Blog of Jatan Mehta, a globally published independent space writer, author of Moon Monday, and invited speaker.

Independent Space Writer: Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress 🌙 Journalist with articles published globally Science Communications Lead for the Open Lunar Foundation Quoted on Nature, The Hind...

A review of notable developments by country or region.

I love reading blogs, newsletters, and virtually anything else on the Web through RSS feeds. As a space writer, it’s the best way for me to keep track of, read, and search what hundreds of sources publish every week. And, I proactively offer my own readers an option to subscribe to my blogs through RSS. Even though I have thousands of email subscribers, I care about this option because it provides people a private and reliably way to read my blogs without having to trust me with their email IDs. Why offer anything less than what you prefer yourself? However, most people don’t know what RSS feeds are, and how feed readers can benefit them. I wrote an accessible article about RSS, which anecdotally made some headway within my friends and little network of humans. But even then most people have a notion that RSS is complicated to use. These notions carry terse truths. Compared to the ease of following someone on social media or subscribing to a newsletter, it’s far from obvious what you’re supposed to do when you encounter an RSS feed icon or link. Even for people who do know about and use RSS readers, it’s still a chore to manually hunt, grab, and add RSS links to their feed readers. How do we simplify this? I redid my space blog’s **RSS feeds page** to offer big buttons for people to subscribe to my posts on every feed reader I could think of. Did you check the page already? Clicking or tapping on any button on that page does one of these two things: 1. If you already use that particular feed reader service/app, you can add my blog to it in two taps. Bam. 2. If you don’t use that reader, most of them will present you with a login & signup option. This way people can directly use a feed reader with at least one blog added instead of having to imagine and figure out what they are and how they work. Isn’t this solution better than the status quo? At least fellow netizens James and Ashur agree. I went ahead and added these two-tap buttons on my personal blog’s feeds page as well. 🤓 These direct-subscribe links work based on special dynamic URLs. I’ve hunted down special URLs for more than 20 feed readers for my feeds pages. Very few RSS readers are missing from the list, and that’s only because they don’t support such a URL structure or scheme—as far as I can tell. I’ve reached out to various such developers to add support for the same. I’m hoping to add direct-subscribe links for Reeder Classic, Feedgrab, Miniflux, and popular Android-only apps. Any tips you have for me to add those or other RSS apps/services are welcome. * * * **P.S.** I absolutely know that many people will still find RSS confusing and just won’t use it. That war is for another day—perhaps if and when the Web is about to come full circle to blogs from the clutches of social media? For now, I’m happy to have made the RSS situation at least a little better than I found it. This is the kind of post which is so niche that most people will wonder what I’m even rambling about. But I don’t care because it has made me feel happy.

Plus: Examples of how Western media narratives of Chinese lunar activities misjudge capabilities and intent

A look at recent Chinese milestones in the build up to crewed lunar missions, another blow(up) for Artemis, how Firefly’s Ocula can fill critical gaps for NASA, and more.

A look at recent Chinese milestones in the build up to crewed lunar missions, another blow(up) for Artemis, how Firefly’s Ocula can fill critical gaps for NASA, and more.

I’ve been quite productive this month, chief of which has entailed publishing a spree of long articles. Notably, all of these pieces have been on different topics, each concerning an unusually important development in its own niche within the space industry. Because of their very newsy nature, it wasn’t possible to not write about them. Such is the nature of journalism. And I wasn’t content with writing about them the way it was already covered either. And so I ended up with concerted back-to-back efforts in publishing my analysis and commentary on NASA’s abysmal budget proposal, India’s PSLV rocket’s failure, ispace Japan’s crash landing, and China’s growing lead in lunar orbital infrastructure. Today I woke up, freshened up, and began the work day like I would usually. But I just couldn’t get meaningful thoughts to exist, much less flow. Giving the brain more time and trying to catalyze the process with good reads or music did not work either. Every end was dead. Clearly, the streak of articles had taken their toll at last. One of the few perks I do get as an independent writer is to be my own boss. I don’t use that privilege loosely, and much prefer to set scheduled tasks for each day of the work week. But today my mind was just frozen. There weren’t any immediate self-imposed deadlines, and so after some initial reluctance, I decided to just let it be and called off the work day. I slept through the afternoon, then walked in the park, had a nice butter vada pav, did some physical and digital chores, and then read a bit on my Kindle over a big cup of chai (tea). One of those reads was about the fascinating problem of character amnesia in China. Allow me to quote the very first para that will make you click with intrigue: > During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that afternoon. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. I end the day writing this blog post, which has brought back my fluid thoughts. And now I can sleep in peace. And, maybe this post provided you some perspective for when you find yourself in a similar situation?

Plus: Examples of how Western media narratives of Chinese lunar activities misjudge capabilities and intent

Hi friends, It’s again been over three months since I sent out the previous newsletter for friends. And once again, a lot has happened in life. Here’s a small snapshot of some notable things you might like to browse. Click the links you’re curious about—that’s what the Web is for. :) ## Loved reading * Lyrical poems by Aurobindo > Friendship is no longer seen as an integral part of daily life, but rather something we squeeze in when all our other responsibilities have been met. * People aren’t mean to talk this much * Twitterlike is a bad shape ## Writing * China selecting international researchers to study Moon samples, demonstrating automated navigation at the Moon, and welcoming India to cooperate on Moon missions * On the immense success of Firefly’s Moon lander but also the disappointing failures of landers from Intuitive Machines and ispace Japan * On India’s joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission and the PSLV rocket’s failure * Trump’s proposed budget cuts and changes to NASA’s Moon missions * _Why Moon missions need their own Wikipedia and beyond_ ## Space, personally * Joined Open Lunar’s orbit as their Science Communications Lead * A story about open knowledge sharing in space * Welcomed Catalyx Space, The Orbital Index and PierSight Space as yearly sponsors of my space writing * I had fun moderating a rather stellar panel on global Moon exploration at the international GLEX conference. Watch the video. 🌙 Yours truly speaking at GLEX 2025. ## Thoughts * Utterly fascinated by dinosaurs—want to launch them to space * Made a list of good enough blogging platforms by price if you just want to write * In which AI kills the human Web, or at least its spirit ## Life and Pictures * App subscriptions and Yoghurt * Visited the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort The Taj Mahal from the other side—across the Yamuna river from the “Moonlight garden”Qutub Minar, DelhiTook my niece to the planetarium. She went around saying “amazing” for every space thing that captivated her, especially during the sky theater show. 🌌Pleasures of a drizzly, windy day. Onion pakoda. * * * I’m grateful for this space where I can embrace a calmer digital life and connect with people directly instead of drowning in the slurp—and now slop—of social media. Have you been up to something interesting lately? Want to share a good read? Message me.

****Left:**** ispace Japan’s second Moon lander, named RESILIENCE, at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center pre-launch. Also seen integrated into the lander is ispace’s first rover TENACIOUS; ****Right:**** Our Earth as imaged by RESILIENCE from lunar orbit. Images: ispace ispace Japan’s second Moon lander