News

By Tariq Malik published 2 days ago (Space.com)

It wasn’t their No. 1 problem, but it was a problem for going number one.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — There was a little potty problem on NASA’s Artemis 2 moon ship.

Within hours of launching four astronauts on NASA’s Artemis 2 mission around the moon, its crew reported a glitch in what may have been the most anticipated new creature comfort of their Orion spacecraft: their space toilet.

Artemis 2 mission specialist Christina Koch noted an issue starting up part of the Orion capsule’s toilet — which NASA calls the Universal Waste Management System — that deals with urine collection.You may like

• NASA’s Artemis 2 moon astronauts are ‘fortunate’ to have a private space toilet — Apollo crews pooped in plastic bags
• The Artemis 1 moon mission had a heat shield issue. Here’s why NASA doesn’t think it will happen again on Artemis 2
• NASA’s Artemis 2 moon rocket has a problem and it’s leaving the launch pad. Don’t expect a moonshot in March

Click here for more Space.com videos…

“The toilet fan is reported to be jammed,” NASA spokesperson Gary Jordan said during live mission commentary. “Now the ground teams are coming up with instructions on how to get into the fan and clear that area to revive the toilet for the mission.”

Norm Knight, NASA’s director of flight operations, told reporters here at the Kennedy Space Center that the malfunction was due to a controller issue on the toilet. But NASA confirmed astronauts could still use the space commode to poop, just not urinate, though engineers were working to restore it to full service.

“In the meantime they’re getting their contingency — their backup waste management capabilities specifically for urine,” Jordan said. “The fecal collection of the toilet, that specific capability, can still be used with the waste management system aboard Orion.”

A few hours after Koch reported the toilet issue to Mission Control, flight controllers walked her through a series of steps to try and fix it.

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“Houston, Integrity, good checkout,” Koch said after trying the fix.

Then, some relieving news.

“Happy to report that toilet is go for use,” Mission Control’s Capcom Amy Dill radioed Koch. “We do recommend letting the system get to operating speed before donating fluid, and then letting it run a little bit after donation.”What to read next

• ISS astronaut evacuation shouldn’t interfere with upcoming Artemis 2 moon mission, NASA chief says
• NASA says its Artemis 2 moon rocket is all fixed up. It could launch astronauts to the moon on April 1
• NASA just delayed the Artemis 2 moon mission because its giant rocket has a leak — we’ve seen this before

“We are cheers all around, and we will do that,” Koch replied.

It does sound like at least one crewmember used a contingency bag before the fix. Koch reported that one CCU, or Collapsible Contingency Urinal, was full and needed to be emptied overboard. Dill radioed up instructions on the best time for that dump, and all was well.

That may be a relief for the Artemis 2 astronauts, in more ways than one. NASA’s Apollo astronauts did not have the luxury of a toilet when they flew to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. They peed and pooped in plastic bags, then stowed the solid waste and vented urine overboard into space.

The toilet aboard Orion is a smaller, more compact version of the bathrooms on the International Space Station. It’s built into the floor of the Orion capsule and allows Artemis 2 astronauts some privacy while taking care of business. While the Orion spacecraft is larger than NASA’s Apollo capsules, it’s still cramped — the interior has been compared to that of two SUVs.

“The one place that we can go on our mission where we can feel like we’re alone for a moment,” Artemis 2 mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency said of the toilet in a video overview.

Vlog 18: The lunar loo – or going to the bathroom during a mission to the Moon – YouTube

Watch On

The toilet is technically known as the “hygiene bay” and has about as much room as the bathroom on a passenger jet, according to Lockheed Martin, which built the Orion spacecraft for NASA. It’s part of Orion’s systems to support an astronaut crew — NASA’s uncrewed Artemis 1 test flight in 2022 didn’t carry one — but there are backup systems aboard, like those Apollo-era bags, if they’re needed.

The Artemis 2 astronauts use foot restraints to help stay in place while using the toilet, which uses airflow to draw solid waste away from the body and into a collection device. For urine, each astronaut has his or her own personal funnel to use, with a fan that draws the urine into a tank.

