• Monument unveiled dedicated to the people who ran the Air Forces Deep Black special projects in the ’70s and ’80s
  They built the surveillance satellites that dominated satellite reconnaissance for decades.

• Varda’s W-6 capsule returns safely in Australia
  The flight tested autonomous hypersonic navigation and next-generation thermal protection systems.

• On May 19, 1971, the Soviet Union launched Mars 2 aboard a Proton-K/D rocket, followed nine days later by its twin, Mars 3
  Both sent back no useful data, partly because of failures and partly because their orbiters worked automatically, taking pictures of a planet covered by a global dust storm and thus showed nothing.

• Video of the May 19, 2000 launch of the space shuttle Atlantis on a 10-day mission to resupply ISS
  It was the first Shuttle to fly with a new instrumental panel, designed more around screens and digital controls.

The Cabinet of Ministers has approved a resolution presented by the Minister of Science and Technology to appoint an expert committee tasked with formulating Sri Lanka’s first National Space Policy. According to the government, space technology has become a critical driver of national development, delivering benefits across disaster management, communication, security, environmental monitoring, and economic innovation.

Sri Lanka is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, so any policy it establishes has to fall under its rules and limitations. This op-ed today in one of the nation’s major media outlets provides a very detailed overview of the issues. It seems the country has a lot of options, most of which revolve around attracting already established aerospace companies to build there.

The first stage completed its second flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

58 SpaceX
28 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 58 to 50.

The asteroid probe Psyche on May 15, 2026 successfully completed its last fly-by of Mars, sending the spacecraft on its way to the asteroid Psyche, with a planned arrival in 2029.

The image to the right, cropped, rotated, and, reduced to post here, was the highest resolution image released by the science team of the Martian south polar icecap.

The image scale is around 0.7 miles per pixel (1.14 kilometers per pixel). The cap itself extends across more than 430 miles (700 kilometers). The image was acquired with Imager A on May 15, 2026, at about 1:53 p.m. PDT.

The white material is the perennial dry ice cap overlaying a water ice cap of larger size.

NASA also released several other images taken during the fly-by, including a close-up of the 290-mile-wide Huygens Crater, located in the Martian southern cratered highlands.

The pictures reveal no significant science, but they prove once again that Psyche’s cameras are working and the spacecraft is pointing accurately.

A 25-year-old man died after falling 8 feet from a scaffold at a SpaceX facility, according to Justice of the Peace Mary Esther Sorola.

The Cameron County Sheriff’s Office first confirmed the death and said it happened on Friday, May 15. The man has been identified as Jose Bautista from Donna. Sorola said Bautista was taken to Valley Regional Medical Center by a SpaceX ambulance. A preliminary autopsy report says he suffered blunt force trauma from the fall; he died at the hospital.

The Wall Street Journal calls the victim a “contractor”, not a SpaceX employee.

As is routine for such incidents, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has begun an investigation.

This incident is likely unrelated to the more recent short delays in the 12th Starship/Superheavy test flight, as it occurred prior to those delays. It is also puzzling for someone to die from so short a fall. Either the height is incorrect, or some other factors must have been at play.

• On this day in 1969, the crew of Apollo 10 launched on a mission to the Moon
  This was the full dress rehearsal for Apollo 11, lacking only the actual landing.

• On May 18, 1991 a Soyuz capsule was launched to the Mir station carrying Helen Sharman, the first British tourist
  Her flight was initially to be paid for by an entertainment consortium, but when that went bankrupt the Soviets picked up the tab, figuring the publicity would be worth it. For an explanation of some of the strange things in the video at the link, see chapter 9 in Leaving Earth.

Original post:
———————
SpaceX earlier today announced a revised launch date for the 12th Starship/Superheavy orbital test flight, delayed one day from May 19, 2026 to May 20, 2026, with a launch window opening at 5:30 pm (Central).

No reason was given. I suspect weather might have played a factor, but it is also possible that some technical issues required a short delay.

Either way, the link to the X live feed will be posted here once it goes live. I will also embed it on Behind the Black once it goes live.

• Emphasizes the design phase for improved orbital safety
• Stresses pre-launch coordination and collision avoidance analysis, especially near crewed vehicles, mitigating hazards during post-launch identification and cataloging of new orbital objects
• Provides guidance on data sharing across design and operations emphasizing the critical importance of sharing and screening high quality ephemeris with covariance from deployment through disposal
• Includes an Appendix with data exchange recommendations to mitigate conjunctions

The companies have apparently decided they needed to get together to make sure they were not stepping on each other’s toes. I would expect other companies to soon join this cooperative effort, as it is in no one’s interest to have satellites colliding in orbit.

