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By charles chiltern.

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9780563524991

Journey Into Space

Charles Chiltern

AudioGO Ltd

05 February 1996

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Journey Into Space: The Return From Mars

Author Charles Chilton

Narrator Various

Duration 1h 27m

Categories Adult Fiction , Science Fiction and Fantasy

Key Stage KS4

Publisher BBC Audiobooks

Version Unabridged

Charles Chilton's classic science fiction series, Journey Into Space, stormed the BBC airwaves during the 1950s. Between 1953 and 1958, a devoted audience of six million adults and children attentively followed Jet Morgan and his crew from one cliff-hanger to another as, together, they faced the unknown perils of space. Return From Mars is the final adventure in the classic science fiction series. The ninety-minute episode is paired with a special half-hour feature, Journey Into Space Again, which is written and presented by Charles Chilton. It includes extracts from the series and interviews with its leading actors, Andrew Faulds (Jet Morgan) and David Jacobs.

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Title details for Journey Into Space: The Return from Mars by Charles Chiltern - Available

Journey Into Space: The Return from Mars

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  • Charles Chiltern - Author
  • ©BBC Audiobooks 2006 - Copyright holder

OverDrive Listen audiobook

  • ISBN: 9781405669924
  • File size: 42095 KB
  • Release date: October 31, 2006
  • Duration: 01:27:41

MP3 audiobook

  • File size: 42171 KB
  • Duration: 01:27:40
  • Number of parts: 2

OverDrive Listen audiobook MP3 audiobook

Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy

Publisher: AudioGO Ltd Edition: Unabridged

OverDrive Listen audiobook ISBN: 9781405669924 File size: 42095 KB Release date: October 31, 2006 Duration: 01:27:41

MP3 audiobook ISBN: 9781405669924 File size: 42171 KB Release date: October 31, 2006 Duration: 01:27:40 Number of parts: 2

  • Formats OverDrive Listen audiobook MP3 audiobook
  • Languages English

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Journey into Space: The Return from Mars Audio Cassette – February 7, 2000

  • Language English
  • Publisher BBC Consumer Publishing
  • Publication date February 7, 2000
  • ISBN-10 0563553618
  • ISBN-13 978-0563553618
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ BBC Consumer Publishing (February 7, 2000)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0563553618
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0563553618
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.82 ounces

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Highlights From SpaceX’s Starship Test Flight

The powerful rocket, a version of which will carry astronauts to the moon for NASA, launched for the third time on Thursday morning. It achieved a number of milestones before losing contact with the ground.

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Kenneth Chang

Kenneth Chang

Here’s what happened during the third test flight of the most powerful rocket ever built.

Spacex launches starship for third time, the rocket, a version of which will eventually carry nasa astronauts to the moon, traveled almost halfway around the earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere..

“Five, four, three, two, three, one.” “This point, we’ve already passed through Max-Q, maximum dynamic pressure. And passing supersonic, so we’re now moving faster than the speed of sound. Getting those on-board views from the ship cameras. Boosters now making its way back, seeing six engines ignited on ship. Kate, we got a Starship on its way to space and a booster on the way back to the Gulf.” “Oh, man. I need a moment to pick my jaw up from the floor because these views are just stunning.”

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The third try turned out to be closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as his company’s mammoth Starship rocket launched on Thursday and traveled about halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere.

The test flight achieved several key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.

This particular flight was not, by design, intended to make it all the way around the Earth. At 8:25 a.m. Central time, Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly — lifted off from the coast of South Texas. The ascent was smooth, with the upper Starship stage reaching orbital velocities. About 45 minutes after launch, it started re-entering the atmosphere, heading toward a belly-flop splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Live video, conveyed in near real-time via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites , showed red-hot gases heating the underside of the vehicle. Then, 49 minutes after launch, communications with Starship ended, and SpaceX later said the vehicle had not survived the re-entry, presumably disintegrating and falling into the ocean.

Even so, Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX on what he called a “successful test flight” of the system his agency is counting on for some of its Artemis lunar missions.

SpaceX aims to make both the vehicle’s lower rocket booster and the upper spacecraft stage capable of flying over and over again — a stark contrast to the single-launch throwaway rockets that have been used for most of the space age.

That reusability gives SpaceX the potential to drive down the cost of lofting satellites and telescopes, as well as people and the things they need to live in space.

Completing most of the short jaunt was a reassuring validation that the rocket’s design appears to be sound. Not only is Starship crucial for NASA’s lunar plans, it is the key to Mr. Musk’s pipe dream of sending people to live on Mars.

For Mr. Musk, the success also harks back to his earlier reputation as a technological visionary who led breakthrough advances at Tesla and SpaceX, a contrast with his troubled purchase of Twitter and the polarizing social media quagmire that has followed since he transformed the platform and renamed it X. Even as SpaceX launched its next-generation rocket, the social media company was dueling with Don Lemon , a former CNN anchor who was sharing clips from a combative interview with Mr. Musk.

SpaceX still needs to pull off a series of formidable rocketry firsts before Starship is ready to head to the moon and beyond. Earlier this week, Mr. Musk said he hoped for at least six more Starship flights this year, during which some of those experiments may occur.

But if it achieves them all, the company could again revolutionize the space transportation business and leave competitors far behind.

Phil Larson, a White House space adviser during the Obama administration who also previously worked on communication efforts at SpaceX, said Starship’s size and reusability had “massive potential to change the game in transportation to orbit. And it could enable whole new classes of missions.”

NASA is counting on Starship to serve as the lunar lander for Artemis III, a mission that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. That journey is currently scheduled for late 2026 but seems likely to slide to 2027 or later.

The third flight was a marked improvement from the first two launch attempts.

Last April, Starship made it off the launchpad, but a cascade of engine failures and fires in the booster led to the rocket’s destruction 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico.

In November, the second Starship launch traveled much farther. All 33 engines in the Super Heavy booster worked properly during ascent, and after a successful separation, the upper Starship stage nearly made it to orbital velocities. However, both stages ended up exploding.

