Let's Dance with the Moon: follow the Artemis II mission with Flight Day updates.

 

April 11, 2026 update

In 1969 as a young boy, I was lucky to have watched, along with the entire world, Apollo 11 launch and land on the Moon and return safely to the Earth. A mission started by the leadership of President John F. Kennedy. Now my children will, in a few more years, also see humans land and walk on the Moon. April 1 was the first launch window, of about 2 hours in duration, for a chance to launch Artemis-II into Earth orbit with four NASA astronauts, three Americans and one Canadian. Mother Nature cooperated, and so did the rocket, launching at 6:35 PM EST.

The Orion spacecraft has just over 355,000 parts, built by NASA and prime contractor Lockheed Martin. The spacecraft injected itself into a flight into deep space on April 2, headed around the moon to return to Earth. We all watched for 10 earth-flight days the successful test of the space craft as four of human kind travelled farther from Earth than anyone in human history. Over 3/4 of all persons on Earth were born after Apollo 17, the last time human walked on the Moon. I am one of the 1/4 persons who were born before Apollo and got to see all of the Apollo astronauts walk on the Moon.

Crew assembling seating and stowing cargo, preparation for reentry on Flight Day 10

APOLLO 11 TRACKER: the Pandemic Lockdown Edition for NASA Lovers like me.

Come with me in 2019, and follow in real-time (50 years ago) what is/was going on with the Apollo 11 Mission to the Moon. You can get these reference books today if you are a NASA fan like me. I also have my Buzz Aldrin NASA Ball Cap on. These books were news reference books published by NASA. They were in the hands of Walter Cronkite and his coworkers and they are great for nerds like me. 

Updated April 3, 2026, my Apollo 11 blog in real-time, first posted in July 2019 recapturing the mission of Apollo 11 on it's 50th anniversary. I also reposted this for anyone stuck at home during our COVID19 pandemic stay-at-home activities (2020) for its 51st anniversary. I am old enough to have watched Apollo missions on TV, CBS News, with Walter Cronkite the voice who guided us through each mission live. It is quite true that scientists and engineers of my age were young children who discovered our love of science and technology from the NASA Apollo program, and some of us from Mr. Spock on Star Trek (original series). All on a black and white TV and newspaper clippings from the Toronto Star, NYTimes and Washington Post. Now my children in 2026 will soon see humans reach the Moon and walk on the Moon once again. My tracking post on the Artemis-II mission of April 2026 is here in The Science Rant: Artemis-II if you would like to compare Apollo to Artemis. 

Evidence Based Medicine is Less than 50 years old: born in Hamilton Ontario from an American doctor who made Canada home.

This is a slight update of my posting from 2019, inspired by the fact that the current federal administration of my country is throwing out Evidence Based Medicine as applied to protecting the health of persons in the United States. This is serious enough that six former Surgeons General of the United States have published an editorial in the Washington Post warning Americans of the danger this poses to their future health. (See Six Surgeons General: It's our duty to warn the nation about JFK Jr., October 7, 2025). How long have we been using Evidence Based Medicine (EBM)? Not as long as you may think, but we benefit from EBM, a concept that was helped along by an important American physician and educator, David Sackett MD.

mRNA Vaccines: what the 1st Trump administration did correct and is now putting in jeopardy in 2025.

Updated 9-4-2025 

As a biochemistry professional, I have followed the science of COVID-19 before most people had heard about it, before it was reported outside of China. Along the way from the pandemic start, through vaccine development, the overwhelming of hospitals, and the arrival of the first COVID-19 vaccines, I have read and listened to politicians and some scientists argue that natural immunity would be good enough. The idea is that you should just let the disease spread and natural immunity will build up. Well, yes that is true, if you survive a viral infection you will most likely have some immunity for some time. The problem with their suggestion however is the survival part and the cost of herd natural immunity. That cost is permanent damage and increased personal risk of future death from MACE. Fortunately, the first Trump administration decided to go with the strategy of "Warp Speed" to get vaccines developed faster than at any time in history. Read on for some explanation about this and learn how MACE can kill you.

Walking the DOGE? They may leave a mess for you: a government purse with no watchdogs and lack of medical research.

Back in February I wrote this post and have updated it today as we start the Fall term and I just taught the first class of Science of Vision to a collection of our young future bioscience colleagues. Both undergraduate and graduate students. In February, you were told that government workers are criminals and frauds, and that biomedical scientists like me are ripping us off. Despite that rhetoric, after 6 months there has not been any evidence presented at all to show where the fraud is or what the fraud is. Why? Because its really hard to cheat with government funds without getting caught and stopped. At least it used to be before all the Inspector Generals of the US Government were closed down. Now the US House is considering slashing the NIH budget by 40%. As I am a scientist, I am writing this to tell you all about the science of how federal research grants work in the United States, and why activities like potential new medical treatment development will simply stop if we chop away the indirect cost components of grants and slash the NIH budget. Here explained with examples:

Human Guinea Pigs, the people paid to safety test potential new drugs are not really volunteers without pressure.

The first testing of a drug to be approved in Canada, or in the US by the FDA, or for the EU's drug agency, requires giving the drug at various doses to healthy persons. We often are taught that these are very much volunteers, who participate for only good reasons. 

If there are bad side effects or even dangerous consequences to new drugs, then these factors must be known or clinical trials on sick persons might cause great harm. Yet, we seem to experience the removal of some drugs from the market long after their approved use causes some severe adverse effects. The adverse effects signal tends to take a couple of years or more before it becomes apparent that the drug should never have been approved because of its severe side effects. How can this be missed in Phase-I? This is how.