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  • Isaacman’s bold plan for NASA: Nuclear ships, seven-crew Dragons, accelerated Artemis

    Nearly two weeks have passed since Jared Isaacman received a fateful, brief phone call from two officials in President Trump’s Office of Personnel Management. In those few seconds, the trajectory of his life over the next three and a half years changed dramatically.

    The president, the callers said, wanted to go in a different direction for NASA’s administrator. At the time, Isaacman was within days of a final vote on the floor of the US Senate and assured of bipartisan support. He had run the gauntlet of six months of vetting, interviews, and a committee hearing. He expected to be sworn in within a week. And then, it was all gone.

    “I was very disappointed, especially because it was so close to confirmation and I think we had a good plan to implement,” Isaacman told Ars on Wednesday.

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  • SpaceX wants to send humans to Mars by 2028, here’s why it won’t

    This week saw another dramatic test of SpaceX’s Starship, when the mighty rocket exploded once again, and both the upper and lower stages were lost. The test wasn’t a complete failure, as the upper stage did reach space for the first time, but it’s clear that there’s still a lot of work to do to make the world’s most powerful rocket something that can be relied on for its eventual intended use: carrying crew to Mars.

    Undaunted by this latest setback, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced in a talk shared yesterday, May 29, that the company would be sending “millions of people” to Mars, in order to create a “self-sustaining civilization” there. The aim, Musk says, is to launch a Starship to Mars by 2026, and if that goes well, then to launch a crewed mission two years later, in late 2028 or early 2029.

    Musk gave further details about the timeline for a Starship launch to Mars in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning this week. “If we’re lucky, we’ve probably got about a 50% chance of sending ships from Earth to Mars at the end of next year,” he said. “So November, December next year. In about 18 months.”

    Pushed on whether this timeline was realistic, Musk admitted that, “I try to give the 50th percentile. So you should expect half the time I’m wrong.”

    To be entirely fair to Musk, it’s good to acknowledge your own fallibility, and it’s good to be ambitious. But projecting a launch to another planet by 2026 seems precipitate when the Starship hasn’t even reached orbit yet.

    Remember when SpaceX was going to land a Starship on the moon by 2022? Or when there was going to be a Starship Mars mission launched by 2024? Neither of those has happened yet, or is even close to happening, and these timelines were never remotely realistic. And this isn’t a recent phenomenon: even back in 2017, Musk was claiming that a crewed mission to Mars would be launched by 2024. And it’s not just Musk who is guilty of this: NASA’s announcement that it would have astronauts landing on the moon by 2024 was also never going to happen.

    It costs nothing to make a big announcement, but it is a good way to drum up a lot of interest and headlines. And as for whether the thing being announced actually comes to pass — well, that’s a secondary concern.

    An uncrewed 2026 Starship flight to Mars could still happen though. SpaceX has proven its ability to iterate quickly and to create remarkable results with its projects like the resuable Falcon 9 rocket, the Crew Dragon capsule, and the Starlink communications network. However, there’s one glaring issue about these Starship plans which isn’t being addressed: sending an uncrewed spacecraft in the direction of Mars is one thing. Sending actual people to Mars, landing them safely, and setting up a long-term habitable environment there is quite another.

    In its promotional material for Musk’s talk, SpaceX said it would be addressing the company’s “plans for establishing a permanent human settlement and cities on Mars,” and “how SpaceX will use the world’s most powerful and capable rocket to build a human presence on the red planet over the next decade.” It also noted that, “The next opportunity to launch from Earth to Mars opens in late 2026.”

    That’s rather a sleight of hand, because the window for launch might be next year (due to the orbits of Earth and Mars, the most efficient way to travel between the two, using something called a Hohmann transfer orbit, happens every 26 months) but even if (and it’s a big if) a Starship is launched then, it absolutely won’t have any people on board. Going from (maybe, possibility, extremely optimistically) launching an uncrewed test flight in 2026, to getting actual humans to Mars within the next 10 years? Not a chance.

    That’s because launching a rocket to Mars is, almost unbelievably, the easy part of a Mars mission. Landing on Mars is extremely difficult, even for a relatively small object like a rover, and it’s much harder for heavy loads and when you need to meet the much higher required degree of safety to have humans on board. Even that isn’t the biggest issue though.

    The big issues are keeping people safe, healthy, and fed when they do arrive. You need to build a habitat and make air to breathe, find a way to collect and purify water, grow crops in poisonous soil and then, most potentially dangerous of all, successfully launch a rocket from Mars to bring people back to Earth — something that’s never been done.