Nonetheless, Mr. Musk hailed both test flights as successes, as they provided data that helped engineers improve the design.

Thursday’s launch — which coincided with the 22nd anniversary of the founding of SpaceX — occurred 85 minutes into a 110-minute launch window. The 33 engines in the booster ignited at the launch site outside Brownsville, Texas, and lifted the rocket, which was as tall as a 40-story building, into the morning sky.

Most of the flight proceeded smoothly, and a number of test objectives were achieved during the flight, like opening and closing the spacecraft’s payload doors, which will be needed to deliver cargo in the future.

SpaceX did not attempt to recover the booster this time, but did have it perform engine burns that will be needed to return to the launch site. However, the final landing burn for the booster, conducted over the Gulf of Mexico, did not fully succeed — an area that SpaceX will attempt to fix for future flights.

SpaceX said the Super Heavy disintegrated at an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

SpaceX engineers will also have to figure out why Starship did not survive re-entry and make fixes to the design of the vehicle.

Even with the partial success of Thursday’s flight, Starship is far from ready to go to Mars, or even the moon. Because of Mr. Musk’s ambitions for Mars, Starship is much larger and much more complicated than what NASA needs for its Artemis moon landings. For Artemis III, two astronauts are to spend about a week in the South Pole region of the moon.

“He had the low price,” Daniel Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former high-level official at NASA, said of Mr. Musk, “and NASA chose to take the risk associated with that configuration hoping that it would work out. And we’ll see if that turns out to be true.”

To leave Earth’s orbit, Starship must have its propellant tanks refilled with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. That will require a complex choreography of additional Starship launches to take the propellants to orbit.

“This is a complicated, complicated problem, and there’s a lot that has to get sorted out, and a lot that has to work right,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Thursday’s flight included an early test of that technology, moving liquid oxygen from one tank to another within Starship.

Mr. Dumbacher does not expect Starship to be ready by September 2026, the launch date NASA currently has for Artemis III, although he would not predict how much of a delay there might be. “I’m not going to give you a guess because there is way too much work, way too many problems to solve,” he said.

Michael Roston

Kenneth Chang and Michael Roston

A rare sight: Starship’s bright orange glow as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

Just past the 45-minute mark of the Starship vehicle’s journey through space on Thursday, something eerie happened. As it drifted high above Earth’s oceans and clouds, the spacecraft’s silvery exterior was overtaken by a brilliant and fiery orange glow.

Starship re-entering Earth's atmosphere. Views through the plasma pic.twitter.com/HEQX4eEHWH — SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 14, 2024

When a spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere, the air beneath it gets hot — hot enough that it turns into a plasma of charged particles as electrons are stripped away from the air molecules. The charged particles create picturesque glows, like neon signs.

But seeing this happen in nearly real-time during a spaceflight is uncommon. That plasma disrupts radio signals, cutting off communication.

Such blackouts happen, for instance, when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule returns to Earth from the International Space Station with its complement of four astronauts. Mission controllers must wait with bated breath to be reassured that the spacecraft’s heat shield has held up and protected the crew during atmospheric re-entry.

Until Starship succumbed to the intense forces of re-entry on Thursday, SpaceX used its Starlink internet satellites to relay the live video feed. The Starlink satellites are in higher orbits, and sending signals upward — away from the plasma — is easier than trying to communicate through it to antennas on the ground.

But Starship wasn’t the only spacecraft in recent weeks to give us a view of plasma heating. Varda Space, a startup that is developing technology for manufacturing in orbit, had cameras on a capsule it landed on Earth on Feb. 21. Before it parachuted to the ground, its Winnebago capsule recorded a day-glow re-entry. The company retrieved the video recording from the capsule and shared it online:

Here's a video of our capsule ripping through the atmosphere at mach 25, no renders, raw footage: pic.twitter.com/ZFWzdjBwad — Varda Space Industries (@VardaSpace) February 28, 2024

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Jeff Bezos’s rocket company could race SpaceX to the moon.

Which billionaire space company will get to the moon first: Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin?

At first glance, SpaceX seems to have a huge head start. It is about to launch the third test flight of Starship. A variation of Starship is scheduled to take NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon as soon as September 2026.

By contrast, Blue Origin has yet to launch anything into orbit, and its contract with NASA for a lunar lander for astronauts is for a mission that is launching in 2030.

But Blue Origin might still get there first. SpaceX faces major challenges with Starship, which is as tall as 16-story building, while Blue Origin plans to send a smaller cargo lander to the moon by the end of next year.

“This lander, we’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today,” John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar permanence at Blue Origin, said during a n interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” this month.

The first launch of the Mark 1 version of the Blue Moon lander is what Blue Origin calls a “pathfinder” to test technologies like the BE-7 engine, the flight computers, avionics and power systems — the same systems that will be used in the much larger Mark 2 lander that will take astronauts to the moon’s surface.

The Mark 1 lander can carry up to three tons of cargo to the lunar surface, but will be small enough to fit inside one of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets . New Glenn has yet to fly, but the company says its debut journey will occur later this year.

After Blue Moon Mark 1 is launched into an orbit about 125 miles above Earth’s surface, the lander’s BE-7 engine will propel it toward the moon, slowing it down to enter orbit around the moon and then guiding it to the landing on the surface.

The smaller size means that the Mark 1 lander, unlike Starship, will not need to be refueled before leaving Earth orbit. Demonstrating that refueling technology in orbit will be a key test to validate Starship’s design. Refueling will also be needed for the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos have already been beaten to the moon by another billionaire, Kam Ghaffarian , one of the founders of Intuitive Machines, which put a small robotic lander named Odysseus near the lunar south pole in February . That was the first private spacecraft to successfully make it to the moon’s surface in one piece (although its journey had some hiccups ).

As with every American rocket mishap, the Federal Aviation Administration will open an investigation to review what went wrong and what SpaceX needs to do to correct it. But if, as Elon Musk says, there are at least six more Starship flights this year, SpaceX will have opportunities to complete a full test flight.

