WASHINGTON, NASA has selected a radar, seismic, gravity and camera suite called GIMLI to be deployed at the Marius Hills Pit and test from the surface whether the pit opens into a lava tube.

The agency named GIMLI on 30 September 2026 as one of three payload suites chosen under its PRISM programme for the Moon Base effort, to fly on a commercial lander under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services scheme. No launch date and no lander vendor have been named. The principal investigator is Nathaniel Putzig of the Planetary Science Institute.

The pit lies in the Marius Hills, an ancient volcanic region. In 2017 a team using the Lunar Radar Sounder on Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft reported echoes near the pit that it interpreted as an intact lava tube, and candidate tube sites line up with mass deficits in gravity maps from the GRAIL spacecraft, the Japanese space agency said. None of that has shown whether the hole leads anywhere.

“Readers should not conclude that the pit is an opening to a lava tube,” Gareth Morgan, GIMLI’s deputy principal investigator at the institute, told Space Daily in an email on 19 October 2026.

High-resolution images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show the pit walls “form an overhang above a subsurface void space that is wider than the diameter of the pit itself”, Morgan said. The size of that void is unknown, and so is whether it is an isolated cavity or part of a larger cave system.

Similar pits exist in volcanic terrain on Earth, Morgan said. “Sometimes they are skylights into lava tubes, but in other cases they are isolated shafts/cavities caused by volcanic-tectonic activity,” he said. “GIMLI has been designed to differentiate between the two scenarios.”

“It has long been speculated that lava tubes, which on Earth are remnants of drained lava flows, exist on the Moon, but this has never been definitively confirmed,” Morgan said. “GIMLI will enable us to address this for the first time.”

“Confirming these void spaces now could shift future habitat planning, offering natural, ready-made shelters that provide crucial thermal stability and shielding from deadly ionizing radiation and micrometeoroid bombardment,” the agency said in its 30 September 2026 release.

GIMLI’s ground-penetrating radar is supplied by the Norwegian Space Agency, according to the institute. Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, is building the active-source seismic system, the gravimeter and the cameras, and is managing the project.

Each instrument should respond to a tunnel in its own way, Putzig told Space Daily in an email on 19 October 2026. “With the ground-penetrating radar, we would expect a strong reflection from the top of the lava tube back to the antenna, due to the high dielectric contrast between rock and the vacuum within the lava tube,” he said.

“For the active-source seismic, we would expect strong reflected and refracted acoustic waves from the perimeter of the lava tube, but the acoustic waves will not pass through the void space,” Putzig said. “For the gravimeter, we would expect to see a strong, negative gravity anomaly when passing over the lava tube, as it represents a locally reduced mass in what is otherwise dense rock.”

“If we see all of these effects, it will represent very strong evidence that the pit does in fact represent a collapse feature into a much more extensive lava tube,” he said.

Elevator and sealed walls

Published figures for the pit’s depth disagree. NASA’s description of the orbiter’s images puts the pit at about 34 metres deep. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team gives 40 metres in a 2017 update. Putzig put the drop at about 60 metres.

“There’s a sharp drop of about 60 m between the pit rim and the floor of the pit, so while first explorations could be done by flying or rappelling into the pit, it may become necessary to install an elevator to move people and equipment in and out of a shelter,” Putzig said.

“Creating a shelter would require walling off either end of a portion of the lava tube and pressurizing the interior, but cross-cutting fractures could make it necessary to seal off the tube walls as well to avoid leaks,” he said.

In July 2022 NASA reported that Diviner data from the orbiter and computer modelling showed shaded locations within some lunar pits “always hover around a comfortable 63 F (about 17 C)”. Radiation shielding inside the Marius Hills Pit has not been measured on site.

Morgan said a null result would still be useful. “If we don’t find evidence of a cave system at our Marius Hills landing site, our measurements will still allow us to test alternative hypotheses for lunar pit formation, which in turn will provide new insights into volcanic activity, such as localized volcanic-tectonic processes,” he said.

The pit walls also expose layers of rock. The suite’s camera mast “will be used to inspect these outcrops (from a safe distance) to measure the number, thickness and origin of the layers”, Morgan said, with the results compared against the geophysical surveys to reconstruct the site’s sequence of eruptions.

Sources:

• https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-adds-new-science-investigations-for-moon-base/
• https://www.psi.edu/blog/psi-led-team-selected-for-nasa-prism-program/
• https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/en/topics/001159.html
• https://lroc.im-ldi.com/image_tags/Pits
• https://lroc.im-ldi.com/images/202
• https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/nasas-lro-finds-lunar-pits-harbor-comfortable-temperatures/
• https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/02/Marius_Hills_pit

The post Astronauts on the Moon could shelter from radiation, micrometeoroids and extreme temperatures inside a lava tube, and NASA is sending a suite called GIMLI to scan beneath the Marius Hills Pit to see whether the pit opens into one appeared first on Space Daily.

NASA Administrator James Webb pressed Manned Spacecraft Center director Robert Gilruth for a report on whether John Young should be disciplined for smuggling a corned beef sandwich onto Gemini III, NASA’s History Office says.

