Drew Ex Machina

For old time space enthusiasts like myself, it seems that no lunar mission is complete without an obligatory Earthrise (or Earthset) image.

While my Gentle Readers are well aware of my decades of writing on space-related topics, I also have a day job as the Chief Scientist of a small Boston-based startup called Tropical Weather Analytics (TWA).

As a long time smoker who isn’t allowed to smoke in my home, I spend a fair amount of each day sitting on my front porch for a few minutes at a time enjoying a few drags on a cigarillo before carefully extinguishing it for later use and heading back insid…

By Ilya Schiller For decades, Americans have relied on federal agencies like NOAA and the National Weather Service (NWS) to provide essential weather forecasts, storm tracking, and emergency warnings.

Naturally, the early history of space exploration is filled with firsts.

A group photo of the attendees of the National Tropical Weather Conference 2025 taken on April 3, 2025.

Now that we are at the end of 2024, it is time to look back at this year’s material published on Drew Ex Machina and see which of the new essays I posted during this site’s eleventh year online, along with earlier published material, proved to be most pop…

One of the more dangerous parts of a space mission is launch which is why almost all crewed spacecraft have had launch abort options to cover all phases of ascent.

Space enthusiasts of a certain age, like myself, grew up learning about the trio of NASA’s unmanned programs which provided scientists and engineers with vital information about the Moon before the Apollo landings: Ranger which took TV images of the lunar…

While today we are inundated with color images of the Earth, our earliest views from space were confined to monochromatic or black and white images (see “First Pictures: The View of Earth from Space – October 24, 1946”).