NASA is practicing moonwalks. When are we going back?

In one sentence: NPR Short Wave's "Spacing Out with Gina" space-news segment (host Regina Barber with science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce and All Things Considered host Scott Detrow) covers three stories: NASA testing lunar landers and rehearsing surface work after Artemis II, with a landing possible as soon as 2028; seismometers that picked up a burst of human stillness during the 2024 total solar eclipse; and new water-chemistry evidence about the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

Story one: NASA preps landers, eyes 2028 for the next moonwalk

Core findings: Artemis II just wrapped up — the first time people ventured out to the moon in five decades. The crew broke the record for the farthest humans have traveled from Earth and brought back striking photos, but the crew capsule itself can't land on the moon; that requires a separate lander. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman — a businessman and former private astronaut who took charge a few months ago — has been pushing SpaceX and Blue Origin, the two companies under contract to build lunar landers, to move faster. Contractor progress is hard to read from the outside: Blue Origin's new Glenn rocket recently had an upper-stage problem that failed to put a satellite into the correct orbit, and the FAA grounded the rocket pending an investigation, fueling concern that it could slow Blue Origin's lander work. NASA says it plans to test one or maybe both landers next year — launching the crew capsule first, then the lander(s), so they can rendezvous and rehearse propulsion and life-support systems in low Earth orbit, close to home. If that goes well, NASA says an actual moon landing could happen as soon as 2028, though delays are common in spaceflight. Meanwhile, NASA is already rehearsing surface operations: astronauts fresh off Artemis II, like Christina Koch, were back in surface spacewalk suits within a day or two of returning to Earth, practicing geology fieldwork. In Koch's words: "When we got back to Earth, we all, within one or two days, were in surface spacewalk suits, doing surface geology tasks and doing them well."

Scientific background: Crewed moon landings happen in two stages — first getting astronauts into lunar orbit (done, with Artemis II), then getting a crew safely down to the surface (the next hurdle). That's the caveat the hosts keep coming back to: the Artemis II astronauts never actually landed on the moon. The crew also got to witness a solar eclipse from space during the mission — the moon passing in front of the sun — a detail that sets up the episode's next story.

Story two: the eclipse that made a whole region go quiet — on seismometers

Core findings: The total solar eclipse that crossed North America in April 2024 turned out to be an unplanned social-science experiment. Planetary scientist Benjamin Fernando, of Los Alamos National Lab, found that in cities along the path of totality — where viewers could see the sun fully covered by the moon and the ghostly corona flickering around it — seismometers recorded a noticeable drop in background noise right at the moment of totality, because crowds that had been loud suddenly went quiet. In Fernando's words: "People were changing their behavior in order to go out and view the eclipse. And that's really the first time that anyone has looked at human behavior through seismics and acoustics that I'm aware of during an event like a solar eclipse." Seismometers normally pick up vibrations from everyday human activity — trucks, construction, even concerts; a Taylor Swift concert, for instance, once registered as roughly a 2.3-magnitude "earthquake" (Barber's recollection, hedged with "I think"), from fans singing, jumping, and swaying. The eclipse produced the opposite signature: a sudden hush. Fernando suggested this shows seismometers have another use beyond geology — helping researchers study noise pollution and its effects on human health and the environment.

Scientific background: Seismometers are extremely sensitive to ground vibration, picking up not just tectonic activity but "anthropogenic noise" from traffic, construction, and crowds. Using that sensitivity to infer a change in human behavior — mass stillness during totality — is what made Fernando's study, in his telling, a first of its kind.

Story three: the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS may have come from somewhere colder

Core findings: 3I/ATLAS is an interstellar comet — a body that formed outside our solar system — first spotted zooming through ours last July, one of a handful of interstellar objects detected in recent years. It's currently still inside the solar system, positioned between Jupiter and Saturn. Using an array of radio telescopes in Chile, astronomers studied water evaporating off the comet's surface and found that 3I/ATLAS's water differs from water in comets that formed in our own solar system: it has more of what's called "semiheavy water," water with a slightly altered makeup, which points to formation in a colder environment than our own solar system. In other words, 3I/ATLAS likely came from a solar system that formed differently from ours. The finding doesn't pin down which specific star system it came from, though — that's still unknown. Its value is as a reference point for future work: astronomers have gotten better at detecting interstellar objects in recent years and expect to find more, which will let them ask whether 3I/ATLAS's water composition is common among interstellar comets or unique — and, by extension, whether our own solar system is unusual.

Scientific background: Water ice on a comet's surface evaporates as it nears a star, and differences in the ratio of "semiheavy water" to ordinary water offer astronomers an indirect way to estimate how cold a comet's formation environment was, and thus where it might have come from. The episode doesn't go into the underlying measurement technique in more detail.

Notable details and trivia

• Cold open: Barber pitches keeping the name "Spacing Out with Gina" for the space segment, then lands a pun — "Why does a shooting star taste better than a comet? It's a little 'meteor'" (meatier).
• Guessing the next Artemis destination before the segment starts, Barber jokes "Jupiter" and Detrow jokes NASA will "talk about their toilets" — to which Barber agrees, "they should talk about their toilets."
• Detrow watched the April 2024 eclipse with his kids' school, standing on the field with a crowd of students — "a fun day." Barber watched totality in Buffalo and remembers the crowd going from loud and excited to suddenly still and quiet.
• Sign-off: Barber teases Detrow that he's "stuck with us" as permanent Spacing Out co-host — "your fault," since he co-created the segment with her.
• Production credits: episode produced by Berly McCoy and Kai McNamee; edited by Christopher Intagliata, Amina Khan, and showrunner Rebecca Ramirez; fact-checked by Nell Greenfieldboyce, Regina Barber, and Tyler Jones; audio engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Tiffany Vera Castro.

Cross-domain connections

The first story (Artemis moon-landing prep, lander testing, astronaut surface training) shares real subject matter with the science domain's existing shortwave-moon-robots page (moon-crawling robots / the cosmic-expansion debate / Artemis III training) — both episodes cover NASA's crewed lunar program, just from different angles (this episode focuses on the Artemis II debrief and lander-testing timeline; moon-robots focuses on the incoming Artemis III crew's field training). They're best read as different slices of the same Artemis storyline rather than duplicative content, so no forced inline link is added to the body. The second and third stories (eclipse seismology, interstellar-comet water chemistry) have no substantive connection to the acquired business-history domain.

Pages worth building

• artemis-program — NASA's crewed return-to-the-moon program, already the subject of multiple independent Short Wave episodes in the mirror (a 2022 "new chapter" episode, an April 2026 launch special, and this episode's lander/training update). Worth a dedicated project page to tie together Artemis II results and the branching Artemis III/lander storylines.
• jared-isaacman — NASA's current administrator, a businessman and former private astronaut now pushing SpaceX and Blue Origin to speed up lander development. A recurring figure in the Artemis storyline likely to reappear in future space coverage.
• 3i-atlas — the confirmed interstellar comet, already the subject of a dedicated Short Wave episode in the mirror (December 2025); this episode adds a water-chemistry update. Worth tracking as a reference point for future interstellar-object research.

Source · shortwave