty-two years ago today, NASA announced plans to build the Saturn V, the rocket that would put the first humans on the Moon during #Apollo and loft America's first space station, #Skylab. Even as new super-heavy lift rocket are coming online, it remains iconic. #OTD #SaturnV

One-hundred and one rockets walk into a coffee shop. One of the rockets goes up to the barista and orders a coffee. The barista says, "I'm sorry; we don't serve your kind here." And the rocket says, "That's OK. Buying coffee was just a specific impulse I had."

Happy 105th birthday to the late Isaac Asimov, aka that guy that in a few years we're going to realize we really probably should have listened to about AI. #IsaacAsimov #OTD #AI

"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." – Rainer Maria Rilke #NewYear #NewYear2025

Two more days to get the best spaceflight history series ever for half-price! For the rest of 2024, my publisher is offering 50 percent off its catalog, including the #OutwardOdyssey series (like my two books!). Use code 6HLW24 at checkout. nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/outwa...