Young had fellow astronaut Walter “Wally” Schirra, the backup command pilot, buy the sandwich, then pocketed it in his pressure suit as he headed to the launchpad on March 23, 1965, Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, NASA’s human spaceflight historian, wrote in the History Office essay on March 20, 2025.

Nearly two hours into a flight of almost five hours, Young offered it to commander Gus Grissom, historian James Anderson wrote in a NASA Ames essay published on March 17, 2022. Grissom took a bite, found the rye crumbling, and put the sandwich in his own suit pocket.

The whole exchange lasted less than a minute. Congress raised the matter with NASA leadership at hearings on the agency’s 1966 budget, Ross-Nazzal wrote.

Webb told the committee that “this is the United States of America’s space program and, as a matter of policy, we are not going to permit individuals to superimpose their judgment as to what is going to be taken on these flights.”

He added: “I think it is fine for Dr. Gilruth to take a very strong position with respect to the individuality of these men, but from those of us who have to look at the totality of the matter, this was not an adequate performance by an astronaut.”

Representative George E. Shipley likened the Gemini cabin to a “surgeon’s operating room” and called Young’s antics “foolish”. Crumbs behind an instrument panel could interfere with flight equipment and cost the mission and its crew.

George Mueller, associate administrator for Manned Space Flight, told the committee that NASA did not “approve [of] unauthorized objects such as sandwiches going on board the spacecraft.” He said the agency had “taken steps, obviously, to prevent recurrence of corned beef sandwiches in future flights.”

Mueller also said: “There was no detriment to the experimental program that was carried on, nor was there any detriment to the actual carrying out of the mission because of the ingestion of the sandwich.”

Gilruth defended the crew. Such antics, he told the committee, helped crews “break up the strain” of spaceflight.

Gilruth said he hesitated “to be too strict in the future by laying down a lot of rules for men who have this responsibility and who, in all the flights so far, have done such good jobs.”

Webb read the incident as a sign that Gilruth was too lax with his astronauts, Ross-Nazzal wrote, and pressed him for a report to determine whether Young should be disciplined or at the very least reprimanded. Young never received a formal reprimand.

The sea urchin experiment

Near the approved food box beside Grissom sat a canister of sea urchin eggs, Arbacia punctulata, Anderson wrote. It was NASA’s first fundamental space biology experiment in orbit.

The canister held eight identical chambers. Turning its handle was meant to start fertilization in specific chambers, with a fixative halting cell division at different stages through the flight.

The handle broke when Grissom turned it, and the experiment’s objectives were not achieved. NASA redesigned the canister, substituted frog eggs, and flew it on Gemini VIII and Gemini XII.

By the end of the program, cell division had been shown to occur in microgravity without detrimental effects attributable to lower gravity.

Gemini III had none of the strict diet controls that other Gemini experiments on astronauts often required, so a few bites of the sandwich “would not have disrupted any of the planned experiments,” Anderson wrote.

Young hatched the idea during training, when Grissom grew “bored” with the dehydrated food, Ross-Nazzal wrote. Bringing a sandwich “seemed like a fun idea at the time” to Young.

One goal of the flight was to test NASA’s food packaging and its waste disposal procedures. Young called the chicken bites “barely edible” in his post-flight debriefing.

On the air-to-ground recordings, Grissom asked, “Where did that come from?” Young said: “I brought it with me.” He added: “Let’s see how it tastes.” Then: “Smells, doesn’t it?”

Two days after the flight, reporter Bill Hines asked at the postflight press conference what became of the sandwich. “How did you find out about that?” Young said, then laughed and said Grissom “ate the sandwich.”

Starting with Gemini IV, crews had to submit a list of items they planned to carry. Sandwiches were prohibited, along with bulky, heavy or metal objects that could affect spacecraft equipment.

The incident did not harm Young’s career. He became the first astronaut to fly to space six times, on two Gemini, two Apollo and two space shuttle missions. He also served as chief of the Astronaut Office for 13 years.

Sources:

• NASA History Office, Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, “Fallout from the Unauthorized Gemini III Space Sandwich”: https://www.nasa.gov/history/fallout-from-the-unauthorized-gemini-iii-space-sandwich/
• NASA Ames, James Anderson, “Contraband Corned Beef and the Early Days of Space Biology: the Gemini III Mission”: https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/ames/contraband-corned-beef-and-the-early-days-of-space-biology-the-gemini-iii-mission/

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There is no line where the atmosphere stops. It thins the way a beach gets wetter towards the sea, until at some point you are in the water and nobody can say exactly when that happened. So the edge of space is not something anyone discovered. It is something people chose, and they chose differently.

For decades that disagreement cost almost nobody anything. It is starting to. Tourist rockets fly into the disputed band with paying passengers and come back down. Hypersonic military vehicles pass through it. The question of which number is right has turned into a question about astronaut wings, ticket sales and, eventually, sovereign airspace.

Three numbers, one of them legal and it is blank

The familiar figure is 100 kilometres, the Kármán line. The FAI, the world air sports records body, uses it to separate aviation records from astronautics records. A 2023 FAI presentation by Nicolas Bérend says the federation set it in 1960, with a group of scientists that included Theodore von Kármán, “for separating aeronautics and astronautics records”. The name came slightly earlier: Andrew G. Haley coined “Kármán line” in a 1957 paper after discussions with Kármán. That is what the 100 kilometre figure is, a records-keeping convention with a date on it.