CycloKinetics’ approach is to create “plug-in” fuels that can replace conventional fuels in various vehicles without requiring modifications to the craft or its engines. There’s nothing particularly wild or exotic about this, and no unobtanium-type elements are involved. It’s more a matter of changing the geometry of the hydrocarbon molecules that make up the fuel itself.

Conventional aviation fuels consist of linear and branched hydrocarbon molecules, which limits how much energy can be packed into a given volume. CycloKinetics instead engineers cycloparaffinic hydrocarbons – that is, ring-shaped molecular structures that pack more carbon and hydrogen atoms into the same space as would be occupied by conventional fuels.

The upshot is 32% more energy in the same volume as standard Jet A fuel. That means, for example, an aircraft capable of flying 1,500 nautical miles (1,726 miles, 2,778 km) on standard fuel could potentially exceed 1,950 nautical miles (2,244 miles, 3,611 km) using the new superfuel, while reconnaissance aircraft could remain on station up to 30% longer.

The company is also selling its version of RP-1, the kerosene fuel used for example by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

It remains unclear whether it will be cost effective for rocket or airline companies to consider buying this fuel. For one, the extra cost to make it might outweigh the fuel savings. For another, it is unclear the company will be able to produce enough to meet the market. Nonetheless, the concept is intriguing, and could pay-off for this startup in the long run.

The uncertainty of science: Based on a re-analysis of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists now say that the plumes of water vapor that Hubble had supposedly detected erupting from the surface of the Jupiter moon Europa might not exist, and could instead simply be statistical noise in the data.

The new paper looks at the last 14 years of data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (HST/STIS) focused on Europa’s Lyman-alpha emissions. Lyman-alpha is a specific wavelength of ultraviolet light emitted and scattered by hydrogen atoms. From 2012-2014, the team was pushing the limits of the Hubble telescope’s capabilities.

“One of the difficulties in interpreting the data back then was determining where to place Europa within its context,” Retherford said. “The way Hubble works left some uncertainty in terms of placement relative to the center of the image. If Europa’s placement was off even just by a pixel or two, it could affect how the data gets interpreted.”

As a result, what they thought could be evidence of a water vapor plume could also just be statistical noise. “Our reanalysis took our original 99.9% confidence in the plumes’ existence and reduced it to less than 90% confidence,” said Dr. Lorenz Roth (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), the paper’s lead author. “That’s simply not enough evidence to support the certainty of claims we made at the time.”

The plumes might still exist, but the data used here is simply more uncertain that previously thought. It is hoped that when Europa Clipper and Juice both enter Jupiter orbit in a few years they will be able to settle this issue more definitively.

When NASA cancelled in 2024 its Viper rover, removing it as the main payload on Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander, the company quickly made a deal in 2025 with the rover startup Astrolab to put its s FLIP prototype lunar rover on board instead.

Astrolab yesterday announced that NASA has agreed to purchase payload space on FLIP, placing four different science instruments on the rover, each from a different NASA center.

The map to the right indicates the location where Griffin is supposed to land, about 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole. Nova-C, Intuitive Machines first attempt to soft land on the Moon, landed at the green dot, but failed when it fell over at landing. Its second lunar lander, Athena, also fell over when it landed in the same region that is now Griffin’s target landing zone.

Griffin’s launch itself has been delayed repeatedly. Astrobotic was originally issued its NASA contract for Griffin in 2020, with a launch planned for November 2023, carrying NASA’s Viper rover. In July 2022 however it was delayed one year to November 2024 because Astrobotic said it needed more time. This date was then delayed to 2025 when Viper was canceled, and then in October 2025 the launch was pushed back again to July 2026.

According to the press release at the link above, that July 2026 launch date is now invalid, with the new launch date set for before the end of 2026. I strongly suspect that date will slip again.

France’s space agency CNES and the European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday announced a new five year agreement extending ESA’s operations at France’s French Guiana spaceport.

The contract covers all activities required to operate Europe’s Spaceport that is on French territory and so falls under the responsibility of the French government represented by CNES. The contract includes both daily operations and running of the facilities and continuous upgrades to adapt the Spaceport to changes taking place in the space sector, including the arrival of new rockets and launch services.

