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Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
An evening pause: I last posted a recreation in April 2017. Today, on Lincoln’s birthday, I present a recreation by Hal Holbrook, performed live on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 13, 1966.
As I wrote in 2017, “Listen to the words, however. This is no pandering speech, as we routinely see today. It is hard, muscled, and honest, bluntly recognizing that all, from both sides of the Civil War, must pay for the scourge of slavery.”
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Whites need not apply.
The quote in the headline above comes from a lawsuit [pdf] filed by a former professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Stephen Kleinschmit, who was eventually terminated because he had raised concerns within his department about its hiring practices, which beginning in 2019 became entirely focused on choosing its new faculty employees solely on whether they were born to the correct race, not on their talents or qualifications.
Kleinschmit raised his concerns because he was required to participate in the hiring process, and feared if he did not do so it “would make him a participant in illegal activities for which he would be held liable.” Instead of recognizing the clearly discriminatory and illegal nature of its racial hiring practices, however, the department decided to terminate Kleinshcmit’s contract instead.
He was ultimately terminated in August 2023 spring semester, ostensibly as a result of the need for “budget cuts.” Kleinschmit said the decision to fire him at that time appeared to be intentional, to not only cut him loose from his job at UIC, but also deny him the opportunity to seek employment at another university for more than a year.
However, Kleinschmit said he – the department’s only white male faculty member – was the only faculty member terminated at that time, despite claims of lack of finances, even as UIC moved forward with plans to hire more “diverse” faculty.
The complaint noted that Kleinschmit’s old job was later posted as eligible for hiring. But now the job ad was written in a way to encourage non-white male applicants, “as UIC shifted resources to a new job focused on fulfilling its racially discriminatory goals.” [emphasis mine]
In other words, the department fired its only white professor in order to replace him with a minority.
» Read more
NASA yesterday announced that it is now targeting March 12, 2025 as new launch date for sending the next crew to ISS, thus moving that date up about one week.
The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency’s original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission that requires additional processing time. The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements. Teams will work to complete Dragon’s refurbishment and ready the spacecraft for flight, which includes trunk stack, propellant load, and transportation to SpaceX’s hangar at 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be mated with the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the fourth mission to the station for this Dragon, which previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights.
Both NASA and SpaceX are touting this as a great decision because it will allow the present ISS crew (which includes the two astronauts initially launched on Starliner last year) to get home quicker.
The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it, and those delays pushed back both the launch of a new crew and the return of the old. So, while everyone is spinning this as SpaceX and NASA brilliantly improvising to get those Starliner astronauts home sooner, the real story is that their return had been significantly delayed by almost two months by SpaceX’s inability to get the capsule ready as promised.
Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!
From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.
“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.
All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.
The new Texas Space Commission, established in 2023 by the state legislature and appropriated $350 million to encourage the development of a Texas aerospace industry, has awarded the rocket and lunar lander company Firefly $8.2 million grant.
Firefly said the funding will result in an additional 5,600 square feet of cleanroom space at its 50,000-square-foot spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, as well as added ground and test equipment, a spacecraft pressure proof test facility at the 200-acre campus in Briggs that has 200,000-square-feet of facilities, and upgraded infrastructure for mission operations and labs. The company’s Cedar Park headquarters is 28,000 square feet. The improvements are expected to be completed by the end of this year.
The 50 jobs will be added in engineering, quality assurance, manufacturing and spacecraft operations, according to the announcement. The grant also will enable the company to expand STEM outreach and internship programs, including working with the schools in the University of Texas System to provide hands-on experience in spacecraft development.
Though the commission was given $350 million to help industry, in truth the legislature allocated $200 million of that money to build a new “research and training facility” at Texas A&M. While this might help encourage engineering students to come to Texas and thus settle there within the industry, to me it looks like the commission was mostly created to distribute a very large chunk of cash to this one university.
Spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea
Though no details have been released, a team from the British rocket startup Orbex has arrived at the Saxaford spaceport in the Shetland Islands to begin preparations for the company’s first launch there, now planned to occur before the end of this year.
Originally Orbex was going to do its launches from the United Kingdom’s other proposed spaceport in Sutherland on the northern coast of Scotland. It had obtained a 50-year-lease to build its own dedicated launch facility, had built its rocket manufacturing facility nearby, and had originally hoped to do the first test orbital launch of its Prime rocket in 2022.