The American figure is 50 miles, about 80 kilometres. The US Air Force used it for its astronaut wings, and the Federal Aviation Administration used the same threshold for the commercial astronaut wings it handed out until it ended that programme after 2021. In 2005 NASA gave civilian astronaut wings to three X-15 pilots, retired NASA pilot Bill Dana and the families of the late John B. McKay and Joseph A. Walker, acknowledging “their flights above 264,000 feet altitude”. That is 50 miles. When those flights happened only the military had wings to hand out, so civilian pilots flew just as high and got no badge. Dana’s first flight into space took him 58.13 miles above the Mojave Desert on 1 November 1966.

The legal figure does not exist. The 1944 Chicago Convention gives every state complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says outer space is not subject to national appropriation. Neither treaty says where one ends and the other begins, a gap a 2017 briefing to the UN space committee’s legal subcommittee lays out plainly. The committee has had the item on its agenda since 1966. Inside it the USSR repeatedly proposed 100 or 110 kilometres and the United States rejected any definition at all. The subcommittee’s 2026 draft report still carries “Matters relating to the definition and delimitation of outer space”, sixty years on.

What the physics says depends on what you ask it

Kármán himself was blunt about this. In 1961 lectures quoted in the FAI presentation he said that where atmosphere ends and space begins “is a judiciary rather than a scientific problem”, and he proposed a range, 300,000 to 400,000 feet, roughly 91 to 122 kilometres, rather than a line. The 100 kilometre figure was a round number inside that range.

Bérend’s lift-based analysis for the FAI in 2023 points to about 110 kilometres. McDowell’s argument, based on satellite drag and orbital survival, points lower.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer who has worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, made the satellite case in a 2018 paper in Acta Astronautica, “The edge of space: Revisiting the Karman Line”, free to read on arXiv. He looked at the orbits of real satellites. An elliptical orbit whose lowest point sits at 100 kilometres can survive for long periods. A satellite whose lowest point drops below 80 kilometres is “highly unlikely to complete its next orbit”. That lowest point is the perigee. McDowell argues that this makes roughly 80 kilometres a useful boundary.

Two other things happen to land in the same place. Meteors, moving much faster than satellites, usually break apart somewhere in the 70 to 100 kilometre range, a sign that the atmosphere starts to bite there. The mesopause, a boundary layer in the upper atmosphere, lies in the same broad region, though its height varies with latitude and season and is not fixed at 80 kilometres. McDowell also notes that 80 kilometres falls within 500 metres of the old 50-mile astronaut wings line. Those are separate ideas that land in roughly the same place. He suggests adopting exactly 80 kilometres as a better convention, one that fits what satellites actually do.

He is also clear about how arbitrary the field has been. Citing an earlier survey by Goedhart, he counts almost 30 different proposals between 1951 and 1962, ranging from 20 kilometres to 400. A spread of twenty to one, inside a single decade, tells you how little the physics forced anyone’s hand before McDowell checked the orbits.

The FAI took the argument seriously. In a statement on 30 November 2018 it said recently published analyses presented “a compelling scientific case” for lowering the line from 100 to 80 kilometres, and it proposed a joint workshop with the International Astronautical Federation for 2019. The workshop did not move the line. The 2023 presentation’s own conclusion is that the boundary of space “is, in any case, a matter of convention”, and the commission’s March 2025 plenary minutes record “the decision to retain the 100 km value”. The FAI has looked at 80, and has chosen 100.

Why the 20 kilometres now matter

On 11 July 2021 Richard Branson flew on Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22 to an apogee of about 86 kilometres. Nine days later Jeff Bezos flew on Blue Origin’s New Shepard past 100. Two days before Branson’s flight, Blue Origin posted that New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line “so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name”. By McDowell’s number, and by the US number, Branson’s passengers went to space. By the FAI’s, they did not. Virgin Galactic has kept selling tickets in that gap ever since, even through its current pause in flights while it builds its next ships. The dispute is no longer about an X-15 pilot’s badge. It is about what a company can truthfully print on a brochure.

The military version is less visible and more serious. Some hypersonic boost-glide weapons pass through the band on the way up and down; a 2023 Congressional Budget Office analysis models one US design reaching about 120 kilometres before spending most of its flight at 30 to 40 kilometres. For a vehicle passing over another country at 90 kilometres, an agreed boundary could help determine whether it had entered sovereign airspace. Neither an astronaut-wings rule nor an air sports convention settles that question. Nor would being in space put a weapon beyond the law: the Outer Space Treaty says activities there are carried out in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter. An agreed boundary could clarify the sovereignty question, although it would not by itself settle the legality of a weapon’s passage or use. It is the piece that is missing.

We put that to McDowell by email. “I think indeed the choice of a boundary does start to matter more as there is more activity in that liminal region,” he wrote, “both tourist suborbital flights and hypersonic military tests.”

So why has the world not switched to 80? “These things take a long time, decades,” he said. “I think my view is slowly gaining ground but I don’t know if it will ever win out!”