The signature covers three years of operations, renewable for a further two years, including a total investment of over €1 billion with €635 million funded by the European Space Agency – showing the agency’s central role in supporting the operation of Europe’s Spaceport. In support of the transformation of the space sector, the contract takes new launch operators into account as well as sharpening safety requirements even more – ensuring launches from Europe’s Spaceport are reliable, safe and competitive.

While the deal is not surprising — neither ESA nor CNES have any reason to end this arrangement — there is one aspect of the deal that is significant: Nowhere in the press release or agreement is there any mention of Arianespace, ESA’s commercial division. For decades Arianespace ran French Guiana for ESA and France. It is now gone, eliminated as an unnecessary middle-man as Europe shifts to the capitalism model.

At the moment, ESA has reduced Arianespace’s role to just one task, marketing and launching the Ariane-6 rocket. At the same time numerous European nations are doing whatever they can to encourage the development of competing independent rocket companies, all aimed at replacing Ariane-6 eventually, and as soon as possible. While that effort will take at least a decade, it is definitely happening.

In what appears to be a direct response to the rumors that SpaceX might be considering buying a gigantic swath of land near Pecan Island on the Louisiana coast for future launch operations, the Louisiana state legislature this week passed several laws providing tax breaks and protection from frivolous lawsuits to “aerospace flight entities”.

The tax breaks relate to the sales and property taxes. As for the lawsuit protection:

The bill would protect aerospace companies from temporary restraining orders for claims of noise pollution and similar public nuisance lawsuits by creating what’s called a “special motion to strike,” which would require a plaintiff to show the court early on that they’re likely to win their lawsuit.

Apparently the legislature has been negotiating with at least one or two big aerospace companies on these matters, and has taken these actions in response to these negotiations. Non-disclosure agreements prevent the legislators from revealing the companies involved, but it does appear based on all the local rumors that SpaceX is a likely candidate to buy that 200+ square mile plot near Pecan Island. It also appears it wants some legal protections before it commits, based on its experience at Boca Chica.

With the passage of this legislation, we should find out relatively soon what companies are involved.

Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.

The significance of this launch is that it is the first time the Vega-C was launched under the management of Avio, which manufactures it, rather than ESA’s commercial division Arianespace. Arianespace is being cut out of the picture. At the moment I think it only has one more Vega-C launch on its manifest. All other future Vega-C launches will be sold and managed by Avio directly.

As this was Avio’s first official launch in 2026 (or ever), the leader board for the 2026 launch race remains unchanged.

57 SpaceX
28 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 57 to 50.

• University to do biology experiment on Dawn Aerospace’s as-yet unflown suborbital spaceplane
  Dawn has only flown a smaller prototype at lower altitudes. It remains unclear when actual suborbital spaceflights will take place.

• Axiom Space establishes a wholly owned Japanese subsidiary
  The goal is to win Japanese commercial and government contracts for its Axiom commercial space station.

• Astronomers find previously unnoticed images of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas in Rubin telescope archive

• Psyche’s raw images from its fly-by of Mars on May 15, 2026

• Chinese pseudo-company Zenk Space aims for June ’26 debut launch of its Zhihang-1 rocket
  Detailed write-up, but all remains uncertain. The company claims it raised more money, and eventually hopes to recover the first stage engines for reuse (similar to ULA’s plan for Vulcan).

• On May 17, 1968 the United States launched Europe’s first satellite, Iris, using a Scout-B rocket from Vandenberg
  Iris studied the Sun’s output, and confirmed earlier space telescope observations that the aurora was caused by charged particles from the solar wind following the Earth’s magnetic field lines down to the poles.

• On May 17, 1969, a day after Venera- 5, the Soviet Venera 6 operated for 51 minutes as it descended through Venus’s nightside atmosphere
  At seven miles altitude its ceased operations due to the pressure from the Venusian atmosphere. Both spacecraft confirmed the hellish atmosphere of Venus, sixty times denser than Earth’s, with temperatures ranging from 750 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Today’s cool image to the right returns us to a previous cool image from 2022. Then I called this strange terrain visible on the floor of the 41-mile-wide Danielson Crater “freaky badlands,” because of the innumerable layers that are all tilted and appear eroded in the same way by prevailing winds coming from the northeast.