Three years later the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had still not issued Orbex or Sutherland the necessary launch licenses. Faced with bankruptcy if it didn’t launch soon, in December the company announced it was switching its first launch to Saxaford, where the CAA had completed spaceport licensing. It hoped the CAA would thus be able to give it a launch license quickly. We shall see.
Note that the news is slow today. As much as I want to post lots of stuff, I can’t if nothing of significance appears to be happening.
Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke
An evening pause: From the first episode of The Judy Garland Show, taped in June 1964 and aired December 1964.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
NC State: Maybe it’s rotten to the core
Back in 2021, when I was reporting new blacklist stories every single day during the intolerant madness after the COVID panic and the death of George Floyd, I posted the blacklisting and attempted destruction of a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, merely because Stephen Porter had publicly questioned the wisdom and soundness of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.
Though administrators tried hard to push Porter out, he managed to survive, and is still teaching at NC State. Sadly however his attempt for justice failed, his lawsuit against this harassment and slander campaign eventually being dismissed by the courts.
Porter however decided he couldn’t simply close the book on the matter. For example, the leftist effort at NC State to silence all debate during this same time resulted in one university employee committing suicide. He couldn’t take the constant harassment, the doxxing of his home address, the vandalism at his home, and the slanders accusing him of being a racist and “white supremacist” wherever he went on campus, all based on no evidence at all.
Moreover, even though the board of governors of the North Carolina university system in 2023 established an “institutional neutrality” policy that forbid its colleges from requiring new students or faculty to endorse DEI or compel them to obey the pronoun demands of others, Porter kept finding NC State violating that policy, in word and deed.
He decided that he needed to fight back.
» Read more
Both China and SpaceX successfully completed launches today.
First, China completed the first launch of its Long March 8A rocket, an upgraded and more powerful version of its Long March 8 rocket. The rocket lifted off from China’s coastal Wencheng spaceport, and put the second batch (number unrevealed) of one of China’s new mega internet constellations.
Along with the basic Long March-8 model and the booster-free tandem configuration, it forms the Long March 8 series of rockets, providing a payload capacity range of 3 tons, 5 tons, and 7 tons to SSO. This significantly enhances China’s satellite networking capabilities for low and medium Earth orbits.
These rockets and the coastal spaceport will also allow China to steadily reduce its reliance on its older family of rockets that use toxic hypergolic fuels and launch from within China.
Next SpaceX launched another 21 Starliink satellites, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 18th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The 2025 launch race:
19 SpaceX
7 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
Click for original image.
Using a variety of ground-based telescopes in many wavelengths, astronomers have now produced a detailed catalog of 74 stars with large dust rings similar to the Oort cloud that is believed to exist at the very outer fringes of our own solar system.
The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows all 74 stars.
The new gallery shows a remarkable diversity of structure in the belts. Some are narrow rings, while others are wider and could be categorized more as “disks” than “belts”. Moreover, some of the 74 exocomet systems have multiple rings or disks and some of those are “eccentric,” meaning not a circular orbit but more like an oval. This provides evidence that yet undetectable planets or perhaps moons are present and their gravity affects the distribution of pebbles in these systems.
You can read the paper here [pdf].
The press release implies the discovery of “exocomets” but that is not true. The belts and rings mapped are likely to have comets in them, but no such comets have been found.
The scientists say that this database can be used to better understand the formation of solar systems, though they also admit that the “limited (although much improved) size of our sample” makes any conclusions based on it very uncertain. They hope however that over time that sample size will grow.
Pakistan and China have finalized plans to place a Pakistani rover on China’s Chang’e-8 lunar lander mission.
This rover partnership was first announced in November 2024. This new release appears to provide a bit more information about the rover itself.
The rover will have a mass of around 35 kilograms and carry science payloads for studying lunar soil composition, radiation levels, plasma properties and testing new technologies for sustainable human presence on the Moon. It will also feature a collaborative scientific payload developed by Chinese and European researchers.
The Chang’e-8 mission is targeting a 2030 launch and will land in the Moon’s south pole region. China also claims it will initiate construction of China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), but that’s a bit of hyperbole. All it shall be is another unmanned lander with two rovers and other instruments, hardly a manned base. What will matter will be what follows, and how quickly.
Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has successfully completed the mid-course correction engine burn that has taken it out of Earth orbit and into a transfer orbit to the Moon.
