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Michael Collins looked down at his watch.
The Apollo 11 astronaut had already beaten the original schedule for the opening of the National Air and Space Museum by three days, but no one would remember that if these final 36 minutes didn't go perfectly.
President Gerald Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller took 35 seconds to find their seats on the red, white, and blue bunting-lined outdoor stage. The flyover by the Thunderbirds was quick enough. At any other event, it would have been the only time-dependent concern of the day.
NASA announced Wednesday that it will fly the Artemis III mission in low-Earth orbit and that it continues to target 2027 for this stepping-stone flight that will help land humans on the Moon.
The space agency chose the orbit close to Earth—as opposed to a higher orbit—because it would preserve the final remaining Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage for launching the Artemis IV landing mission later this decade. Instead, NASA will use a "spacer" to simulate the mass and overall dimensions of an upper stage but without propulsive capabilities.
The additional information released this week follows a decision made by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman three months ago to shuffle the agency's Artemis plans in order to accelerate a lunar landing.
NASA's goal of reaching the Moon's surface as many as 21 times over the next two and a half years will require an overhaul of the agency's approach to buying lunar landers and success in rectifying the myriad problems that have, so far, caused three of the last four US landing attempts to falter.
It will also require improved oversight of NASA's industrial base and better management of a supply chain that has often failed to deliver on time.
These landers are separate from NASA's Human Landing System program, which has contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop and deliver human-rated landers to ferry crews to and from the lunar surface for the agency's Artemis program. Alongside the crew landers, dozens of robotic and cargo landings will deliver payloads to scout for a future Moon base and demonstrate technologies for larger vehicles, mining and resource utilization, and sustained operations during the two-week-long lunar night.
C'est l'un des projets les plus attendus par les amateurs de fantasy et d'action pure. Alors que le tournage bat son plein en Écosse sous la direction de Chad Stahelski, maître du genre, le reboot de Highlander promet de ne pas faire dans la demi-mesure, selon l'un des membres principaux du casting. De quoi rassurer sans doute les puristes de la franchise.
Alors que la saga historique la plus romantique de la décennie est de retour pour une ultime saison 8 sur Netflix, depuis le 8 mars 2026, les semaines peuvent sembler bien longues avant de pouvoir découvrir un nouvel épisode, chaque samedi. Pour patienter, voici 5 séries comme Outlander, à dévorer en streaming.
La saison 8 d'Outlander servira d'adieux à Claire et Jamie. Casting, date de sortie, histoire, bande-annonce... Voici tout ce que l'on sait sur ce grand final de la série historique, qui s'annonce épique.
Alors que l'ultime saison d'Outlander s'apprête à débarquer sur Netflix, le 7 mars 2026, les fans redoutent déjà de dire adieu à leurs personnages préférés. Et surprise : même les comédiens ignorent comment la série culte va se terminer.
Alors que Sophie et Benedict sont au cœur de toutes les attentions, grâce à la saison 4 de La Chronique des Bridgerton, voici 5 séries similaires, idéales pour continuer sur votre lancée juste après la partie 2, disponible depuis le 26 février 2026 sur Netflix.
Netflix continue de proposer des temps forts chaque mois, pour gonfler son catalogue. En mars 2026, c'est l'heure de profiter des nouveaux épisodes de l'adaptation One Piece et du film Peaky Blinders.
Alors que Sophie et Benedict sont au cœur de toutes les attentions, dans la saison 4 de La Chronique des Bridgerton, voici 5 séries similaires, idéales pour patienter jusqu’à la sortie de la partie 2, prévue pour le 26 février 2026 sur Netflix.
Le film des années 1980, qui mettait en scène un combattant immortel, va connaître une seconde jeunesse sous la direction de Chad Stahelski (John Wick). Et l'acteur Henry Cavill vient de partager les toutes premières images de son apparence, dans ce reboot de Highlander.
Shoot for the moon in our Python version of the Atari hit, Lunar Lander. Mark Vanstone has the code.
Atari’s cabinet featured a thrust control, two buttons for rotating, and an abort button in case it all went horribly wrong.
First released in 1979 by Atari, Lunar Lander was based on a concept created a decade earlier. The original 1969 game (actually called Lunar) was a text-based affair that involved controlling a landing module’s thrust to guide it safely down to the lunar surface; a later iteration, Moonlander, created a more visual iteration of the same idea on the DEC VT50 graphics terminal.
Given that it appeared at the height of the late-seventies arcade boom, though, it was Atari’s coin-op that became the most recognisable version of Lunar Lander, arriving just after the tenth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Again, the aim of the game was to use rotation and thrust controls to guide your craft, and gently set it down on a suitably flat platform. The game required efficient control of the lander, and extra points were awarded for parking successfully on more challenging areas of the landscape.
The arcade cabinet was originally going to feature a normal joystick, but this was changed to a double stalked up-down lever providing variable levels of thrust. The player had to land the craft against the clock with a finite amount of fuel with the Altitude, Horizontal Speed, and Vertical Speed readouts at the top of the screen as a guide. Four levels of difficulty were built into the game, with adjustments to landing controls and landing areas.
Our homage to the classic Lunar Lander. Can you land without causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage?
To write a game like Lunar Lander with Pygame Zero, we can replace the vector graphics with a nice pre-drawn static background and use that as a collision detection mechanism and altitude meter. If our background is just black where the Lander can fly and a different colour anywhere the landscape is, then we can test pixels using the Pygame function image.get_at() to see if the lander has landed. We can also test a line of pixels from the Lander down the Y-axis until we hit the landscape, which will give us the lander’s altitude.
The rotation controls of the lander are quite simple, as we can capture the left and right arrow keys and increase or decrease the rotation of the lander; however, when thrust is applied (by pressing the up arrow) things get a little more complicated. We need to remember which direction the thrust came from so that the craft will continue to move in that direction even if it is rotated, so we have a direction property attached to our lander object. A little gravity is applied to the position of the lander, and then we just need a little bit of trigonometry to work out the movement of the lander based on its speed and direction of travel.
To judge if the lander has been landed safely or rammed into the lunar surface, we look at the downward speed and angle of the craft as it reaches an altitude of 1. If the speed is sufficiently slow and the angle is near vertical, then we trigger the landed message, and the game ends. If the lander reaches zero altitude without these conditions met, then we register a crash. Other elements that can be added to this sample are things like a limited fuel gauge and variable difficulty levels. You might even try adding the sounds of the rocket booster noise featured on the original arcade game.
The direction of thrust could be done in several ways. In this case, we’ve kept it simple, with one directional value which gradually moves in a new direction when an alternative thrust is applied. You may want to try making an X- and Y-axis direction calculation for thrust so that values are a combination of the two dimensions. You could also add joystick control to provide variable thrust input.
Here’s Mark’s code snippet, which creates a simple shooting game in Python. To get it working on your system, you’ll need to install Pygame Zero. And to download the full code and assets, go here.
You can read more features like this one in Wireframe issue 37, available directly from Raspberry Pi Press — we deliver worldwide.
And if you’d like a handy digital version of the magazine, you can also download issue 37 for free in PDF format.
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