Today’s image shows more of the same. The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 26, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It not only shows these layers, in the full image (which I strongly suggest you look at), it also shows several terraced mesas with the same tilt, each looking almost like wedding cakes that have slumped sideways. The aquamarine colors in the hollows suggest finer-grained dust, while the orange colors on higher terrain suggest coarser materials and bedrock.

As I noted in 2022:

At present scientists have no real understanding of what caused these layers. They could have been put down either by the Martian atmospheric climate cycles, where the widely changing tilt of the planet caused many swings over many eons. Or this crater floor might have once been under water, either filled like a lake or at the bottom of a larger sea. No one knows, though scientists have found evidence suggesting an inland sea might have once existed to the west in the outlet from Valles Marineris.

That inland sea is indicated on the overview map to the right. The white rectangle marks the area covered by the inset, with the white dot marking the area covered by the picture above.

This crater is located about 377 miles to the north of where the rover Opportunity landed. It is also in the same region where there are other craters with similar wild layering on their floors, with the craters Crommelin and Firsoff the most notable.

I posted previously the 3d fly-over animation of the floor of Danielson below, using MRO photos. It is worth looking at again. This is very strange geology that challenges every theory proposed so far by geologists.

The unmanned Dragon capsule that SpaceX launched on May 15, 2026 successfully docked with ISS early this morning, bringing with it almost 6,500 pounds of cargo to the station.

In addition to cargo for the crew aboard the space station, Dragon will deliver several new experiments, including a project to determine how well Earth-based simulators mimic microgravity conditions, a bone scaffold made from wood that could produce new treatments for fragile bone conditions like osteoporosis, and equipment to help researchers evaluate how red blood cells and the spleen change in space. The Dragon spacecraft also will carry a new instrument to study charged particles around the Earth that can impact power grids and satellites, an investigation that could provide a fundamental understanding of how planets form, and a instrument designed to take highly accurate measurements of sunlight reflected by Earth and the Moon.

It also delivered a French-made spacesuit prototype to be tested by French astronaut Sophie Adenot to see if its design will allow her to get in and out of the suit in under two minutes. Based on what Adenot reports, engineers will use this prototype to develop “a new prototype” for further ground testing. (I wonder if this project is like most European space projects: After this second prototype is tested, they will build a third prototype, followed by a fourth and fifth, with the real article not actually going into operation for decades hence.)

As SpaceX and numerous banks get ready for the company’s initial public offering of stock (IPO), several tidbits about the structure of the stock and the company post-IPO have been dribbling out.

First, prior to the sale the company split its stock, converting each existing private share from one to five. It appears this action served to protect the value of that previously issued stock, much of which had either been issued to employees or purchased by major investors, including Musk. This split maintains their control over the company.

It also lowered the expected price of the stock in the IPO, ranging from present estimates of $100 to $160.

The absolute level of a stock doesn’t typically matter all that much, but a lower price might help smaller retail investors build positions. Retail shareholders are expected to be important for SpaceX. They hold a lot of Tesla shares.

Second, these preliminary stock arrangements appear designed to guarantee Elon Musk will remain in control of the company, even after it goes public. His shares, numbering 260 million (which could be more than a billion if prior to the stock split), will be given supervoting powers, ensuring his mastery of the company.

When the IPO happens remains uncertain. The Wall Street Journal says June 12, 2026, while Bloomberg says it could be as soon as May 20th.

Either way, it will be a major financial event, and should shake up the entire global launch industry in ways that cannot be predicted. It will certainly give SpaceX the funds it needs to develop Starship/Superheavy fully, making access to space cheap and affordable. It will also allow the company to pursue its goals in space, establishing data centers constellations in orbit and on the Moon (for profit) as well as colonies on Mars.

Whether the IPO will suck all the investment capital out of the rest of the industry remains uncertain, though some are claiming this. In reality, it could just as easily end up doing the opposite, as the market is never zero-sum game. Success in one place usually ends up fueling success all around.

Either way, this IPO is going to change things for sure. It will establish without question what I have been saying for more than a year, that the real American space program is being run by SpaceX, and that NASA’s Artemis program is merely a long term ineffective sideshow that is simply aiding the company achieve its goals.

Though China’s state run press did not reveal the number of satellites launched, other sources said the rocket placed 18 satellites into orbit. If so, there are now 173 Qianfan satellites in space, out of a planned constellation of as many as 12,000. The first phase of the constellation however only requires 648, which China hopes to reach before the end of the year.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

57 SpaceX
28 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 57 to 49.

To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.

