Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

Spaceflight News is an Android app that aggregates space news stories and data on space events such as launches and orbital maneuvers. The main screen of the Spaceflight News app on my Pixel 2 XL phone. The app lists the headlines of the stories and links to the respective sites and blogs for reading the full text. The headlines come from the Spaceflight News API , a project by the same author of the Spaceflight News app. The API lets developers add to their own apps spaceflight news from selected sources. So it doubles as a demo app for the API. The Spaceflight News API is inspired by the Launch Library , a project to provide developers with an API for adding to their apps a wealth of data on space launches collected and maintained by a group of volunteers. The Spaceflight News app provides also Launch Library data, and other information on space events such as vehicle rollouts, docking and berthing maneuvers, and more. Although there are great and more advanced launch dat...

If you've been on the web for more than a decade, you’re familiar with blogs and how they work. But don’t take for granted that others do. Two recent Reddit threads in r/Blogging hint at how low awareness of blogs and their infrastructure is in 2019. A blogger wondered how to follow a blog and suggested using Twitter, completely ignoring RSS. In a different thread, another blogger shared an anecdote that made him realize many young people don’t know what blogs are . What’s more worrying is the demise of RSS , a valuable source of repeated, interested traffic that bloggers own and can control. It’s comparable in effectiveness and growth potential only to email newsletters. Suppose a typical user stumbles upon a blog they like and want to follow. They don't know how to do it as RSS, the best tool for that, is even less known than blogs. Visiting the blog from time to time is impractical, the user forgets and moves on. They may follow the blog's social profile. But, giv...