Starship's third flight went very far, but like its first two flights, it was not a complete success. The landing burn for the Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket — the aim was to “land” it in the Gulf of Mexico — was not fully successful, and the Starship craft did not survive re-entry. But it was marked significant progress, because none of the problems from the earlier flights recurred, and SpaceX engineers now have data to tackle the new problems.

Michael Roston

On the social media site X, Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX on what he called a “successful test flight” of Starship. The agency is counting on Starship to land astronauts on the moon’s surface as part of the Artemis III mission. Another vehicle, the Orion capsule, is to be used to bring those astronauts back to Earth.

SpaceX says Starship did not survive re-entry, but it achieved several key milestones during the flight. That marks significant progress since the second test flight. Elon Musk has said he hopes there will be a half-dozen Starship flights this year.

SpaceX says a dual loss of communication, both through its own Starlink satellites and other forms spacecraft communications with Earth, suggest that Starship did not survive re-entry. They’re still listening to see if radio contact resumes.

Video is gone. Telemetry is also stuck at a speed 25,707 kilometers per hour and an altitude of 65 kilometers. The reason is not clear.

Starship already has private customers booked for deep space trips.

Starship has not yet done a full orbit of the Earth, but SpaceX already has three private astronaut missions on its manifest for the spacecraft.

The first flight with astronauts aboard will be led by Jared Isaacman who previously bought an orbital trip on a Falcon 9 rocket that was known as Inspiration4 .

Then two other Starship flights will travel around the moon and back, one led by Yusaku Maezawa , a Japanese entrepreneur, and the other by Dennis Tito, who was the first private individual to buy a trip to the International Space Station in 2001.

Back in 2018 when Mr. Maezawa signed up for the lunar flyby, Mr. Musk said Starship would be ready by 2023.

Mr. Maezawa later called the mission ‘dearMoon,’ inviting people to apply for a seat on the trip. Last week, he acknowledged it was not going to happen this year.

“We were planning for our lunar orbital mission ‘dearMoon’ to take place in 2023, but seems like it will take a little longer,” he wrote on the social network X. “We’re not sure when the flight will be, but we will give you all an update once we know more.”

SpaceX is apparently also planning uncrewed cargo flights to the surface of the moon with Starship.

In March last year, a small start-up company, Astrolab, announced that it was sending a Jeep Wrangler-size rover to surface in the south polar region of the moon , and the ride would be a cargo Starship flight that would take it there.

SpaceX did not confirm the news.

This appears to be part of the expanding potential market for Starship. SpaceX also plans to use the rocket for launching its second generation of Starlink internet communications satellites .

Starship is re-entering Earth's atmosphere. We’re seeing the heating on the flaps, with video being transmitted to the ground through SpaceX's Starlink satellites. The view is incredible. Usually the plasma disrupts radio transmissions.

SpaceX skipped the restart of one of the Raptor engines on the upper stage of Starship. It did conduct the propellant transfer test and the opening and closing of the payload door, which means the flight achieved some of its experimental objectives during its coast around the Earth, but not others. Next stop: Re-entry through the atmosphere and a hard bellyflop in the Indian Ocean.

The music on the livestream is more old-fashioned than the ambient beats we’re used to during SpaceX video feeds. But there’s nothing old-fashioned about the views in space from the rocket, which are unreal, but have not always been visible as its connection to the ground comes and goes.

During this period of the flight, Starship is scheduled to perform several tests. The first, opening the payload door, is complete. It will also move several tons of liquid oxygen between two tanks within Starship. That’s a preliminary test for future in-orbit refueling between two Starships, which is critical for sending the vehicle to the moon. Finally, Starship will try to restart one of its Raptor engines in the vacuum of space, something it has not done before.

The payload door of the upper Starship rocket stage is now open. That’s how a future Starship will deploy Starlink satellites, and demonstrating that it works was one of the objectives of today's flight.

The engines on the upper-stage of the rocket successfully completed their burn. Starship is now coasting in space, on a trajectory that will re-enter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

We were watching the booster attempting to land in the Gulf of Mexico. But the camera feed cut off, and we're not sure what actually happened. The upper stage Starship is still continuing on its trajectory toward the Indian Ocean.

The Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket appears to be headed back to Earth. During the last attempt, the booster exploded at this point, so it looks like SpaceX has fixed that issue.

The large Super Heavy booster stage has separated from the Starship upper stage, which is on its way to space. The flight is looking good.

All 33 Raptor engines in the booster are working fine. So far everything looks good.

Less than 2 minutes until liftoff. Propellant tanks are full, and wind will not prevent an on-time liftoff.

Starship is less than 10 minutes away from its third launch. The countdown is going smoothly.

What will happen during Starship’s third test flight.

For its third test flight, Starship aims to fly part of the way around the Earth, starting from SpaceX’s launch site in Boca Chica Village, Texas, and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

The earlier test flights — both of which ended in explosions — aimed to come down in waters off Hawaii. SpaceX said it had set the new flight path to allow for safe testing of things it hadn’t done before with the Starship vehicle.

The journey will start at the site that SpaceX calls Starbase, which is a few miles north of where Texas and Mexico meet along the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket, nearly 400 feet tall, will be mounted next to a launch tower that is about 480 feet tall. It will be filled with methane and liquid oxygen propellants during the hours before liftoff.

Three seconds before launch, computers will begin to ignite the 33 engines in the Super Heavy rocket booster beneath Starship.

Starship and Super Heavy will begin their ascent over the Gulf. At 52 seconds into the flight, SpaceX says, the vehicle will experience the heaviest atmospheric stress of its trip, a moment flight engineers call max-q.

If the stainless steel spacecraft survives that stress, the next key moment will occur 2 minutes and 42 seconds into flight, when most of the Super Heavy booster’s engines power down. Seconds later, the upper Starship vehicle will begin “hot-staging,” or lighting up its engines before separating from Super Heavy.