    These problems all have potential technological solutions, but space-ready technology doesn’t just appear within a few years. Knowing how to purify water on Earth, say, and being able to do it reliably using light-weight and extremely robust technology that needs to operate in a different gravitational environment with unknown environmental factors like extreme dust exposure, are two quite different things. And that’s one of the easier problems to solve.

    The really sticky issue for human habitation of Mars, according to experts, is human health. Between a long and grueling journey with health effects of its own, arriving on the planet will be no picnic. With its thin atmosphere, Mars is bombarded by dangerous space radiation, and currently there’s no practical way of protecting astronauts from it.

    If future Mars explorers want to be able to go out and explore the planet without their likelihood of developing cancer shooting through the roof, they’ll need some kind of radiation protection that is portable and lightweight enough to move in, and they’ll need shielding for any habitats and vehicles that they want to use as well. None of these problems have been solved yet, and they are unlikely to have solutions ready to launch in the next decade.

    The SpaceX presentation is big on grand claims and flashy visuals, but short on details about how any of these objectives are going to be met. None of this is a reason not to try to go to Mars — certainly there are many excellent reasons for human exploration beyond our planet — but as any engineer should know, grand plans don’t mean a thing unless there’s a realistic way to make them happen.

  • Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions

    Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together.

    Limp had no background in the space industry before taking the helm of Jeff Bezos’ space company in December 2023. He started his career as a computer scientist at Apple, took a stint at a venture capital firm, and joined Amazon in 2010, where he managed development of consumer devices like Alexa, Kindle, and the Fire TV.

    “I had no thoughts of ever running a space company,” Limp said Thursday at a space conference in Washington, DC. “I’ve done consumer electronics my whole life. Started at Apple and did a bunch of other things, and so when I decided to retire from Amazon, I was looking for something that I could give back a little bit, be a little bit more philanthropic in the sort of second half of my career. I didn’t want to stop working, just wanted to do something different. And about that same time, Jeff was looking for a CEO.”

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  • Ars Live: Four space journalists debate whether NASA is really going to Mars

    I’m incredibly excited, as part of the Ars Live series, to host a conversation with three of the very best space reporters in the business on Thursday, May 29, 2025, at 2:30 pm Eastern about the future of NASA and its deep space exploration ambitions.

    Joining me in a virtual panel discussion will be:

    • Christian Davenport, of The Washington Post
    • Loren Grush, of Bloomberg
    • Joey Roulette, of Reuters

    The community of professional space reporters is fairly small, and Chris, Loren, and Joey are some of my smartest and fiercest competitors. They all have deep sourcing within the industry and important insights about what is really going on.

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  • Elon Musk: There is an 80 percent chance Starship’s engine bay issues are solved

    On Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours before a launch attempt of the ninth flight test of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, Elon Musk spoke with Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger to talk about where his space company goes from here.

    In recent weeks, Musk has dialed back his focus on politics and said he wants to devote the majority of his time to SpaceX and his other companies. So what does that mean?

    The conversation came just ahead of the opening of Starship’s launch window, at 6:30 pm CT (23:30 UTC) in South Texas. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.

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  • Perseverance’s new selfie is cool, but its hunt for life in ancient rocks is even cooler

    It’s not only Instagram users and holiday makers snapping selfies — even robots are getting in on the action. This new image from the NASA Perseverance rover shows a selfie that’s out of this world, captured as the rover collected its latest sample of martian rock.

    Taken on May 10, the selfie was devised to celebrate the rover’s 1,500th day on Mars. As a day on Mars is just a little bit longer than an Earth day, at around 24 hours and 39 minutes, NASA measures its Mars missions in “sols” or martian days. As well as being a fun image for scientists and the public to enjoy, it gives the engineering team on the ground the chance to check the look and the status of the rover as it has been exploring since it landed in February 2021.

    You can see plenty of red dust covering the rover, as the surface of Mars is covered in a dusty material called regolith which gives the planet its famous red color. Dust can be quite the challenge for Mars missions, as it gets everywhere when it is whipped up by huge dust storms and can cause problems by gumming up electronics and covering solar panels. But fortunately for Perseverance, the rover may look a little grubby on the outside but its essential functions are all still working well.

    “After 1,500 sols, we may be a bit dusty, but our beauty is more than skin deep,” said Art Thompson, Perseverance project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Our multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator is giving us all the power we need. All our systems and subsystems are in the green and clicking along, and our amazing instruments continue to provide data that will feed scientific discoveries for years to come.”