What to make of it

The honest reading is this. Physics does not hand you one number. Different physical criteria produce different answers: about 110 kilometres in Bérend’s analysis, about 80 in McDowell’s, and Kármán’s own answer was a range. Every line anyone has drawn is a convention. McDowell’s case is that 80 is a better convention than 100 because it matches what satellites actually do, and that is a fair case. But physics can inform the choice without settling what the boundary should mean in law.

What has changed is not that vehicles reached the band. X-15 pilots were there in the 1960s. What has changed is that the band now has customers, competitors and weapons in it, and each of them is in space according to one authority and not according to another. The edge of space was always going to be a decision. For decades, states managed without agreeing on it. Commercial flights and military vehicles now give that unresolved question practical consequences, without making agreement inevitable. McDowell’s own estimate is decades, if ever.

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On 28 November 1967, at the Woomera rocket range in outback South Australia, a six-hour countdown started on time and ticked all the way down to 30 seconds before launch. Then it stopped. A heating-cooler unit attached to the rocket had failed to eject, and everyone had to come back the next day.

I’m not a space engineer. I came across this story the way most people probably would, through a passing mention of Australia’s first satellite, and the more I read the more amazing it got. The rocket on that pad was a spare, left over from an American weapons test and given to Australia. The 45-kilogram satellite on top of it had been designed and built in Australia in about eleven months. And when it finally flew, at 2:19 the following afternoon, Australia had launched its first satellite, from its own soil, on an American rocket.

It was called WRESAT, short for Weapons Research Establishment Satellite. Here’s how it happened.

A spare rocket nobody wanted to ship home

The opportunity came out of a weapons program. During 1966 and 1967, Woomera hosted SPARTA, a joint US, UK and Australian project to gather data on the conditions nuclear warheads would face as they plunged back into the atmosphere. Ten American Redstone rockets were brought to Woomera for it, along with re-entry vehicles and an American team to fly them. If the name Redstone sounds familiar, it should. Modified Redstones launched America’s first satellite in 1958 and its first two astronauts, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, in 1961.

Only nine of them were needed, as Kerrie Dougherty OAM, space historian at the Australian Space Agency, notes in a paper on Australia’s early satellites. That left one spare. By then the Redstone was an obsolete rocket, and as Dougherty explained to me by email, the Americans “weren’t particularly interested in taking the spare back to the US”. Shipping it home wasn’t cheap either. As the Honeysuckle Creek history site puts it, “To send them back to the US would be a considerable expense.”

Project manager Des Barnsley, whose account is reproduced on that site, wrote that by late 1966 it was clear at least one of the ten vehicles would be surplus, and the idea of using it to launch an Australian satellite “was unofficially raised”. Who suggested it first has never been completely clear, Dougherty says. The Americans may have made the offer on their own, or WRE staff may have hinted that a rocket nobody wanted to take home would make a nice gift. Either way, the US decided it would be “a nice gesture of support to Australia” to donate it.

The catch: it had to fly before the end of 1967

The gift came with a deadline. The experienced American launch team would prepare and fire the rocket for the WRE, but only before they packed up and went home. That meant the launch had to happen as soon as possible after SPARTA wrapped up, and “definitely before the end of 1967”.

Everyone brought something to the table. The US supplied the rocket and a launch team from the aerospace company TRW “at no cost”. NASA agreed to track the satellite and collect its signals through STADAN, its worldwide network of tracking stations, “also at no cost”. The UK supported the launch operations through its long involvement with Woomera. Australia’s job was the satellite itself.

In other words, three countries lined up a rocket, a launch crew and a global tracking network, and Australia had less than a year to build something worth putting on top.

Eleven months, start to finish

Defence Science and Technology, the Weapons Research Establishment’s successor, records that design work began in early 1967 as a joint venture between the WRE and the University of Adelaide, and that the satellite was designed, developed, built and launched in eleven months. Barnsley’s own figure, written later, was “just less than twelve months”.

Whichever figure you use, the whole thing fitted inside a single year, with the team working towards a launch deadline that couldn’t move.

Not everyone thought it could be done. “There was plenty of scepticism from the US,” Dougherty told me. When I asked her what made it possible to build WRESAT so quickly, her answer was one word: “necessity!” If the satellite wasn’t ready before the US team left, the launch wouldn’t have gone ahead, or would have had to wait until a WRE team could be trained to prepare and fire the rocket themselves.

It also helped that the Australians weren’t starting cold. Barnsley put the speed down to work that had started long before the offer arrived. The WRE and the University of Adelaide’s physics department had spent years working together on upper atmosphere research using sounding rockets, small locally built rockets that carry instruments high into the sky and then fall back to Earth rather than going into orbit. WRESAT’s scientific payload, developed by the University of Adelaide, grew directly out of the instruments they had been flying on sounding rockets since 1962. The team already knew how to build the instruments. What they had never done was put them into orbit.

“With a lot of ingenuity, innovation and pragmatic decisions, they were able to have WRESAT ready to fly by November 1967,” Dougherty said.

The key people named on the history site are Barnsley as project manager, Professor J H Carver of the University of Adelaide, Bryan Rofe as officer in scientific charge, and Dr Don Woods. By Barnsley’s account, the outside contracts cost “a few hundred thousand dollars”.

Who deserves the credit?