After a successful Trans Lunar Injection burn on Saturday, Feb. 8, Firefly’s spacecraft carrying NASA science and tech to the Moon has departed Earth’s orbit and begun its four-day transit to the Moon’s orbit. Blue Ghost will then spend approximately 16 days in lunar orbit before beginning its descent operations. Since launching more than three weeks ago, Blue Ghost has performed dozens of health tests generating 13 gigabytes of data. All 10 NASA payloads onboard are currently healthy and ready for surface operations on the Moon.
I post the artist’s rendering of Blue Ghost to the right to contrast its design with Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander that fell over when it landed last year. Note how much lower to the ground Blue Ghost is. This will certainly reduce the chances it will have the same problem as Odysseus, even if one leg breaks upon landing.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
SpaceX today successfully launched 22 or 23 Starlink satellites (the reports vary), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific. At present one other SpaceX booster has flown more, 25 times.
The 2025 launch race:
18 SpaceX
6 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely not taken as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature. When the camera team does this they try to pick something interesting, and sometimes succeed.
I think they succeeded in this case. At first glance this appears to be a crater, but on closer inspection it is instead a small mound. The picture was taken in the winter, at the high latitude of 55 degrees north. The featureless white surface surrounding this dark mound is almost certainly the mantle of dry ice that falls as snow and covers the poles during the winter. If not that, it is then likely to be a water ice sheet that orbital data suggests covers much of Mars’ high latitudes.
» Read more
Democrats in Washington
In the past few weeks there have been a number of very entertaining essays describing the insane inability of Democrats to learn anything from their defeats in the 2024 elections. From the second link:
The Democratic Party just can’t help itself. For its own psychological reasons, it can’t move beyond the “denial” stage of grief. Doing so would jeopardize the party’s sense of purpose, identity, and ego. Right now, the “patient” cannot heal itself because it won’t accept the diagnosis.
Instead, it rejects it: Trump is Hitler! Musk is Hitler! MAGA is Hitler! I’m the only one defending democracy!
A sane, rational actor would take a step back and consider his own role in losing three branches of government, a majority of statehouses, and two-thirds of the Supreme Court. And then they’d develop a better product.
Fortunately for the GOP, they’re just not ready for that level of introspection. Not yet. (And probably not until it’s forced upon them.)
And so, the losing losers of the Democratic Party continue to lose. They can’t even counterpunch effectively, because they overreact to every feint. They’re so ridiculously undisciplined, they’re chasing shadows, following the champ around the ring like a puppy dog — eating a buffet of rights, jabs, and uppercuts. [emphasis in original]
All true, but if conservatives think this stupidity on the left will win Republicans the mid-term elections in ’26 and the next presidential election in ’28, they are fooling themselves. » Read more
Click for NASA’s original image.
Link here. Athena is scheduled for launch on February 26, 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The article is mostly focused on describing the Gracie hopper, which will attempt to hop into the permanent shadows inside a nearby crater.
Though no announcement has ever been made, it appears the landing site for this lander has been changed. Previously it had been targeting a ridge adjacent to Shackleton Crater, at the south pole and shown on the map to the right. That location however required a launch in January. The delay to February seems to have shifted the landing site.
If all goes to plan, Athena will land on a plateau just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole. This region is thought to be rich in water ice, and IM-2 will prospect for the precious resource with the help of some ride-along robots, including a pioneering hopper nicknamed Gracie.
Though I cannot find any specific information on where this location is, I strongly suspect it is the site that Intuitive Machines’ lander, Nova-C (also dubbed Odysseus), attempted to reach last year.
The yellow boxes on the map indicate NASA’s candidate landing zones for its Artemis-3 manned mission.
The Germany government has now allocated $897,000 to a private consortium of four companies to help finance its promised but delayed an off-shore launch platform.
The North Sea launch platform is being developed by the German Offshore Spaceport Alliance (GOSA), a joint venture formed in December 2020 by Tractebel DOC Offshore, MediaMobil, OHB, and Harren Shipping Services. The platform will be constructed on the 170-metre-long Combi Dock I vessel and will accommodate launchers with a mass of between 36 and 52 tonnes. A 2020 feasibility study stated that the development and operation of the North Sea launch platform would cost between €22 and €30 million over six years.
The consortium had first announced the project in 2023, with the first launch of several suborbital test rockets in 2024. Since then little has been heard of this project, with those launches never occurring.