“That’s absolutely an important component on this ship,” Blaine Brown, Lockheed Martin’s director of Orion spacecraft mechanical systems, told Space.com in an interview. “You can call it a luxury. Some call it a necessity.”

NASA’s Artemis 2 mission is a historic test flight to send astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon. It’s the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System rocket that launched them on their way.

The mission is the vanguard of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the moon by 2028 and begin a permanent moon base by 2032.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 12:15 a.m. EDT on April 2 to reflect the successful repair of the toilet on Artemis 2’s Orion spacecraft.

Tariq Malik

Editor-in-Chief

Tariq is the award-winning Editor-in-Chief of Space.com and joined the team in 2001. He covers human spaceflight, as well as skywatching and entertainment. He became Space.com’s Editor-in-Chief in 2019. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering education and city beats in La Habra, Fullerton and Huntington Beach. He’s a recipient of the 2022 Harry Kolcum Award for excellence in space reporting and the 2025 Space Pioneer Award from the National Space Society. He is an Eagle Scout and Space Camp alum with journalism degrees from the USC and NYU. You can find Tariq at Space.com and as the co-host to the This Week In Space podcast on the TWiT network. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Twitter @tariqjmalik.

A Girl Asleep (detail), 1657 Art: Johannes Vermeer

Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what seems to be truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth. It is not an effort to change, alter or heal anything other than our consciousness.

The claims in a Translation should be outrageous and mind-blowing, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week. 

1)    Truth is that which is so.  That which is not truth is not so.  Therefore truth is all that is.  Truth being all, there is nothing else, nothing other, therefore Truth is one.  Truth being one is indivisible, therefore whole, therefore hale, therefore hearty, therefore healthy.  I think therefore I am.  Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore the beingness of me is Truth OR I, being, am Truth. Since there is no beingness without consciousness of it, therefore Truth is Consciousness.

2)    I think the rash on my feet relates to the rage I feel at my dermatologist who always finds something “suspicious” because of my “history” of melanoma.

Word-tracking:
melanoma:  dark tumor
suspicious:  spectacle, to perceive with the eyes, to see, to look askance, to look from below
askance:  obliquely, not directly
suspect:  mistrust
history: inquiry into the past
dermatology:  skin, hide, covering
rage:  raving mad, crazy, insane
rash:  rase, erase, scratch out, lively, eruption, explosion
erupt:  rupture, break

3)    Truth being whole cannot also be broken, ruptured, therefore Truth is not rash.  Truth being consciousness and Truth being whole, therefore Truth is sane.  Truth being sane cannot also be insane, therefore Truth is not raging mad.  Truth being one and Truth being mind, therefore Truth is one mind.  Since Truth is one mind, there is no covering up or hiding in Truth, therefore Truth is totally transparent to all.  Truth being all that is does not include all that was or all that will be, therefore Truth has no past or future, only the eternal Now.  Truth being whole, complete, perfect, there is nothing suspicious in Truth, therefore Truth is beyond suspicion.  Truth being all is therefore without limit, therefore infinite. Truth being infinite, there is no growth, dark or otherwise, to infinity, therefore the boundlessness of Truth is benign.

4)    Truth is not rash. 
        Truth is sane. 
        Truth is not raging mad.
        Truth is one mind.
        Truth is totally transparent to all.
        Truth has no past or future, only the eternal Now. 
        Truth is beyond suspicion. 
        Truth is infinite.
        The boundlessness of Truth is benign.

5)    The boundless sanity of Truth is transparent to all.  

For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching.

Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation.  If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to  zonta1111@aol.com and we will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.

April 4:  11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST

Mike Zonta, H.W., M.

In a crisis — any crisis — The Prosperos offers Translation.  Translation Saturday Meetings is a weekly series of Translation presentations by veteran Translators, live and up to date on the issues of the day.

It is not a Translation workshop,  It is not a Translation class.  It is not a group Translation in the usual sense, though group participation is encouraged.