Super Heavy’s journey will end about seven minutes after launch. SpaceX would typically aim to return the massive rocket booster to the launch site for a vertical landing. But for the test flight, the spent Super Heavy will perform a series of maneuvers before firing its engines one last time to slow its descent into the Gulf of Mexico.

As Super Heavy is descending, Starship will be gaining altitude. About eight and a half minutes into its flight, its engines will switch off. It will then begin coasting around the Earth.

While floating through space, Starship will attempt several things that the spacecraft has never done. Nearly 12 minutes into the flight, it will open a door that in the future could deploy satellites and other cargo into space. About 12 minutes later, it will transfer propellants from one tank to another while in space, a technique needed for future journeys to the moon and beyond. Then, 40 minutes into the flight, Starship will relight one if its engines while in space.

If the spacecraft makes it through those experiments, the conclusion of Starship’s journey will start at about the 49-minute mark. The spacecraft is set to pivot horizontally into a belly-flop to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. If it survives the extreme temperatures, Starship will splash down 64 minutes after it left Texas. The company has said in the past that it expects the belly-flop ocean landing to end in an explosion .

After SpaceX completes its testing campaign, future Starship flights will return to the Texas Starbase site after they complete their missions in orbit. SpaceX is also building a launch tower for Starship at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where flights could one day launch and land, including the Artemis III mission that NASA plans to use to return American astronauts to the moon’s surface.

SpaceX has started the company’s official live video stream from Texas, a sign that it is serious about igniting the rocket in about 20 minutes. You can watch it in the video player embedded above.

What went right and wrong during the 2nd Starship test flight.

The second test flight of Starship in November got a lot higher and faster than the first attempt seven months earlier.

During the first launch outside Brownsville, Texas, in April last year, things went wrong from the start — the exhaust of the engines of the Super Heavy booster excavated a hole beneath the launchpad, sending pieces of concrete flying up to three-quarters of a mile away and a plume of dust drifting 6.5 miles, blanketing the nearby town of Port Isabel. Several of the booster engines failed, and the upper stage never separated from the booster.

Instead, the rocket started making loop-de-loops before the flight termination system destroyed it.

During the second test flight , all 33 of the booster engines worked during ascent. A water deluge system protected the launchpad. The upper Starship stage separated from the booster and then made it most of the way to orbital velocity. However, the journeys of both the booster and the upper Starship stage still ended in explosions.

For the booster, as it dropped away from the upper stage, 13 of the 33 engines fired again to guide it toward the landing location. Although this particular booster was not going to be recovered, SpaceX wanted to test the re-entry techniques that are similar to what it currently uses for its smaller Falcon 9 rockets. However, something went wrong. Several engines shut down and then one blew up, causing the destruction of the booster.

In an update posted on the company’s website on Feb. 26 , SpaceX said the most likely cause of the booster failure was a blockage of a filter where liquid oxygen flowed to the engines. The company said it had made design changes to prevent that from happening again.

The upper stage continued upward for seven minutes after stage separation. This was itself an achievement because the company completed a step called hot-staging, during which the upper-stage engines ignite before the stage detaches from the Super Heavy booster.

Because the spacecraft was empty, extra liquid oxygen was loaded to simulate the weight of a future payload it could carry to orbit. But when the extra oxygen was dumped, a fire started, disrupting communication between the spacecraft’s flight computers. The computers shut down the engines and then set off the flight termination system, destroying the spacecraft.

The upper Starship stage reached an altitude of about 90 miles and a speed of about 15,000 miles per hour. For a spacecraft to reach orbit, it needs to accelerate to about 17,000 miles per hour.

Frost lines have appeared on Starship and the Super Heavy booster as methane and liquid oxygen flow into the rocket’s tanks.

It’s sunrise in Cameron County, Texas, but weather reports show cloudy conditions persist. We’ll see if weather is going to keep Starship on the beach, but SpaceX says it has started loading propellants into the rocket.

Launch time is now 9:25 a.m. Eastern. SpaceX says winds are still a concern that could cause a liftoff to be called off, but it will go ahead with loading of propellants in the rocket.

SpaceX pushed the launch time back a little more, to 9:10 a.m. Eastern. They have until 9:50 to try today.

SpaceX has just announced the new target launch time is 9:02 a.m. Eastern, and the company said on X that it is clearing some boats from a safety zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Cameras from a number of space enthusiast websites like NASASpaceflight that are pointing at the rocket show there is still no frost on its side, so the loading of ultracold methane and liquid oxygen propellants has not yet begun.

As SpaceX prepares for its third flight of Starship, other space efforts have experienced difficulties this week. On Wednesday, Kairos, a rocket from a Japanese startup called Space One, exploded moments into its first launch attempt. And Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency, said on Thursday that two Chinese satellites were lost after a rocket failed to reach the planned orbit.

In a posting on the social media site X, SpaceX says that it is aiming for launch at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, or 30 minutes into the 110-minute launch window. There is a 70 percent chance of favorable weather. There have been concerns of high winds, especially at higher altitudes.

What is Starship?

For Elon Musk, Starship is really a Mars ship. He envisions a fleet of Starships carrying settlers to the red planet in the coming years.

And for that eventual purpose, Starship, under development by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX rocket company , has to be big. Stacked on top of what SpaceX calls a Super Heavy booster, the Starship rocket system will be, by pretty much every measure, the biggest and most powerful ever.

It is the tallest rocket ever built — 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.

And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. As those engines lift Starship off the launchpad in South Texas, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.

NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket , which made its first flight in November 2022, holds the current record for the maximum thrust of a rocket: 8.8 million pounds. The maximum thrust of the Saturn V rocket that took NASA astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program was relatively paltry: 7.6 million pounds.

An even more transformative feature of Starship is that it is designed to be entirely reusable. The Super Heavy booster is to land much like those for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space belly-flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before pivoting to a vertical position for landing.