I also asked Dougherty how she would split the credit between the two countries. She started with the Americans. The project “simply would not have occurred if the rocket had not been offered by the US”, the launch was handled by the experienced US team, and NASA provided the global tracking.

“But the rapid design and construction of the satellite itself, and its scientific payload, was an all-Australian project, albeit with advice and guidance from the US.”

Weighing it all up, this is where she landed.

“So I guess that I would have to put it at 50/50, or maybe even 60/40 in favour of the US, since their offer made the whole project happen. Australia gained entry to the ‘Space Club’ at a greatly discounted price!”

The tight schedule did come at a cost. The biggest drawback of working to the US timetable, Dougherty said, was that there was no time to design and build solar panels, so WRESAT had to run on batteries, “which severely limited its operational lifespan”.

Bumping around in the back of a truck

The satellite stayed attached to the rocket’s spent third stage in orbit, so there are two weights for it. The satellite on its own was a cone about 1.6 metres long, weighing 45 kilograms. Together with the burned-out stage it rode on, the whole package that reached orbit weighed about 72.5 kilograms and was a little over two metres long.

My favourite detail comes from the curator’s notes on Australian Screen Online. The American team was reportedly horrified to see WRESAT bumping around in the back of an open truck. The Australians’ response was that if it couldn’t survive the short ride, it was unlikely to survive lift-off.

The same notes record that very few dignitaries turned up to watch when it finally launched on the 29th.

What it did up there

WRESAT went into a near-polar orbit, so each lap carried it high over the far north and far south of the planet, without passing directly over either pole. Its path was a stretched oval, ranging from a couple of hundred kilometres above the Earth to more than 1,200 kilometres.

Its instruments measured ultraviolet light and X-rays coming from the Sun, along with a faint ultraviolet glow, called Lyman alpha, made when sunlight is scattered by the thin cloud of hydrogen surrounding the Earth. In plain terms, it was measuring kinds of sunlight that the upper atmosphere soaks up before they can reach the ground, which you can only properly study from above. Defence’s history describes the aim as improving understanding of how the upper atmosphere affects climate and weather, and helping US research programs gather physical data. The readings came back by radio on 136.350 MHz.

That was the big step up from the sounding rockets the team had flown before. A sounding rocket only spends a few minutes high enough to take these readings before it falls back to Earth. WRESAT could take them orbit after orbit, for days. Short as its working life was, Dougherty says it “obtained valuable data for comparison with the sounding rocket data already obtained at Woomera”.

With no solar panels, WRESAT simply transmitted until its batteries ran flat. According to DST, it completed 642 orbits and sent back scientific information during 73 of them, roughly its first five days. It then kept circling silently for weeks until it re-entered the atmosphere and burned up on 10 January 1968, over the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland.

There’s one more neat footnote. As space writer Andrew LePage notes at Drew Ex Machina, the rocket that carried Australia’s first satellite was also the last known Redstone ever flown.

A donated rocket and a lot of goodwill

The successful launch brought congratulations from the US, including a message from the US Vice-President. Among them was a note from Gilbert Ousley at NASA in Maryland: “There were many sceptics here concerning the time scale, but you proved them wrong.”

Barnsley was blunt about where the whole thing came from. He wrote that “without the outstanding relationship between Australia and the US DoD and NASA the project could never have been contemplated, let alone undertaken.”

That seems fair to me. The rocket, the launch crew and the tracking network all belonged to someone else, and the window was a matter of months. What Australia brought was a group of people who already knew how to build the instruments, and who finished them inside a deadline that was set before the work began.

Dougherty summed it up better than I can. “WRESAT was a fine example of Australian technical and scientific skills, innovation and our inventive ‘make do’ tradition, made possible by the generous donation of the launch vehicle by the US.”

That’s what amazes me most. It wasn’t one country going it alone. It was three countries deciding a leftover rocket was too good to waste, and a small team in Adelaide and Woomera making sure it wasn’t.

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In May 1963, about 3,600 kilometres above Earth, a radio command reached a small package riding piggyback on an Air Force satellite. Inside were 480 million copper wires, each 1.78 centimetres long and less than two hundredths of a millimetre thick, set in a binder made to vanish in sunlight. As the binder turned straight to vapour in the vacuum, wires began to drift free and spread into a thin ring around the planet.

That was Project West Ford, built by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory for the US Air Force and meant to carry long-distance radio that solar flares and jamming could not knock out. Lincoln Laboratory says the belt of loose wires had been swept from orbit by late 1965, on schedule. Many wires never came loose. Space Daily’s check of two public satellite catalogues, CelesTrak and Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT, on 8 October 2026 finds 36 to 39 clumps of West Ford wire still listed in orbit, 63 years later. CelesTrak has an orbit from the past month for 26 of its 39, and 23 of those are objects both catalogues agree are West Ford wire still in orbit. The most recent recorded reentry was in April 2024.

Space Daily told the story of the experiment itself in September. This piece follows the wire left behind, and sets two early forecasts about it, known here from the papers’ published summaries, beside six decades of tracking records.

A radio mirror for a fragile sky

In the early 1960s, much long-distance radio still worked by bouncing signals off the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere. That mirror was unreliable. As the Harvard Crimson explained in May 1963, signals off the ionosphere could be jammed, and “a large solar flare can cause a radio fadeout by impairing the ionosphere’s ability to transmit signals.”