It is, however, restricted to those who have taken Translation class. So if you have never taken Translation class, check the calendar tab on The Prosperos website (TheProsperos.org) or get in touch with us and we will schedule a class.

Last week our sense testimony was:  Parents require obedience. And our conclusion was:  Truth is its own authority.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – See you there!!! – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Here’s the link:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81749347119

For more info and link to join please email Mike Zonta at:

zonta1111@aol.com

(Image from HarperCollins Australia)

After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order

Rana Dasgupta

After Nations explores ‘a generalised state of crisis’ that afflicts the nation-state worldwide. In an effort to understand this crisis, Rana Dasgupta charts the development of the global nation state project from the Enlightenment to the present, its ongoing value unquestioned—to our detriment.

In its modern, fully-fledged form, the nation-state system is a very recent innovation, and one that departs from the normal history of the world – which is a story of empires. What we are seeing is the rapid disintegration of a system on which we had come to depend too completely.

After Nations offers a startling account of this exhilarating and terrible system. Its thesis will be disturbing to many, but we must quickly come to terms with it if we are to address the very grave challenges that now face us as a at their core, the political, economic, military and even environmental problems we face today are not the fault of inadequate policies or poor leadership. They are the consequence, rather, of our outdated political infrastructure – the nation-state system – which is not capable, even in theory, of protecting populations from twenty-first-century conditions. Five crises (“God”, “Money”, “Law”, “War” and “Nature”) will combine inexorably to diminish the ability of this system to deliver minimally acceptable outcomes.

The author’s aim, through a portrait of this time of crisis, is radically to re-imagine what the nation-state system can and should provide. His interrogation of what we might now ask of our neighbourhoods and cities, will here be writ After Nations asks what we want for our global future.

About the author

Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian writer. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He lives in Delhi, India.

His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), was an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization. Billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales, thirteen passengers stuck overnight in an airport tell thirteen stories from different cities in the world, stories that resemble contemporary fairytales, mythic and surreal. The tales add up to a broad exploration of 21st century forms of life, which includes billionaires, film stars, migrant labourers, illegal immigrants and sailors. [1] Tokyo Cancelled was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Dasgupta’s second novel, Solo (2009) is an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man. Having achieved little in his twentieth-century life, he settles into a long and prophetic daydream of the twenty-first century, where all the ideological experiments of the old century are over, and a collection of startling characters – demons and angels – live a life beyond utopia.

(Goodreads.com)

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 1, 2026 James Tunney, LLM, is an Irish barrister and author of The Mystery of the Trapped Light: Mystical Thoughts in the Dark Age of Scientism plus The Mystical Accord: Sutras to Suit Our Times, Lines for Spiritual Evolution; also TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit, Human Entrance to Transhumanism: Machine Merger and the End of Humanity, and AI-Govnerveance: Care and Possession in Dustopia. His most recent book is Trotsky vs Jesus: Battle of the AI-Millennium. His website is https://www.jamestunney.com/about-the… He focuses on the distinctions between physical light and many forms of spiritual light, including magical light, Egyptian light, and divine light. He reflects on the multiple meanings of the notion of light entrapped within matter or flesh. He argues that scientism, to the extent that it denies the realities of the spirit, is a dark cultural force. He also points out the high value that spiritual traditions place upon darkness. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on September 21, 2020)