That means all of the really expensive pieces — like the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster and six additional Raptors in Starship itself — will be used over and over instead of thrown away into the ocean after one flight.

That has the potential to cut the cost of sending payloads into orbit — to less than $10 million to take 100 tons to space, Mr. Musk has predicted.

Starship and Super Heavy are shiny because SpaceX made them out of stainless steel, which is cheaper than using other materials like carbon composites. But one side of Starship is coated in black tiles to protect the spacecraft from the extreme heat that it will encounter if it gets far enough in its flight to re-enter the atmosphere.

Here is what to know about Thursday’s SpaceX test flight.

The third try was closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as the company’s flight test of the mammoth Starship rocket launched on Thursday and traveled almost halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere.

The flight achieved some key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.

This particular flight did not, by design, make it all the way around the Earth. At 9:25 a.m. Eastern time, Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly, lifted off from the coast of South Texas. About 45 minutes later it started its re-entry, but communications were lost a few minutes after that. The company said the rocket was lost before attempting to splash down in the Indian Ocean, a sign that more work needs to be completed on the vehicle.

That reusability gives SpaceX the potential to drive down the cost of lofting satellites and space telescopes, as well as people and the things they need to live in space.

Here’s what else to know:

Thursday’s flight demonstrated new capabilities for Starship. In addition to reaching orbital speeds, the Starship vehicle opened and closed its payload door and managed to move several tons of liquid oxygen between two tanks within the rocket, a key test needed for future missions.

The Starship system consists of two stages — the Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper-stage spacecraft, which is also called Starship. The company intends both to be fully reusable in the future. Read more about Starship .

Thursday’s launch was the third of Starship. Here’s a recap of what happened last time .

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How long would it take to walk around Mars?

The answer depends on many factors, including velocity, rest breaks and terrain.

a person in a brown spacesuit walking on a reddish-orange desert

Humans have long had a fascination with Mars, and NASA has ambitious plans to send astronauts there within the next few decades. Anyone walking on Mars would likely explore only a small fraction of the planet's surface. 

But without oceans or other bodies of water, could an astronaut walk all the way around the Red Planet? How long would it take to walk around Mars?

Unsurprisingly, a long time — though exactly how long might be hard to say. If the astronaut could travel continuously at a walking speed, it would be a simple calculation.

Related: Boiling blood and radiation: 5 ways Mars can kill

"We would need essentially two parameters," said Erdal Yigit , an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University who studies the atmospheres of planets. Those parameters are the astronaut's velocity (speed and direction) and the distance they would travel.

If the person traveled along Mars' equator , they would walk about 13,300 miles (21,400 kilometers) to get all the way around the planet. Walking around Mars through its poles would shave off about 100 miles (160 km), but the extreme cold would pose an even greater challenge than the harsh conditions on the rest of the planet, Yigit said.

The person's velocity would be about 3.1 mph (5 km/h), which is also an average walking speed on Earth, straight along the equator, Yigit said. Despite Mars' reduced gravity (about 40% of Earth's), Yigit doubts a person's walking speed would be much different on Mars. Like any back-country hiker on Earth, this person would likely be carrying a heavy load of supplies — such as oxygen, water and food — and would be wearing a heavy spacesuit.

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If someone were to walk continuously around Mars at that speed, the calculation would be simple: Just divide the distance by the velocity. That would mean it would take about 4,290 hours. There are about 24.7 hours in a Martian day (called a sol), so it would take roughly 174 sols to walk around Mars continuously. That's a little over a quarter of a Martian year, which is 668.6 sols.

ripples line the face of a reddish-orange wind-blown sand dune on Mars

Of course, no one would be able to complete that walk continuously — on Mars, Earth or anywhere. Even if the person were able to bring enough oxygen, water and food with them, and could eat and drink while walking, they would still need to stop to sleep. Assuming the astronaut slept about eight hours each night, it would add about 56 sols. If the person stopped for four or five more hours each sol to eat, rest, change clothes, clean themselves, and set up and deconstruct some type of campsite, it would take another 30 or 35 sols, depending on how long they were stopped.

All in all, a more realistic estimate might be at least 265 sols, about 40% of the Martian year. But that calculation does not account for potential obstacles, such as rough terrain. Mars has many mountains, including some that are taller than any on Earth, as well as valleys, craters and many other geological features that would be tough to navigate.

 —  Does the sun move in the solar system?

—  What is the biggest planet ever found?

— Why are there no gas moons?

Of course, it is very unlikely that anyone will be walking all the way around Mars anytime soon. People have circumnavigated Earth on foot, though it is, of course, impossible to truly walk or run all the way around, due to the oceans. But humans have walked on only a small portion of the moon , despite traveling there multiple times. And walking so far and for so long on Mars would pose many logistical problems, like bringing enough food, water and oxygen and protecting the person from the dangerous impacts of radiation.

Although it's highly unlikely that humans will walk around the entire Red Planet, sending astronauts to the surface still has many advantages over rovers, Yigit said.

Rovers "are susceptible to dust and other kinds of electrical problems; something may happen," he said. With humans "even if there are problems, we can find solutions around them." 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Rebecca Sohn

Rebecca Sohn is a freelance science writer. She writes about a variety of science, health and environmental topics, and is particularly interested in how science impacts people's lives. She has been an intern at CalMatters and STAT, as well as a science fellow at Mashable. Rebecca, a native of the Boston area, studied English literature and minored in music at Skidmore College in Upstate New York and later studied science journalism at New York University. 

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Mars Sample Return science continues amid budget uncertainty

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MSR sample tube

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Efforts by scientists to use a Mars rover to collect samples are continuing even as NASA wraps up a new assessment of when and how those samples will be brought back to Earth.

The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has filled 26 of its 43 sample tubes, scientists involved with the mission said in presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference (LPSC) here March 12. The rover is climbing up the remains of a river delta that once flowed into Jezero Crater.