For a military with forces spread around the world, that was a serious weakness. Lincoln Laboratory’s own retrospective on the project describes communications for command and control as one of the Defense Department’s “acute problems” of the time. The idea, proposed by Walter Morrow of Lincoln Laboratory and Harold Meyer of Ramo-Wooldridge, was a belt of metal wires that would serve, “in effect, as an artificial ionosphere.” Morrow’s plan, the Crimson wrote, was meant “to provide a jam-proof, fail-proof, destruction-proof communication system.”

Each wire was a tiny antenna. A metal rod about half a wavelength long resonates with a radio wave, so the needles were sized for the X-band microwaves the ground stations used. Sixty-foot dishes would aim a powerful beam at the belt, and the scattered echo would reach a receiving dish across the continent. NASA’s Echo 1A balloon had used a similar passive trick in 1960 with a single giant reflector. West Ford tried it with a cloud.

The first attempt, in October 1961, failed. Lincoln Laboratory’s account says the dispenser’s ejection mechanism “didn’t spin up, so no dipoles were released.” NASA’s 2013 review puts it differently, saying the wires “did not dispense individually,” and the Crimson described “four or five useless clumps of wire floating around the earth.” The 1963 package packed its wires into a spinning cylinder, so that sunlight could turn the binder to vapour and release the needles from its surface, according to the engineering paper describing it.

A ring that worked, briefly

For a short window, it worked. The belt took about 40 days to close into a complete ring, according to a 1964 analysis of its orbit. Voice, data and teletype passed between West Ford stations at Millstone Hill in Massachusetts and Camp Parks in northern California.

The data rates fell fast. A 1964 report on the communications tests records digital data sent at 20,000 bits per second at first, sliding to around 100 bits per second. Digitised voice was sent during the first week. After about 50 days the belt was generally too sparse for the full scattering measurements, and the only traffic sent through it was teletype.

By late 1965, the Lincoln retrospective says, it was clear the future “belonged not to orbiting passive dipoles but to satellites with active transponders,” spacecraft that receive a signal and send it back out amplified.

The astronomers’ revolt

Astronomers had fought the project from the start, fearing the wires would spoil their view of the sky at both optical and radio wavelengths. The International Astronomical Union formally objected in 1961, and the Crimson reported that both the IAU and the US National Academy of Sciences set up “watchdog committees” because of West Ford.

The objection went beyond copper. Sir Bernard Lovell, head of Britain’s Jodrell Bank radio observatory, put it this way, as quoted by the Crimson: “The damage lies not with this experiment alone, but with the attitude of mind which makes it possible without international agreement and safeguards.”

The engineers’ answer was a short lifetime by design. The wires were so light for their size that sunlight itself would push on them, stretching their orbits into long ovals until the low point dipped into the atmosphere and air drag pulled them down. The Lincoln account calls this giving the dipoles “a high area-to-mass ratio.” In 1964 the Lincoln team concluded that the wires, loose or clumped, “never interfered with any astronomical observations,” a verdict from the project’s own scientists.

NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office counts the 1967 Outer Space Treaty among the legacies of Project West Ford. Its Article IX says a state that “has reason to believe” an activity or experiment it plans “would cause potentially harmful interference” with other nations’ peaceful use of space “shall undertake appropriate international consultations” before going ahead. The office also notes that the international Committee on Space Research set up a group on potentially harmful space experiments after the failed 1961 mission. By 2013, NASA said, that group had evolved into the panel that hosts the committee’s discussions of orbital debris.

The clumps that stayed up

The loose needles behaved as predicted. In a 1966 paper in Science, Lincoln physicist Irwin Shapiro reported that radar confirmed the individual wires had reentered “in precise accord with predictions.” Calculations, he wrote, indicated that the wires survived reentry and “floated gently back to Earth,” though “the probability of finding one is minuscule.”

The trouble was how many had never separated. A 2013 review by NASA’s debris office says a post-mission investigation found only 25 to 45 percent of the planned 480 million dipoles dispersed properly. The rest are believed to have stayed stuck together, and the clumps were later picked up by the US Space Surveillance Network. NASA notes they are “still strongly affected by solar radiation pressure.”

Lincoln’s team expected those clumps to come down too, mostly. The published summary of their 1964 assessment said “the orbital lifetime of most of these clusters will be less than ten years; some, however, will orbit indefinitely.” The summary of Shapiro’s December 1966 paper went further: “Some dipole clusters remain in orbit but almost all should return to Earth within the next 2 years.”

That second forecast can at least be set against the clumps already in the US satellite catalogue when the paper appeared. The paper’s published summary does not say whether “almost all” meant only the clusters in that catalogue, but if it did, the record does not bear it out.

CelesTrak, a widely used public satellite-tracking site, lists 147 objects from the 1963 launch under the name “Westford Needles,” and the order of their catalogue numbers suggests roughly when each was first logged. About 30 clumps were already on the books by November 1966. None of them came down in the next two years. None came down within ten years of launch either. The first fell in November 1974, and CelesTrak still lists 16 in orbit today, 12 of them with orbits updated in the past month.

