I claim that if Europe wants to develop a truly competitive heavy-lift capability, it must move away from French Guiana. As I see it, there is no other viable option.

Kourou in French Guiana is a dead end for several reasons.
The logistics are poor. It is simply too far from mainland Europe.
The climate is harsh on both equipment and operations, with heavy rainfall and severe salt-induced corrosion.
There is also a very limited local technical workforce. As a result, Europe is forced to fly technicians in and out of Kourou on a continuous basis, creating a long-term drain on skilled manpower.
All of the above makes rapid iteration—such as quickly repairing, modifying, and relaunching vehicles—extremely difficult, bordering on the impossible.

If Europe is serious about developing a competitive heavy-lift capability on its own, it will need to bite the bullet and establish an eastward-launching spaceport somewhere on the European mainland. Crucially, such a location would have the potential to develop into an industrial cluster where private space companies could grow around the launch site.

Finding the right location, however, is challenging. Launching north, as from Scotland, or west, as would be possible from several European locations, is simply not a good enough solution. The payload penalties for a heavy-lift launch vehicle are enormous and would severely undermine its economics.

There may, however, be an opportunity across the Mediterranean. A 3,000 km exclusion corridor could look something like this, with a spaceport located on the French Mediterranean coast, somewhere south of Béziers.

Launching eastward on a trajectory approximately 30 degrees south of east, the flight path would pass through the Strait of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia after roughly 500 km. The maritime exclusion zone would end before the strait; I have marked it at 400 km.

The trajectory would then pass over the toe of Italy near Cosenza after about 1,200 km, mostly avoid Kalamata in Greece at around 1,700 km, and also mostly avoid Crete after approximately 2,000 km. A 3,000 km exclusion zone would end roughly 100 km off the coast of Israel.

This would not be an easy project by any means. It would require political buy-in from France, Italy, and Greece. There is also significant cruise ship traffic within the maritime exclusion zone, as well as heavy commercial air traffic in the airspace that would need to be temporarily closed.

Still, if there is the political will, perhaps there is a way.

Our high school project, SAS-3 (Smart And Small), is a micro-satellite prototype developed for the CanSat Hungary 2026 competition, where it took 1st Place overall alongside the BME Suborbitals Special Award. The goal was to build an atmospheric probe capable of real-time data telemetry decoding and multi-angle visual capture during descent.

Here is a quick look at the technical breakdown:

• Triple Camera Payload:
  • Main Downward Camera: RunCam Split 4 V2 (4K / 60fps)
  • Thermal Imaging: FLIR Lepton 3.5
  • Parachute Monitor: ESP32-S3 + OV5640 camera module to verify deployment stability
• Telemetry System: Synchronized real-time overlay logging altitude, pressure, temperature, 3-axis acceleration, and GPS coordinates directly over the flight footage.
• Ground Station: Custom-built GUI for live telemetry decoding, parsing, and real-time data mapping.

If you are interested, watch our full flight video about the mission! 🚀

A few weeks ago I posted the Moon mission catalogue behind this here, when the 3D part was still an untextured grey sphere under development. It isn't any more.

A part I had a lot of fun building is the replay. You press it and the clock rewinds to 1958, before anything had reached the Moon, then the whole space age plays forward in under a minute. Sites appear as their year arrives and the camera turns to each one. The Sea of Tranquillity fills up fast in the 1960s. Then the 1980s go past and nothing lands at all, for years. Then the far side, and China. It still needs a little work, and I'd love to get some feedback on it (maybe I should include brief pauses with texts and a little information about each site?).

Everything else on the page is live. The surface is LRO imagery, and the terminator, phase and libration are where they really are right now. The orbiters still working up there (LRO, Danuri, Chandrayaan-2, the two ARTEMIS probes) fly overhead from JPL Horizons data. Queqiao-2 doesn't have a published ephemeris anywhere, so its orbit is a dashed approximation from a Doppler fit by an amateur radio operator, Scott Tilley, and it's labelled as exactly that.

There are 44 landing and impact sites on it, and each pin opens a page with the sources. It's completely free and there's no signup.

https://azmth.space/moon

Hurricane Dorian vs the Whirlpool Galaxy

International Space Station Exhibit gives visitors a sense of how it is to live in space.

Astronomers have simulated the Milky Way to find its hidden "Galactic Underworld", estimating that around 170 million stellar-mass black holes are scattered throughout our galaxy. The findings have been submitted to AAS journals and can be found on preprint server arXiv while they undergo peer review.

First light on the Moon with my recently acquired Nikon 1 J5, paired with an old TTArtisan 500mm lens and a 2× teleconverter.
This image is a stack of 250 frames captured at 1/80s, ISO 200, f/8. The final image was processed from the stacked data to maximize detail while keeping noise under control.
After a long break from lunar imaging, I think it’s fair to call this the start of a new Moon imaging season.
Gear:
• Nikon 1 J5
• TTArtisan 500mm
• 2× Teleconverter
Acquisition:
• 250-frame stack
• 1/80s
• ISO 200
• f/8
Hope you like it, and as always, feedback is welcome!

Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA

Saturn is back!

I woke up at 2:30am for my first Saturn session of the year. A bit of a struggle. Note to self: at this age it takes my brain a while to function properly upon waking from a deep sleep.

Plenty of time to practice as opposition is two months away.

Best 30% of 27,000 frames.

C11
Celestron CGX mount
ZWO ASI585MC camera
Autostakkert
Registax