Of those 26 tubes, 20 contain rock cores, said Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who serves as principal scientist for Mars Sample Return (MSR) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Two contain regolith and another holds a sample of the atmosphere, while the other three are “witness tubes” that serve as controls to identify any terrestrial contamination in the other tubes.

Two of the remaining 17 tubes are also witness tubes, leaving 15 that can be filled with other samples. Scientists are planning next phases of the rover’s traverse, she said, such as to the crater rim, which promises what she called “an incredible diversity” of rocks of different ages and exposed to different processes, “including materials of astrobiological potential.”

That work is ongoing as NASA enters the final phases of a review of the overall MSR architecture, including the schedule and design of the mission that will collect those sample tubes and return them to Earth. After an independent review board, or IRB, concluded that the agency’s existing approach could not meet cost and schedule goals, NASA commissioned an MSR IRB Response Team (MIRT) in October to evaluate alternative approaches .

“Much of the work is already complete” by the MIRT, Wadhwa said. The MIRT is expected to complete its work by the end of the month, with NASA releasing its revised MSR plans, and proposed budget, as soon as April.

That has put not just MSR but also NASA’s overall planetary science portfolio in limbo. NASA’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal, released March 11, left MSR funding as TBD, or to be determined . At the same time, the agency must also develop an operating plan for fiscal year 2024 funding provided by an appropriations bill passed March 8 that instructed NASA to spend at least $300 million, and as much as $949.3 million, on MSR in 2024 .

The TBD in the fiscal year 2025 budget request for MSR reflects the uncertainty about the plans for carrying out the program, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, during a town hall meeting at LPSC March 11. “We’re trying to give the response team the time they need to complete their assessment and provide the recommendation,” she explained.

Once that work is done, NASA will amend its budget request to seek specific funding for MSR in 2025, but at the expense of the allocations requested for other planetary programs in the original proposal. “I do not expect the top level of the planetary budget to go up above the $2.73 billion” in the original request, she said, which is already fully allocated to other programs. “We need to think about how we support Mars Sample Return within a balanced planetary portfolio and within that $2.73 billion top line.”

NASA faces similar challenges for determining MSR funding in 2024 within the limits set by the appropriations bill. “This is going to be the heart of a very difficult process,” she said.

While providing little information about what the new MSR architecture, and its cost and schedule, will be, NASA officials at the conference reemphasized the scientific value of the program.

“Mars Sample Return is one of the highest priorities in the past two decadal surveys. It is an agency priority,” said Lindsay Hays, acting lead scientist for MSR at NASA Headquarters, during a March 12 presentation. The samples, she said, can serve as a “Rosetta Stone” to decode the early history of terrestrial planets.

Those officials acknowledged, though, the uncertainty about MSR was affecting science planning. That includes potential surveys beyond the crater rim by Perseverance to collect samples. “We’re awaiting to see what the MIRT results are,” Hays said. “The MIRT is going to help us understand what is our future architecture and future schedule.”

She added that “maximizing sample number and simple diversity is absolutely key” for the mission, a point Wadhwa also made.

“We are currently awaiting the outcome of the MIRT in terms of what the timeline is going to look like,” Wadhwa said, which will shape what kind of traverse Perseverance will take to collect additional samples at and beyond the crater rim. “We have an amazing set of rocks awaiting us in those regions.”

Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science... More by Jeff Foust

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NASA's attempt to bring home part of Mars is unprecedented. The mission's problems are not

Massive cost overruns. Key deadlines slipping out of reach. Problems of unprecedented complexity, and a generation’s worth of scientific progress contingent upon solving them.

That’s the current state of Mars Sample Return, the ambitious yet imperiled NASA mission whose rapidly ballooning budget has cost jobs at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge and drawn threats of cancellation from lawmakers.

But not all that long ago, those same dire circumstances described the James Webb Space Telescope, the pioneering infrared scope that launched on Christmas Day 2021.

The biggest space telescope ever has so far proved to be a scientific and public relations victory for NASA. The telescope's performance has surpassed all expectations, senior project scientist Jane Rigby said at a meeting recently.

Its first images were so hotly anticipated that the White House scooped NASA’s announcement, releasing a dazzling view of thousands of galaxies the day before the space agency shared the first batch of pictures . Thousands of researchers have since applied for observation time.

“The world has been rooting for this telescope to succeed,” Rigby told the National Academies’ committee on astronomy and astrophysics.

Read more: NASA finally figures out how to open a $1-billion canister

Yet in the years before launch, the success and acclaim Webb now enjoys was far from guaranteed.

The telescope cost twice as much as initially anticipated and launched seven years behind its original schedule. Some members of Congress at one point tried to pull funding from the project. Even the journal Nature referred to it at the time as the “telescope that ate astronomy.”

After a thorough assessment of the project’s needs and flaws, NASA was able to turn the troubled venture around. Supporters of Mars Sample Return are hopeful that mission will follow a similar trajectory.

“A lot of great science will come out of" Mars Sample Return, said Garth Illingworth , an astronomer emeritus at US Santa Cruz and former deputy director of the project that is now the James Webb Space Telescope. “But they’ve got to get real as to how to manage this.”

Last year was a crisis point for Mars Sample Return, whose goal is to fetch rocks from the Red Planet’s Jezero crater and bring them back to Earth for study.

In July, the U.S. Senate presented NASA with an ultimatum in its proposed budget : Either present a plan for completing the mission within the $5.3 billion budgeted, or risk cancellation. A sobering independent review found in September that there was “near zero probability” of Mars Sample Return making its proposed 2028 launch date, and “no credible” way to fulfill the mission within its current budget. NASA is due to respond to that report this month.

The James Webb Space Telescope was further along in its development journey when it reached a similar crossroads in 2010, six years after construction began. Frustrated with the ballooning budget and constantly postponed launch date, the U.S. House of Representatives included no funding for the telescope in its proposed budget, which would have ended the project had the Senate agreed.

In a statement, lawmakers castigated the mission as “billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management,” foreshadowing the criticisms that would be leveled at Mars Sample Return more than a decade later.

