Moon and Beyond - It's the first anniversary
Reflecting on a Year of Exploring the Moon and Beyond
It's been about a year now since I launched this blog in March 2024, driven by my passion for 🌓 Lunar Exploration and the shared curiosity about humanity’s future beyond our home planet.
Initially, I realised my deep dives and threads on X deserved a more permanent home, prompting me to explore this format a bit more seriously.
A year later, balancing full-time paid work, personal commitments, and maintaining consistent updates has taught me a lot. Regular daily updates? Tried it—couldn’t sustain it. Weekly newsletters? Same story. There are already fantastic sources for keeping up with rapid developments, especially Lunar missions — Spacenews, Moon-Monday, and Orbital Index to name just a few. (Feel free to suggest more in the comments!)
What you can expect from me moving forward are thoughtful, longer-form articles, summaries, monthly or may be weekly or whenever inspiration strikes, that isn’t necessarily yesterday’s moon landing. I promise authenticity and genuine effort rather than frequency alone.
If this resonates with you, subscribing ensures you won’t miss a thing—new content delivered straight to your inbox.
Towards sustainable blogging
I debated between Ghost and Substack quite a bit before finally choosing Ghost. It was my primary platform for blogging, and at the time it felt right—it still does.
Ghost is fantastic for writing: the direct support for markdown, the intuitive '/' dynamic menu, and the bookmarking features have been extremely helpful. That said, it’s not exactly cheap. The pro yearly subscription alone costs me $108, on top of domain expenses.
Originally, I hoped this blog would evolve into a regular, sustainable newsletter, justifying the costs. But I’ll be honest—in the battle between paid and unpaid work, the former almost always wins, especially in the beginning. I’m trying to change that and, rather than force myself into unsustainable commitments, I decided to choose a platform and cadence that genuinely fit where I'm at right now.
Though I ultimately chose Ghost, Substack is a solid #2. At the time, I found Substack slightly inferior for my needs, but I genuinely appreciated their strategy: "We get paid when you do." Inspired by this clarity, I’ve decided not to paywall any of my articles, not then, not now. Instead, I ask you my reader, the subscriber, to pledge your support if you find value in what I’m creating.
Maybe I'll end up enabling paid support eventually if enough people truly believe in the content here—let's see how it unfolds. I’m hopeful and looking forward to another year of good articles. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.
In the days, I'll be busy setting up my Substack and migrating everything from Ghost before resuming my posts. The first step is moving my domain here, so if you're reading this, moonandbeyond.blog would’ve already migrated to moonandbeyond substack or at least in process of migration. Honestly, the migration has been a bit bumpy, but I've managed it. Occasionally, you might see a broken link or image in my older posts—if you do, please comment below the post or email me directly; I’ll get it fixed promptly.
That's it for now—see you around in my next post.
Per aspera ad lunam!
Again, thanks for being here—and do spread the word if you enjoy the journey!
~FIN