    Even with all the instruments working correctly, though, getting the rover to take a selfie isn’t a quick job. The image was captured using Perseverance’s WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera, which is located at the end of its robotic arm. As the rover was working on capturing the selfie, it also caught an unexpected photobomber: a wind feature called a dust devil which popped up in the background.

    “To get that selfie look, each WATSON image has to have its own unique field of view,” explained Megan Wu, a Perseverance imaging scientist from Malin Space Science Systems. “That means we had to make 62 precision movements of the robotic arm. The whole process takes about an hour, but it’s worth it. Having the dust devil in the background makes it a classic. This is a great shot.”

    With its celebrations well in hand, the rover is now moving on to investigate a new area of Mars: a region called “Krokodillen” after a Norwegian mountain ridge. This area is particularly exciting because it is thought to contain some of the oldest rocks on Mars, which could help to unlock the secrets of how the solar system formed.

    Here on Earth, our planet has a system of tectonics in which parts of the planet’s crust are gradually pulled down toward the mantle when they meet at a fault line. That means that the rocks on Earth are essentially recycled in an ongoing cycle of melting down toward the planet’s interior then rising up and cooling to become part of the surface. That’s why there are very few extremely old rocks on Earth.

    On Mars, however, it’s a different story. Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics, so very old rocks can stay on its surface for billions of years. Some of these are up to 4 billion years old, or even older, so studying them can help scientists learn about how the rocky planets formed in our solar system around 4.5 billion years ago.

    To study these very old rocks, though, Perseverance needs to find them first. There are thought to be extremely old rocks along the edge of the huge crater in which the rover landed, called Jezero. The Jezero Crater is almost 30 miles across, likely created by a huge meteorite impact billions of years ago. When this object slammed into the martian surface, it threw up large amounts of material like huge chunks of rock which landed nearby and are still there to this day.

    That means that by looking along the rim of the crater, Perseverance can search for these ancient chunks of rocks and use its instruments to study them. That can also help to answer one particularly important question that scientists want to understand, which is how long there was water on Mars. They know that, although Mars is dry and arid today, it once had plentiful liquid water on its surface. It may even have looked a lot like Earth at one point — and we know that water is essential for the formation of life.

    What scientists don’t agree on is exactly how long there was water on Mars, and whether it would have been around for long enough to give potential life the chance to develop there. So knowing exactly when Mars lost is water is a key part of understanding the planet and whether it could ever have supported life.

    To that end, Perseverance will be keeping a lookout for clay minerals which form in the presence of water, perhaps even formed before the impact which created the crater. These could contain potential indications of life, called biosignatures, such as organic compounds.

    “If we find a potential biosignature here, it would most likely be from an entirely different and much earlier epoch of Mars evolution than the one we found last year,” said NASA scientist Ken Farley. “The Krokodillen rocks formed before Jezero Crater was created, during Mars’ earliest geologic period, the Noachian, and are among the oldest rocks on Mars.”

  • Tuesday Telescope: Finally, some answers on those Martian streaks

    One of the longest-standing mysteries about Mars has been the presence of dark and light streaks on the rolling hills surrounding Olympus Mons. This week’s image, from the European Space Agency, shows some of these streaks captured last October.

    This massive mountain rises about 22 km above the surface of Mars, more than twice as high as Mount Everest on Earth. It is bordered by hummocky deposits, called aureoles, that were formed by landslides from the mountain. A striking feature of these aureoles is the periodic appearance of bright and dark streaks—sometimes for days and sometimes for years.

    For decades, scientists have wondered what they might be.

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  • NASA rover shares moody image of Mars moon Deimos

    Once in a while, you might look up and marvel at magnificent views of our moon, its surface dramatically lit by our sun’s light. But have you ever paused to wonder what other moons might look like from the surfaces of other planets in our solar system?

    NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been exploring Mars since arriving there in dramatic fashion in 2021, has just shared an exquisite image of Deimos, one of the red planet’s two moons. 

    “Wishing upon a … moon?” NASA’s Perseverance team, based in California, wrote in a post on the rover’s X account on Thursday, adding: “That bright ‘star’ is actually Mars’ moon Deimos.”

    Perseverance captured the image in March “in the hours before dawn” via a long-exposure using its left Navcam. The picture also includes two stars — Regulus and Algieba — from the constellation Leo, which NASA has helpfully pointed out:

    Deimos above the surface of Mars.
    NASA

    With a diameter of 7.7 miles (12.4 kilometers), Deimos, which scientists believe is likely to be a captured asteroid, is much smaller than Earth’s moon, which has a diameter of 2,159 miles (3,474 kilometers). 