Across all 147, the record is slow too. Only 13 came down within ten years of launch, all of them clumps catalogued after 1966, and most of the 104 marked as decayed fell between the 1970s and the 1990s. Three came down in the 2010s and three more since 2020, in November 2020, October 2022 and April 2024.

Counting wire in the dark

CelesTrak shows 43 “Westford Needles” objects still in orbit, but not all of them are wire. Jonathan McDowell’s independent GCAT catalogue identifies two as solar array covers from the satellite that carried the package and two as parts of the West Ford package itself. That leaves 39 clumps in CelesTrak’s listing. NASA said in 2013 that two “Westford Needles” entries are assessed to be from a different mission, without saying which.

GCAT counts 36 West Ford wire objects in orbit, and five of those carry a flag meaning probably still in orbit but lost, with no recent tracking data. The two lists disagree on whether five objects are still up. GCAT records three that CelesTrak shows as orbiting as having reentered decades ago, though two of those still have current CelesTrak orbits. It assigns a fourth, which also has a current CelesTrak orbit, to a 1969 launch, and it keeps a fifth as lost that CelesTrak says reentered in 1989.

Only 26 of CelesTrak’s 39 have orbits updated in the past month, and three of those are objects GCAT disputes. That leaves 23 that both catalogues call West Ford wire and that have a current orbit, which is the firmest count of what is still circling. Small clumps on stretched, shifting orbits are hard to follow, and a missing public orbit does not prove an object is gone, or that it is still there.

The dates need care too. Fourteen objects in CelesTrak share one reentry date, 17 October 1987, which looks more like a catalogue clean-up than fourteen clumps falling on the same day. And the catalogue-number method used above to date when clumps were first logged is an inference, not a field the catalogues record.

NASA’s own figure in 2013 was 46 clumps. Both catalogues record six reentries since then, yet 46 minus six does not give either current count, most likely because entries have been added and reassigned along the way. Comparing the 2013 number with today’s is not a clean measure of decline.

The 1964 forecast is harder to hold anyone to. It covered all clusters, including small ones radar may never have caught, and it allowed that “some” would orbit indefinitely.

None of the sources reviewed for this piece reports a collision involving West Ford wire, and the 1964 team judged collisions with spacecraft “improbable.”

Looking for needles

West Ford left something else behind on the ground. Lincoln Laboratory had already been funded to develop a powerful ground terminal “of the sort that a higher-capacity West Ford system would use.” The retrospective explains the name it was given: Haystack, “because its main job was to look for needles in space.”

The future went to active satellites. Haystack stayed. In the same 2013 newsletter that counted the West Ford clumps, NASA described the Haystack radar sampling small orbital debris for its debris office.

Somewhere on Earth, more than a hundred million copper hairs from 1963 presumably lie where they settled, too fine to find. Overhead, more than 20 tangles of the same wire are still being tracked, nudged on every orbit by the sunlight that was supposed to bring them down.

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ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer returned to Earth on 28 September 2026, but home was only a waypoint. During a successful flyby 8,640 kilometres above the Indian Ocean, Earth’s motion and gravity deflected Juice’s path by 20 degrees and increased its speed relative to the Sun by 3.5 kilometres per second.

The encounter was the third of four planned gravity assists. It followed the first lunar-Earth double flyby in 2024 and a Venus flyby in August 2025. One more Earth pass in January 2029 will finally place Juice on its transfer towards Jupiter, where it is due to arrive in July 2031.

The mission turned this return into more than a trajectory correction. Juice’s navigation camera pointed at the Moon’s horizon to test a technique intended to improve optical navigation during selected encounters in a sequence of 35 future flybys of Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.

The Moon is not part of the gravity assist this time. It is a known target on which engineers can rehearse the image geometry they will later need around worlds hundreds of millions of kilometres away.

The detour through Venus began with a slowdown

The route looks inefficient only if distance is the sole measure. A direct flight would require a much more energetic launch and an enormous propellant load, first to reach Jupiter and then to prevent a nearly 6,000-kilogram spacecraft from flying straight past it.

A gravity assist avoids carrying most of that fuel. In the Sun’s frame, a spacecraft exchanges a minute amount of momentum with a moving planet as gravity curves its trajectory. The result can be a gain or loss of heliocentric speed, depending on the direction of approach. The planet’s own motion is what makes the encounter more than a simple U-turn.

Juice’s first assist in August 2024 deliberately removed energy. The Moon increased its speed by 0.9 kilometres per second relative to the Sun, positioning it for Earth one day later. Earth then reduced its heliocentric speed by 4.8 kilometres per second; overall, the lunar-Earth sequence turned the path by about 100 degrees.

That world-first lunar-Earth sequence sent Juice inward towards Venus while saving an estimated 100 to 150 kilograms of propellant. SpaceDaily’s account of the completed trajectory reset described how the two encounters worked together.

Venus supplied the next turn on 31 August 2025, bending the solar orbit back towards Earth and adding speed. The flyby had no sightseeing component. Juice was built for the cold outer Solar System, so it pointed its 2.5-metre high-gain antenna towards the Sun as a heat shield and kept its remote-sensing instruments inactive.