The first stage completed its 6th flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The capsule is also making its sixth flight to ISS, and will dock with the station at 7 am (Eastern) on May 17, 2026.

57 SpaceX
27 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 57 to 48.

• Rocket Lab celebrates the completion of its 1,000th Rutherford engine

• German Pangea Propulsion touts successfull static fire testing of its ARCOS methane-fueled “thrust module”
  It will be used on the company’s planned aerospike engine.

• Video of fuel dump by China’s Zhuque-2E upper stage over Minnesota
  Its flight path was polar. Future such launches will produce similar sky shows.

• Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile yesterday agreed in principle to form a joint venture
  They will work together to “fill long-time [cellphone] coverage gaps, especially in rural areas.” It also appears they did this out of fear of Starlink.

• On May 15, 1960 Korabl-Sputnik 1 was launched (known as Sputnik 4 in the West).
  First unmanned test flight of the Soviet’s manned Vostok capsule. It did not de-orbit as planned, with one section remaining in space until 1962, and another until 1965. It also fueled fake rumors a man was trapped on board because the Soviets used taped recordings to test their communications systems.

• On May 15, 1963 the last Mercury mission launched, carrying Gordon Cooper on a 22-orbit mission

• On this day in 1973, Skylab launched, the first American space station
  It was occupied by three crews over the next six months on missions lasting 28, 59, and 84 days. The first and second crews also did extensive repairs to the station, which had been damaged during launch. See chapter 3 in Leaving Earth.

Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped and reduced to post here, was created on April 5, 2026 using 46 pictures taken by one of the high resolution camera’s on the Mars rover Perseverance. It also attempts to show this terrain in natural color.

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Perseverance’s present location. The green dot indicates where I think the rover was when the panorama was taken. (Note: I think the press release incorrectly lists the Sol number for these dates, but as I am not sure I can only guess.) The yellow lines indicate approximately the terrain seen in the full panorama.

As the press release notes, “the panorama offers one of the richest geological vistas of the rover’s mission, revealing a windswept landscape of diverse rock textures.” It also appears this is the direction the rover is presently headed.

I ask my readers to once again look at this panorama. It shows an utterly barren terrain. There is no life here, and if there ever was it was gone billions of years ago and never did much to shape the landscape. While some at NASA and in the planetary community like to tout the possibility of life on Mars in order to lobby for funding, the reality we see says there is none, and that life will only appear on Mars when humans finally arrive there to build new human societies.

Intuitive Machines announced May 14 that it entered into an agreement to acquire Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd. and its American subsidiary, Comsat. Intuitive Machines will pay 37 million pounds ($49.6 million) for Goonhilly, split equally between cash and stock, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter pending regulatory approvals in the U.S. and U.K.

Goonhilly operates a ground station in Cornwall, England, that includes 30- and 32-meter antennas that have been used for lunar and deep-space communications. Through Comsat, it operates teleports in Southbury, Connecticut, and Santa Paula, California, that have dozens of antennas.

This antenna deal gives the company added flexibility in its future lunar missions. It also gives it a capability it can sell to both the European Space Agency as well as NASA. NASA for example is looking to accelerate in the next few years the number of unmanned lunar landers it will buy from the commercial sector. It also is looking for commercial options to improve its communications capabilities for those missions. Intuitive Machines is now better placed to compete for this work.

Northrop Grumman on April 15, 2026 successfully completed a test of a new nozzle design of a GEM solid-fueled booster, the strap-on booster whose nozzle failed on two previous ULA Vulcan rocket launches.

On April 15, the company said Northrop Grumman performed a successful static fire test of a Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM) 63XL Solid Rocket Booster (SRB). A spokesperson told Spaceflight Now on Thursday that the test served to “demonstrate nozzle design enhancements which were already in work and an advanced propellant technology for future solid rocket motors across their portfolio.”

“The information gathered from this test, along with findings from the investigations will provide critical data to validate analytical models and support Vulcan’s return to flight,” the spokesperson said.

At the moment the Pentagon has grounded all Vulcan launches because of this nozzle issue, and has given several planned Vulcan payloads to SpaceX instead. ULA hopes to resume normal Vulcan flights using GEM boosters before the end of the year, but it also hopes to launch Vulcan sooner without the boosters. It is right now preparing a boosterless Vulcan to do a launch for Amazon, placing an as yet undetermined number of Leo satellites into orbit. It is also possible it will do the same with AST SpaceMobile’s Bluebird satellites.