If built as promised, this platform would accommodate rockets as large as the Falcon Heavy. Its goal, besides offering the platform to all rocket companies, is apparently to give German rocket startups the option of a German spaceport so they don’t have to depend on other countries.
Even as the Falklands government is demanding its money back from OneWeb for not activating its service on time, it appears the public on those islands has buying and using Starlink terminals, even though it is presently illegal to use it there.
The high level of Starlink usage sparked a successful petition backed by 70% of the island’s population. This petition demanded both a reduction of the £5,400 FIG VSAT licence fee and formal approval for Starlink’s operation in the Falkland Islands.
In response, a Starlink Select Committee – comprising all of the island’s MLAs – convened from July to October 2024. The committee formally endorsed the petition’s demands, and the proposal was subsequently forwarded to the Falkland Islands Government (FIG) for implementation. However, the effective date for this approval has now been delayed until April.
Because Sure International holds an exclusive monopoly telecommunications licence, Starlink’s use in the islands is currently illegal. Nonetheless, this restriction has not prevented the widespread installation of hundreds of Starlink terminals, which remain unlicensed.
Sure International apparently provides internet service though traditional land lines. The cost difference compared to Starlink is considerable, with Starlink being far cheaper and providing much faster speeds. Meanwhile, OneWeb has failed to deliver and is losing this business. By April expect Starlink to be approved.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Rocket Lab today successfully launched five more internet of things satellites for the French company Kinéis, bringing its planned 25 satellite constellation to 20 satellites.
Rocket Lab has the contract to launch the entire constellation, and this was the fourth of five launches in that deal.
The 2025 launch race:
17 SpaceX
6 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
SpaceX today successfully placed 21 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its seventeenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The 2025 launch race:
17 SpaceX
6 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
New calculations have increased the chances that the recently discovered asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit the Earth in 2032 from 1.2% to 2.3%.
Ongoing observations from ground-based telescopes involved with the International Asteroid Warning Network will continue while the asteroid is still visible through April, after which it will be too faint to observe until around June 2028.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will also observe the asteroid in March 2025 to better assess the asteroid’s size. Currently the asteroid is estimated to be 130-300 feet across.
There remains great uncertainty in these numbers. We will really not know for certain if the asteroid will hit us until its orbit is studied for the next few years. Moreover, its size and make-up is also not known precisely yet. It could be as large as 320 feet, or as small as 130 feet. If the larger size, it poses a much greater risk, though that risk shrinks again if it is a rubble-pile asteroid that will simply break apart upon hitting the atmosphere.
This is not something to take lightly. Though the asteroid is not a world-destroyer, it does have the ability to cause significant damage, depending on where it hits. As its arrival is not for eight years, there is even time to quickly put together an unmanned mission to study it. (In the past I would never said this, but the domination of private enterprise in our present competitive space industry makes many things possible that were impossible when NASA and the government ran everything.)
New details reported yesterday strongly suggest that the high altitude balloon company Space Perspective has been unable to find new investors and is on the verge of shutting.
In a February 5 email to stakeholders, Interim CEO Michael Savage provided the latest updates, shedding light on failed funding efforts, the company’s dire financial situation, and attempts to restructure its debt. The email also acknowledged the gravity of the challenges ahead, hinting at the possible closure of operations.
Savage’s email outlined efforts to secure funding, including meetings with investors Fortuna and Broadlight, both of whom ultimately declined to proceed. Savage explained that while there was initial interest, the company’s mounting debt and financial instability deterred further investment. “Both [investors] have expressed interest, but despite the current circumstances and since Nov./Dec. 2024, they feel that their LPs would not stomach the numbers,” Savage wrote.
The company has previously announced it was shifting operations out of the Cape Canaveral area to a location 90 miles north where costs were less as it searched for new investors. This new report suggests this move and the search have not worked and the company will soon go out of business.
ULA has decided to destack the Vulcan rocket it had planned as its first launch in 2025 (launching a military payload) and is now replacing it with one of its remaining Atlas-5 rockets to put the first batch of satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper internet constellation.
It appears the military is not ready to certify this launch after the second Vulcan launch in October 2024 experienced a problem with one of its strap-on boosters. The payload got to its proper orbit, but the loss of that booster’s nozzle appears to be an issue the military remains concerned about.