To forestall cancellation, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) ordered an independent review of the project, which was under construction in her state.

The board determined that Webb’s problems stemmed from a “badly flawed” initial budget. All the technical expertise needed to complete this ambitious project was there, the evaluators concluded. But getting it done with the amount of money currently set aside would be virtually impossible.

Illingworth remembered that review when he read the Mars Sample Return assessment , which offered a similarly stark conclusion.

“Some of the words are very familiar,” he said with a chuckle.

When the Mikulski review came out in 2010, Illingworth was deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which later became the James Webb Space Telescope.

He was sympathetic to the challenges facing Mars Sample Return managers, though chagrined that the James Webb Space Telescope's hard-earned lessons have apparently faded so quickly — especially the importance of having a realistic budget from the beginning.

NASA missions are managed by very smart people with established histories of doing very hard things. How does something as terrestrially mundane as budgeting continually trip them up?

“The problem is that the models that you have as a cost estimator — and they have very complex proprietary software models that attempt to understand these types of things — are all built on things that have happened , in the past tense,” said Casey Dreier , chief of space policy for the Planetary Society.

“By definition, when you're trying something completely new, it's very hard to estimate in advance how much something unprecedented will cost,” Dreier said. “That happened for Apollo, that happened for the space shuttle, it happened for James Webb, and it’s happening now for Mars Sample Return.”

Mars Sample Return also has some mission-specific challenges that Webb didn’t have to contend with. For one, it’s happening at the same time as Artemis, NASA’s wildly expensive mission to return people to the moon .

Expected to cost $93 billion through 2025, Artemis got a 27% increase in its budget over the previous year, while Mars Sample Return’s guaranteed funding is 63% less than last year’s spend.

And while NASA’s ambitions are growing, its funding from Congress, adjusted for inflation, has been essentially flat for decades. That leaves little room for unexpected extras.

“We are tasking the space agency with the most ambitious slate of programs in space since the Apollo era, but instead of Apollo-era budgets, it has one-third of 1% of U.S. spending to work with,” Dreier said. “If you stumble right now, the wolves will come for you. And that's what is happening to Mars Sample Return.”

Read more: Budget deal for NASA offers glimmer of hope for JPL's Mars Sample Return mission

Not all ambitious scientific endeavors survive the kind of scrutiny the sample return is facing. In 1993 Congress canceled the U.S. Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super Collider, an underground particle accelerator, citing concerns about rising costs and fiscal mismanagement. The government had already spent $2 billion on the project and dug 14 miles of tunnel.

But in the same week that Congress ended the supercollider, it agreed — by a margin of a single vote — to continue funding the International Space Station, a similarly expensive project whose cost overruns had been widely criticized. ISS launched in November 1998 and is still going strong. (For now, anyway — NASA will intentionally crash it into the sea in 2030.)

The space station’s future was never seriously threatened again after that painfully close vote, just as Webb’s future was never seriously questioned after the 2010 cancellation threat.

JPL, the institution managing Mars Sample Return, has already paid dearly for the mission’s initial stumbles, laying off more than 600 employees and 40 contractors after NASA ordered it to reduce its spending.

But projects that survive this kind of reckoning often emerge “stronger and more resilient,” Dreier said. “They know the eyes of the nation and NASA and Congress are on them, so you have to perform.”

NASA is set to reveal this month how it plans to move forward with Mars Sample Return. Those familiar with the mission say they believe it can still happen — and that it’s still worth doing.

“Do I have faith in NASA, JPL, all of those involved to be able to deliver on the Mars Sample Return mission with the attention and technical integrity that it requires? Absolutely,” said Orlando Figueroa, chair of the the mission's independent review team and NASA’s former “Mars Czar.”

“It will require very difficult decisions and levels of commitment, including from Congress, NASA and the administration, [and] a recognition of the importance, just like was the case with James Webb, for what this mission means for space science.”

Read more: Could a single synthetic molecule outsmart a variety of drug-resistant bacteria?

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .

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  2. Journey Into Space: The Return from Mars

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    journey into space return from mars

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  1. Journey into Space, series 4: Return from Mars [Complete story]

    This is the continuing story of 4 intrepid explorers heading back to Earth from Mars, but landing on Earth reveals that it wasn't as straight forward as they...

  2. Journey into Space

    Indeed, Space Force had originally been intended as a new Journey Into Space serial, following on from The Return from Mars, until relatively late in the day, so its four central characters are clear 'doubles' for the Journey Into Space team. In the version that was actually recorded and transmitted, one character (Chipper Barnett) refers to ...

  3. Journey into Space: The Return from Mars

    Captain Jet Morgan and the crew of the spaceship Discovery return to Earth, thinking they've been away six years - only to discover they've somehow been tran...

  4. Journey Into Space: The Return From Mars

    The Return From Mars was a revival of Journey Into Space, written by Charles Chilton for Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre in 1981, and continues the story from approximately the end of The World In Peril, with the crew returning to Earth after thirty years in space, missing presumed dead. Frozen In Time was another stand-alone story, written ...

  5. Journey Into Space : Charles Chilton, Julian Simpson : Free Download

    Despite its age, such is the respect for all of the Journey into Space and Space Force, And Journey To The Red Planet ... all made in the late 50's and into the 60's they regularly appear in the BBC Radio listings/scheduling ... JIS04 The Return From Mars 1of3 download. 27.1M . JIS04 The Return From Mars 2of3 download. 28.1M . JIS04 The ...

  6. British Sci-Fi

    Charles Chilton was asked to write a new one-off 90-minute episode of Journey Into Space for this slot, and The Return from Mars was the result. The plot was an approximate continuation from the end of The World in Peril. The episode was broadcast on 7 March 1981. Disclaimer: By uploading these files, I make no claim to ownership or copyright ...

  7. Charles Chilton

    All episodes of Charles Chilton - Journey into Space. The Return from Mars. Captain Jet Morgan and his Discovery crew are hurtling towards 2026.