    And while Deimos orbits Mars at a distance of 14,577 miles (23,460 kilometers), Earth’s next door neighbor orbits at a far greater distance of about 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers).

    Also, our moon has a spherical shape, whereas Deimos has an irregular form that NASA has rather unflatteringly described as “potato-shaped.”

    The rover’s image offers a refreshing departure from its usual focus on the martian terrain where it’s searching for signs of ancient microbial life, allowing us to appreciate for a moment the broader cosmic context of Perseverance’s mission. 

    In many ways, the striking photo is more than just a technical achievement as it also offers a moment of reflection during the rover’s epic mission to seek knowledge beyond our home planet.

  • SpaceX chief reveals target date for 9th Starship test

    SpaceX chief Elon Musk has strongly suggested that the ninth test flight of the massive Starship rocket will take place next week.

    “Just before the Starship flight next week, I will give a company talk explaining the Mars game plan in Starbase, Texas, that will also be live-streamed on X,” Musk said in a social media post on Wednesday.

    His comments came shortly after SpaceX conducted a static test fire of the Starship spacecraft’s Raptor engines, which will assist the vehicle in the planned controlled landing in the Indian Ocean following separation from the first-stage Super Heavy booster.

    After losing the spacecraft in flights seven and eight earlier this year, SpaceX is under pressure to ensure that this time around the vehicle performs as expected.

    As Musk said in his post, the long-term plan is to use the Starship — the most powerful rocket ever to fly — to take the first human crew to the surface of Mars. 

    The SpaceX chief said in 2024 that he wanted to launch an uncrewed Starship to the red planet as early as next year to test the reliability of the spacecraft’s landing and liftoff capabilities. Next week, we’ll get an update on that plan.  

    Once SpaceX engineers are confident of the Starship’s ability to get astronauts safely to Mars — and back again — the company can start making concrete preparations for the first crewed flight, something Musk has said he’d like to see happen before the end of this decade.

    Musk’s timelines often miss the mark, so don’t be surprised if this one does too. On the flip side, SpaceX is expected to ramp up Starship testing to up to two flights a month by the end of this year, giving the technology powering the rocket a better chance of accelerating toward readiness.

    Before the crewed Mars flight, NASA is expecting to use a modified version of the Starship to land two crewmembers on the surface of the moon in the Artemis III mission, which could take  place in 2027. 

    This year looks set to be the busiest yet for the Starship. Tune in next week for Musk’s address to find out more about what’s in store.

  • Marvel at Mars’ ancient landscape, captured by Curiosity

    With its hills and distant mountains, the landscape seems somehow familiar yet at the same time eerily alien. 

    The striking image was captured just recently by NASA’s Curiosity rover as it continues its years-long exploration of Mars.

    “Some perspective: These hills have been here for billions of years, and the tracks I leave will fade over time,” Curiosity — or rather the NASA team operating it from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California — said in a message accompanying the image.

    The rover added: “It’s humbling to know my time of exploration is just a brief moment in history on such an ancient planet.”

    The remarkable Curiosity rover has been trundling along the surface of the red planet for nearly 13 years after landing in Mars’ Gale Crater in 2012.

    The main goal of the mission is to determine whether Mars was ever had the conditions to host microbial life, though its findings will also assist NASA in preparations for the first crewed mission to the distant planet, for which a date has yet to be set.

    About the size of a Mini Cooper, Curiosity conducts its ongoing research using 17 cameras and a robotic arm containing a suite of specialized laboratory-like tools and instruments.

    The six-wheeled has already found chemical and mineral evidence strongly supporting the idea that Mars once had habitable environments. It was also the first rover to drill into martian rocks and analyze subsurface samples, research that revealed past water activity and various environmental conditions.

    During its time on Mars, Curiosity has traveled nearly 19 miles, captured more than a million images, and continues to provide valuable data on Mars’ geology and climate.

    It’s fair to say that Curiosity’s discoveries have fundamentally changed our understanding of Mars, confirming that the planet was once potentially habitable while also paving the way for future robotic and human exploration.

    Incredibly, the mission was originally expected to last no more than a couple of years, but the rover’s early success and robust performance prompted NASA to continue it.  

    The space agency has yet to announce a specific end date for the mission, suggesting that it will continue for as long as Curiosity remains functional and capable of returning valuable scientific data.