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Mar 31, 2026 Colette Baron-Reid is an internationally bestselling author published in 27 languages. She is an Oracle expert, spiritual intuitive, personal transformation thought leader, business strategist, artist, and educator. She helps people become the artist of their own reality. She is author of eight books, including The Map: Finding the Magic and Meaning in the Story of Your Life, You’re in the Right Place, and The Art of Manifesting: A Meditative Drawing Practice to Rewire Your Brain and Create Your Reality. She has created 19 oracle cards, includingWisdom of the Oracle Divination Cards, The Spirit Animal Oracle, and Guides of the Hidden Realms Oracle. Her website is colettebaronreid.com. Colette describes how she created and popularized modern Oracle Cards that are themed variations from the traditional Tarot. She describes her Oracle Cards as tools of intentional synchronicity that can provide a mirror, direct guidance, and gnosis to the person making an inquiry. She suggests that the world is a living oracle, and you can uncover the truth of who you are, need to become, and what you want to create. 00:00 Introduction 03:11 Beginnings of Oracle Cards 11:20 Evolution of Tarot and Oracle Cards 24:31 Esoteric teachings and tools to communicate 26:47 Intuition and the future with Oracle Cards 35:06 Direct guidance and personal connection to higher power 36:36 Imagery, symbols, and language of the cards 40:18 Oracle cards for manifestation 45:19 Tools of synchronicity 46:19 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer and coach, and spiritual guide based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Emmy is the founder of the Intuitive Connections and Holistic OT communities. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on February 12, 2026)

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Mar 30, 2026 Psychology and Psychotherapy Richard Reichbart, JD, PhD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst. For thirty five years, he has maintained a private practice for the treatment of adults, adolescents and children in Northern New Jersey. In addition, he is a short story writer, a parapsychologist, and a poet. He is author of The Paranormal Surrounds Us: Psychic Phenomena in Literature, Culture, and Psychoanalysis. Prior to his career in psychology, he worked as an attorney focusing on civil rights and Native American issues. Here he describes how he was introduced to parapsychology as a result of becoming a psychoanalytic patient of Jule Eisenbud. He describes how Eisenbud became a persona non grata within the psychoanalytic community as a result of his research in “thoughtography” with Ted Serios. He also describes Freud’s ambivalent attitude toward the paranormal. He points out, however, that telepathic experiences are rather common within the intimacy of psychoanalytic sessions. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on November 7, 2020)

Science of Being

The Loneliest Civilization in History

The WHO says loneliness kills 871,000 people a year—but the real cause isn’t smartphones or social media. It’s a 10,000-year experiment that dismantled the tribe.

Thom Hartmann

Apr 01, 2026 (wisdomschool.com)

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The World Health Organization released a report last June that deserves far more attention than it got. One in six people on the planet, they found, is now affected by loneliness. It kills an estimated 871,000 people every year, more than 100 every hour, every hour of every day.

The Commission that produced the report called social disconnection “a defining challenge of our time” and drew a roadmap for governments and communities to respond. The usual proposals followed: more parks, better public transit, tech companies designing for connection rather than engagement, a minister of loneliness here, a national strategy there.

These are not bad ideas. But they’re solutions to a problem that’s being described incorrectly, and when you describe a problem incorrectly, your solutions tend to work at the edges rather than at the root.

The framing we keep reaching for treats loneliness as a malfunction, something that has gone wrong in an otherwise healthy social system. But what if loneliness at this scale is not a malfunction at all?

What if it’s the entirely predictable result of an experiment in how to organize human life that we’ve been running for about ten thousand years, and the results are now coming in?

I spent time in South Sudan in 2008, near the Darfur border, in a refugee settlement of 45,000 people who’d fled bombardment, rape, mass murder, and forced displacement. The conditions were severe by any measure: one hand-pumped well, no sanitation, no shelter beyond what people had gathered from the landscape, temperatures that dropped into the nineties at night.

Disease was everywhere. Food was scarce. And yet every single evening, in different corners of the settlement, someone brought out drums. The music would start, and then the singing, and then people were dancing and talking and the children were playing and the old men were telling stories to anyone who would listen. There was not a moment of the kind of blank, sealed-off isolation that I see on the faces of people riding the subway in any American city.

These were people who’d lost nearly everything. What they hadn’t lost, because it had not yet been taken from them, was each other. Not each other in the thin modern sense of being in proximity. Each other in the full sense: known, embedded, accountable, necessary to one another’s daily survival and daily joy. This is what a tribe is. This is what human beings lived inside of for the vast majority of the time we’ve existed as a species.

The Australian Aborigines have a phrase, “The Great Forgetting,” for what happened to European peoples over roughly the last two millennia as the old tribal structures were systematically dismantled by the British empire and then by the Catholic Church.