  8. Journey Into Space

    In 1981, Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre slot ran a special science fiction series. Charles Chilton was asked to write a new one-off 90-minute episode of Journey Into Space for this slot, and The Return from Mars was the result. The plot was an approximate continuation from the end of The World in Peril.

  9. Journey Into Space: The World In Peril

    The Return From Mars was a revival of Journey Into Space, written by Charles Chilton for Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre in 1981, and continues the story from approximately the end of The World In Peril, with the crew returning to Earth after thirty years in space, missing presumed dead.

  10. Journey Into Space (1981) The Return from Mars (Final Episode)

    Jet Morgan and his crew return to Earth from Mars, only to find they have been missing, presumed dead, for more than thirty years.Broadcast Date: 7 Mar 1981I...

  11. Journey Into Space: The Return From Mars

    Journey Into Space: The Return From Mars Charles Chilton's cult science fiction drama returns for an excursion into another time. In this era of Satnav and GPS it's hard to imagine being ...

  12. Journey into Space: The Return From Mars

    Captain Jet Morgan and his Discovery crew find themselves hurtling towards 2026, with much confusion to follow. A spacecraft called Discovery returns back to earth from an expedition to Mars 40 ...

  13. Journey into Space: The World in Peril & The Return from Mars

    The final series of Charles Chilton's classic 1950s sci-fi trilogy and the gripping 1981 sequel Written by veteran radio producer Charles Chilton, Journey into Space kept Light Programme listeners enraptured between 1953 and 1958. Almost eight million people tuned in to the interstellar adventures of Jet Morgan and his intrepid crew, making it the last UK radio drama serial to beat ...

  14. Journey Into Space: The Return from Mars

    Return From Mars is the final adventure in the classic science fiction series. The ninety-minute episode is paired with a special half-hour feature, Journey Into Space Again, which is written and presented by Charles Chilton.

  15. Journey into Space: Return from Mars

    Charles Chiltern's 1981 sequel to the classic BBC Radio sci-fi drama epic, Journey into Space. Charles Chilton's classic radio sci-fi series Journey into Space thrilled listeners between 1953 and 1958, attracting almost eight million people to its gripping tale of the far future and the thrills of interstellar travel - the last radio programme in the UK to attract a bigger evening audience ...

  16. Journey into Space

    A BBC Radio 4 sequel to Charles Chilton's iconic radio sci-fi series. Between 1953 and 1958, Journey into Space attracted millions of listeners, gripped by the mystery and promise of space exploration in weekly cliffhanging instalments. In this thrilling episode, the spaceship Ares has been heading back to Earth for 30 years, with the crew in ...

  17. Journey Into Space: The Return From Mars

    Return From Mars is the final adventure in the classic science fiction series. The ninety-minute episode is paired with a special half-hour feature, Journey Into Space Again, which is written and presented by Charles Chilton. It includes extracts from the series and interviews with its leading actors, Andrew Faulds (Jet Morgan) and David Jacobs.

  18. Journey Into Space

    JOURNEY INTO SPACE. Journey into Space was written by Charles Chilton and ran for over 60 episodes during the 1950s, entralling the nation. ... THE RETURN FROM MARS: 0563 553618: £8.99: By the time that the series had finished, it had been translated into 17 languages, broadcast from radio stations worldwide, was novelised, and had attracted a ...

  19. Journey Into Space

    Listen to this episode from Journey Into Space on Spotify. Journey Into Space is a BBC Radio science fiction programme written by BBC producer Charles Chilton. It was the last UK radio programme to attract a bigger evening audience than television. Originally, four series were produced (the fourth was a remake of the first), which was translated into 17 languages (including Hindi, Turkish and ...

  20. Sci Fi Saturday Night presents: British Sci-Fi

    British Sci-Fi - 4 - Journey Into Space: Return From Marsby Charles Chilton Jet Morgan and his crew return to Earth from Mars, only to find they have been mi...

  21. Journey Into Space: The Return from Mars

    Journey Into Space: The Return from Mars. by Charles Chiltern ©BBC Audiobooks 2006 Audiobook. Listen to a sample Listen to a sample Description; Creators; Details ...

  22. Journey into Space: The Return from Mars

    Please don't make this your first Journey into Space, listen to the radio originals first as these are the very best and very far ahead of their own time in style and message. I also have the other two recent stories, Frozen in Time and The Host which are far better than this story, so I would leave this to last of all. ...

  23. Highlights From SpaceX's Starship Test Flight

    Then, 40 minutes into the flight, Starship will relight one if its engines while in space. If the spacecraft makes it through those experiments, the conclusion of Starship's journey will start ...

  24. NASA Sets Coverage for Crew Launch; Trio to Join Expedition 70

    Editor's note: This advisory was updated March 22, 2024, with new times for coverage following the scrub of the March 21 launch attempt.. Three crew members will launch on Saturday, March 23, to support Expedition 70 aboard the International Space Station. NASA will provide full coverage of launch and crew arrival at the microgravity laboratory.

  25. Space Force Two : Charles Chilton : Free Download, Borrow, and

    Written by Charles Chilton, it was originally intended to be a sequel to his Journey into Space series (broadcast in the 1950s), using the cast which had just made a one-off revival of that series ("The Return From Mars"); while this idea was dropped late in the development of the serial, the four characters are nevertheless essentially the same as those from the earlier series, albeit with ...

  26. How long would it take to walk around Mars?

    If the person traveled along Mars' equator, they would walk about 13,300 miles (21,400 kilometers) to get all the way around the planet.Walking around Mars through its poles would shave off about ...

  27. Mars Sample Return science continues amid budget uncertainty

    "Mars Sample Return is one of the highest priorities in the past two decadal surveys. It is an agency priority," said Lindsay Hays, acting lead scientist for MSR at NASA Headquarters, during a ...

  28. NASA's attempt to bring home part of Mars is unprecedented. The ...

    The James Webb Space Telescope was further along in its development journey when it reached a similar crossroads in 2010, six years after construction began. Frustrated with the ballooning budget ...