Two details however contradict this conclusion. First, revenue in the quarter were only $200K, down from $500K earned in the first quarter of 2025. Second, the company’s stock is now trading at under $3 per share, a far cry from the high of $62, when Richard Branson sold the bulk of his holdings and got out when the getting was good. It is also a quarter of the stock’s initial value when first issued in 2019.

The company hopes to resume flights with these new spacecraft later this year, but whether there is any substantial interest in suborbital tourism remains unknown.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

No word from China’s state-run press where the rocket’s lower stages crashed. The rocket itself is built by pseudo-company CAS Space, which is wholly controlled by a government agency.The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

56 SpaceX
27 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 56 to 48.

SpaceX scrubbed a Starlink launch this morning, rescheduling it to tomorrow. It also hopes to launch a cargo Dragon to ISS this afternoon, a launch that has twice in the past week been scrubbed due to weather.

• Stoke Space shows pictures of the flight version of its Nova rocket’s first stage, now undergoing final testing
  It sounds as if the launch is about three months away, though once again Stoke has not set a date.

• Rocket Lab is secretly shipping a large payload adapter (used to hold satellites on a rocket) from New Zealand to Wallops
  The tweet speculates this may be the adapter to be used on the first launch of the new Neutron rocket.

• Firefly touts its scheduled 4th Blue Ghost lunar mission near the Moon’s south pole
  It still has to complete two lunar landing missions before this 4th mission can fly.

• NASA provides preliminary mission details for Artemis-3 next year
  The key revelation is that SLS will launch with a dummy upper stage. As this mission will stay in low Earth orbit, there is no need for that stage.

• Video of the launch of Venera 10 on May 14, 1975
  The lander operated for 65 minutes on the surface of Venus, taking the second picture ever of that surface. It worked in conjunction with Venera-9, which launched a week earlier and took the first picture ever of Venus’s surface.

• Air & Space museum touts two Hubble instruments in its collection, brought back by astronauts in the last repair mission in 2009
  The instruments were the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and COSTAR (which had launched in 1993 and fixed the telescope’s focus problem).

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and expanded to post here, was taken on April 2, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample”, such images are usually taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule. The camera team needs to take pictures at a regular cadence to maintain its proper temperature.

When they have such a gap, they try to find interesting things to photograph, and usually succeed. In this case we are looking at what I think the scientists dub “brain terrain,” a feature unique to Mars that is thought related to near surface ice and its sublimation, though at present the origins of brain terrain remain murky. The scale is approximately 100 meters across the width of this picture.

However, the location of this brain terrain makes any conclusions about its origin difficult.

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, on the vast flood lava plains surrounding Mars’ biggest volcanoes. In this case the location is in the center of a plain dubbed Icaria Planum. Thus, we might not be looking at geology formed due to near surface ice, but by the solidification of lava in the distant past.

I still favor an ice explanation, however, for two reasons. The latitude, 42 degrees south, is well within the mid-latitudes where near surface ice is plentiful on Mars. Also, if you look at the full picture, you can see there is a small 1.4-mile-wide unnamed crater nearby that appears filled with glacial debris. Moreover, the inset on the overview map shows lots of blobby features and splash aprons around other craters, all suggesting near surface ice.

Nonetheless, I am still guessing, and my guesses are dangerous because they are based on only a little knowledge. All we can say with full confidence is that Mars is an alien planet with geology not found on Earth.

Moving forward, NEC plans to conduct market feasibility studies, conceptual design, and demonstrations for OTVs by the end of fiscal year 2027 to clarify the required functions and other specifications. Following this, NEC plans to begin development of a demonstration model in fiscal year 2028, with the goal of launching it and conducting in-space demonstrations in fiscal year 2032, and aims to bring the technology to practical use in the future.

While the overall goal makes sense, the timetable seems far too slow. By the time NEC is ready with its operational OTV in 2032, at least a half dozen tugs will have been in operation for at least three to five years. Already several tugs have flown missions, with several more in the pipeline. Moreover, these companies have found less demand for tugs than expected, and have been repurposing their technology to other purposes.

Regardless, it does appear Japan is beginning to use this strategic fund as intended, to encourage the development of a private space industry, independent of its government space agency JAXA.