Who else besides me is excited about the Artemis I launch on Monday?  

I'm definitely looking forward to it!

I am, but being on the West Cost I'll have to get up very early. I visited the Cape Canaveral complex back in 2017 and took the special tour. One of the most amazing experiences of my life because I got to see where so much history had been made.

Webb continues to give spectacular images of things near and far. I really like this image of Neptune along with its rings and moons.

I enjoy watching night launches - but I didn't stay up late to watch the Artemis I launch overnight. However, there are numerous places to watch it online.

If you're curious as to where the spacecraft is now, NASA offers a tracker similar to the one for JWST.  It's just over 17 hours after launch but it is already over 92,000 miles from earth.

We've had a nasty turn of events for the UK's first-ever rocket launch, last night — the rocket was taken up from Newquay Airport in Cornwall by a modified 747 jumbo jet and released, with the aim of carrying 9 satellites into orbit (including one made in Wales!). Everything was going according to plan until somehow the second stage engine apparently failed and the rocket and all the satellites were lost in space... now they're trying to figure out what went wrong. (And I guess, contrary to the traditional saying, in this case it IS rocket science.)

I am so not a fan of Artemis flying manned the second time out let alone around the moon. NASA'S history is littered with disasters that have been caused by them rushing. Apollo 1 and Challenger are case in point.

Well, here's a bit of news today, that is enough for discussion on both this thread & the astronomy thread. I heard that 124 light years away from Earth astronomers have found a planet that appears to support life. Several news items state:

In a potential landmark discovery, scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have obtained what they call the strongest signs yet of possible life beyond our solar system, detecting in an alien planet's atmosphere the chemical fingerprints of gases that on Earth are produced only by biological processes.

But surely it is unlikely that we would ever reach it, and would we really want to do so? 124 light-years would be way beyond a normal human lifespan. K2-18 b is 8.6 times as massive as Earth and has a diameter about 2.6 times as large as our planet. What might its gravity be like?

Meanwhile, it is fascinating to wonder what could be on this new exo-planet. At the moment I wish it were as simple as Polly and Digory's rings in the Wood between the Worlds.