The sacred sites destroyed. The rituals banned. The languages absorbed into Latin and then into English and the national languages of nation-states. The commons enclosed. The grandmothers and grandfathers who carried the deep knowledge of how to live in a particular landscape, and how to live with one another, silenced or killed.

What was left, they know, was the outward form of a culture without its roots, people in tremendous numbers living side by side without any architecture for genuine belonging.

We don’t often tell this story when we talk about loneliness. We prefer to blame social media, or the pandemic, or smartphones, or the death of the third place. These things matter, but they’re just the symptoms.

The WHO report notes that loneliness kills as surely as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. What it doesn’t ask is how it came to be that the default condition for hundreds of millions of people is a kind of low-grade starvation of genuine human contact, and whether that condition might have structural roots that run deeper than any app or urban planning initiative can reach.

The answer, if you look honestly at the anthropological record, is that we built a civilization optimized for productivity and consumption, and we did it by dismantling, piece by piece, everything that made human beings feel genuinely held.

The village. The extended family under one roof. The practice of sitting together in the evening rather than each retreating to a separate screen. The shared ritual that marked time and gave life its shape. The elder who knew your name and your history and could place you in a story larger than your own anxiety. None of these things went away because they were bad ideas; they went away because they interfered with the efficient production of workers and consumers.

I worked for years as a psychotherapist running a residential program for severely abused children, kids who’d been failed by every institution designed to protect them. What I saw, over and over again, was that the damage was not only what had been done to them; it was also what had never been provided.

Safety, yes. Food and shelter, yes. But beneath all of it, the absence of the sustained, unconditional, witnessed belonging that is the birthright of every child and that no therapeutic technique, however skilled, can entirely substitute for. You can heal a great deal. You can’t, however, manufacture a tribe after the fact and expect it to do what a tribe does when it’s the water a child has swum in from the beginning of her life.

This is not a counsel of despair. The drumming happened in the refugee settlement because the impulse toward community is not destroyed so easily. It’s biological. It’s written into us at a level that predates language or culture.

Researchers studying the neuroscience of loneliness find that it activates the same threat-detection circuitry as physical pain. This is not a coincidence: for most of human history, being separated from your group meant death.

The pain of loneliness is the nervous system’s alarm. We just built a world where the alarm goes off constantly and there is nowhere particular to run.

What this means practically is that the solutions worth trying are not the ones that make isolation more comfortable. They are, instead, the ones that re-create, in whatever scaled-down modern form we can manage, the conditions that the nervous system is actually asking for.

Not more social media followers, but more people who know when you’re sick and show up anyway. Not a longer list of connections on LinkedIn, but a smaller circle of people with whom you share actual obligations, actual history, actual meals.

The research consistently points toward exactly what every tribal culture already knew: that meaning and belonging are not separate things, that you can’t have one without the other, and that neither of them can be delivered through a screen or legislated into existence by a government commission.

The WHO is right that this is a public health crisis. But public health crises have causes, and the cause of this one is not a virus or a toxin. It’s a story we’ve been telling ourselves for ten thousand years about what civilization is for.

The good news is that stories can change. The drums are still in us, waiting.

By Anna FitzGerald Guth

April 1, 2026 (SFGate.com)

 

NASA footage showed its rocket successfully taking off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday afternoon, carrying four astronauts out of view of the crowd that had gathered below to watch the historic launch. 

Among the crew — three Americans and one Canadian — is California-raised Victor Glover, the mission’s pilot, and Christina Koch, the first woman to head to the moon. Glover will also become the first Black man to circumnavigate it.

 

 

The 10-day mission will take astronauts farther from Earth than humans have ever traveled. While no landing is planned, it’s a key step toward future moon missions — and eventually, missions to Mars.

The 32-story rocket lifted off at 3:35 p.m. Pacific. It marks the first crewed journey to the moon since 1972.

“We still call amazing things that humans do moonshots, and now our generation is going to get to have one of our own,” said Glover, who was born in Pomona and studied engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Read more »

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