Yeah, my experience was the same as Dick’s, despite being younger — that’s what I first “learned” about Triton in school, too, when I was memorizing planets and moons. The trouble was due to Gerard Kuiper, who was the first astronomer to attempt to estimate a diameter for Triton. He came up with roughly 3,700km. It wasn’t until Voyager 2’s approach in 1989 that we figured out that it was rather smaller than that (though still a pretty big moon, obviously).

Still very much worth visiting again, though given how long even a Starship launch would take to get a probe there, I fear we are *all* going to be quite old before that happens, if indeed we live to see it.

I congratulate Mr. Davenport on the acuity of his hearing.

Jeff Wright,

Triton was thought to be just a bit larger than Ganymede when I was a grade-schooler. Of course Mercury was thought to be tidally locked to the Sun, Venus was thought to have an Earth-tropics surface climate and Jupiter was thought to have 12 moons, Saturn 9 and Pluto none. Science marches on.

To all,

Good move on the part of Starlab Space to get Luca Parmitano as one of the astronaut-evaluators of its interior space station mockup. As the Primo Carnera of human spaceflight, Parmitano is, himself, an ergonomic edge case. His insights should prove invaluable.

Wasn’t Triton once thought to be larger than Ganymede?

Fingers crossed

We are way overdue to pay it a follow-up visit.

2. Christian Davenport just tweeted out that he is hearing that an FAA license for Starship Flight 5 could be granted tomorrow. Meanwhile, Elon is tweeting that Flight 5 will be flying on Sunday, along with shots of a ginormous American flag flying from Orbital Pad B’s tower. Sounds like the dam is ready to burst.

https://x.com/wapodavenport/status/1844866815073173579
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1844840205486043138