Rather than wait, ULA decided to switch to the Kuiper launch. The company wants to complete up to 20 launches in 2025, many of which are for Amazon using its last ten or so Atlas-5 rockets. When it can start commercial launches of Vulcan remains somewhat uncertain. The military has indicated it will make a final decision of certification in the spring, and has also said that first operational flight will follow soon after.
The expected real per launch cost of SLS and Orion
Boeing yesterday sent a notice out to its employees working on NASA’s SLS rocket that up 400 could be laid off due to “revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations.”
Boeing SLS employees were informed Feb. 7 that the company was making preparations to cut up to 400 jobs from the program because of “revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations.” The specific positions being considered for elimination were not announced but would account for a significant fraction of the overall SLS workforce at the company.
This is probably the most significant update from the entire SLS program since it was first proposed by George Bush Jr in 2004. All other announcements either told us there were going to be more delays, the cost was going up, or there were newly discovered technical problems caused by bad management or sloppy work. This announcement instead actually indicates that NASA management — under pressure from the new Trump administration — is finally addressing these failures after two decades.
In the past few months there have been many indications from the swamp in Washington that it is finally beginning to recognize the absurdity and stupidity of the whole SLS/Orion infrastructure, a realization I outlined in detail fourteen years ago, soon after the project was reshaped from the absurd and stupid Ares project under Bush Jr. to SLS/Orion under Obama.
It took however the arrival of Trump (changed himself from his first administration) to do it. Trump is doing what no president has done in our lifetimes, going through all federal programs and ripping them apart if they are failing to do what they promise. And he is doing it with full and amazingly enthusiastic support of the American people. No one cares that government employees are “crying.” Nor does anyone pay attention any longer to these sob stories, put out by the propaganda press. It have proven itself to be habitual liars whose only interest has been prop up the Washington swamp, and everyone now recognizes it.
Expect a major reshaping of NASA and its entire manned program. We will still be heading to the stars, but finally doing it.
An evening pause: Something to ponder over the weekend. The video only includes two short clips from this 1964 BBC show, and thus picks two that have ended up to be largely right. And though Clarke’s predictions were not all right, he hit the mark an incredibly high number of times.
Hat tip John Jossy.
"The only thing we can be sure of about the future, is that it will be absolutely fantastic."#OnThisDay 1917: Writer, futurist and inventor Arthur C Clarke was born.
In 1964, he appeared on Horizon and gave some astonishing predictions about the future. pic.twitter.com/ID0X7idWyy
— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) December 16, 2023
Glacier country in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 4, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The science team labels the features in the lowland below the mesas “ribbed terrain.” To me it looks like peeling paint. What it is however is glacial material, a lot of it. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, in the middle of the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip in the northern hemisphere I label glacier country, because practically every high resolution image of this region shows glacial features like those on the right.
The mesa with the crater on top gives a clue on the geological history. This is chaos terrain, a region of random mesas cross-crossed with canyons and wide low plains, as shown in the inset. The entire surface was probably once at the same height as the top of that mesa with the crater. Over time glacial ice eroded away along fault lines. As that sublimation process continued, the fault lines widened to became canyons, then the flat plains, with the isolated mesas remaining between.
The “peeling paint” terrain is likely a layer of ice that is in the process of sublimating away.
Ars Technica today reported that because of continuing battery issues with the new Dragon manned capsule, SpaceX now plans to use the older Endurance Dragon capsule for the next manned launch to ISS and prevent further delays in bringing home the two Starliner astronauts.
NASA now believes the vehicle will not be ready for its debut launch until late April. Therefore, according to sources at the agency, NASA has decided to swap vehicles for Crew-10. The space agency has asked SpaceX to bring forward the C210 vehicle, which returned to Earth last March after completing the Crew-7 mission.
Known as Endurance, the spacecraft was next due to fly the private Axiom-4 mission to the space station later this spring. Sources said SpaceX is now working toward a no-earlier-than March 12 launch date for Crew-10 on Endurance. If this flight occurs on time—and the date is not certain, as it depends on other missions on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 manifest—the Crew-9 astronauts, including Wilmore and Williams, could fly home on March 19. They would have spent 286 days in space. Although not a record for a NASA human spaceflight, this would be far longer than their original mission, which was expected to last eight to 30 days.
The new capsule will then be used for Axiom’s fourth commercial flight to ISS, AX-4, presently scheduled for later in the spring.