The operation followed a communications failure caused by a software timing bug that left a signal amplifier switched off. SpaceDaily covered the recovery and final preparation for the Venus encounter. ESA subsequently described the spacecraft as successfully through that flyby and on course for Earth.

Earth supplied a precisely aimed bend

According to ESA’s flyby report, closest approach occurred over the Indian Ocean at 11:45 UTC on 28 September. Earth deflected Juice’s trajectory by 20 degrees and increased its speed relative to the Sun by 3.5 kilometres per second.

Those numbers are not produced by an engine burn at perigee. They are the consequence of entering Earth’s moving gravitational field along a carefully chosen line and leaving it in a new direction. A mistimed arrival would change both the size and direction of the result.

The navigation campaign began on 17 August. Six correction opportunities were reserved at intervals including four weeks, two weeks, one week and three days before the encounter. ESA reported after the flyby that only one small manoeuvre had been required; enhanced tracking continues until 10 October.

The reserved final emergency manoeuvre was not needed. Juice passed above Australia before closest approach and then swept over the Indian Ocean along the planned trajectory.

This boost still does not send Juice straight to Jupiter. Jupiter is not yet in the right place. The 2026 encounter has shaped another solar orbit, returning Juice to Earth in January 2029 for the final push onto a path that intercepts Jupiter in July 2031.

Earth’s shadow turns geometry into a power problem

Before closest approach, Juice spent eight hours and 39 minutes in Earth’s shadow, from 19:24 UTC on 27 September until 04:03 UTC on 28 September. With no sunlight reaching its solar arrays, the spacecraft operated from batteries alone.

That eclipse did not threaten the flyby, but it limited how freely the payload could be used. Teams prioritised the most valuable observations during the battery-powered interval rather than switching on every instrument continuously.

Across a wider window from 23 September to 3 October, all ten science instruments were scheduled to gather data on Earth and the Moon, though not continuously or all at once. ESA expects to publish selected images and spectra after the data reach Earth and are evaluated. Both bodies are useful calibration targets because their shapes, surfaces and surrounding environment are already measured far better than the Jovian system.

Juice also spent several days inside Earth’s magnetotail, the long nightside extension of the magnetic field shaped by the solar wind. The measurements can test particle and field instruments in a complex but comparatively familiar plasma environment before they face Jupiter’s larger, faster-rotating and more intense magnetosphere.

Two small monitoring cameras photographed the passage as well. They should not be confused with NavCam or the JANUS science camera. The monitoring cameras provide engineering views of the spacecraft and its surroundings; NavCam extracts geometry; JANUS is designed for scientific imaging. NavCam also returned an image of Madagascar taken two minutes after closest approach.

The Moon stands in for three icy worlds

During this Earth approach, the navigation camera pointed towards the lunar horizon, also called the limb. An image of that curved boundary contains information about the apparent centre and angular size of the Moon. Compared with a predicted view, it can sharpen the estimate of the spacecraft’s position relative to the target.

ESA said the lunar observations were intended to test a technique for improving optical-navigation accuracy, but had not published an evaluated performance result at the time of this update. The careful claim is therefore that Moon-limb images tested the method, not that the September campaign has already proved a specific performance gain.

NavCam first operated on a real world during the 2024 lunar-Earth encounter. In its account of that first in-space test, ESA showed raw, uncalibrated lunar images and explained that the camera would later use the shapes of Jupiter’s moons to support navigation.

The 2026 geometry was different. Juice did not fly close to the Moon, and lunar gravity was not the manoeuvre. The Moon was observed from the Earth-approach trajectory as a reference object. Calling it a rehearsal is accurate; calling this another lunar gravity assist would not be.

Why a camera must share the navigation load

Ground-based radio tracking remains essential, but a complete Earth communications loop is too slow for fresh local relative-position updates during a close Jovian flyby. Near Jupiter, a radio message can take roughly 50 minutes each way. The location of the moon relative to the approaching spacecraft also matters more than an absolute position measured in isolation.

SpaceDaily’s earlier account of Juice’s image-based navigation system described onboard software that detects the edges of a moon in NavCam images. Those edge measurements allow the system to refine relative geometry without waiting through the complete Earth communications loop.

The underlying system is called Enhanced Attitude Guidance through Limb Extraction, or EAGLE. It is intended for use on the inbound leg of selected moon encounters, with mission planners deciding case by case when the technique should support guidance and pointing.

This does not mean Juice will improvise a tour or replace its flight-dynamics team. Ground controllers design and command the encounters. Optical navigation supplies a timely local measurement during sequences in which a small targeting error could move an instrument footprint by many kilometres or turn a planned close pass into a miss.

NavCam is also not a substitute for the science payload. It is a wide-field engineering camera optimised to tell the spacecraft where a world is. Scientific cameras and spectrometers ask what that world is made of and how its surface changes. A blurred-looking limb can still be excellent navigation data.

Earth is a rehearsal, not the destination

After Jupiter arrival, Juice will make 35 flybys of Ganymede, Callisto and Europa before entering orbit around Ganymede in 2034. Each encounter must satisfy navigation, power, communications, radiation and instrument-pointing constraints at the same time.

SpaceDaily has also reported an engineering-model rehearsal of a Callisto flyby, in which simulated images were projected into a navigation camera to exercise the flight software. That laboratory test supplied a synthetic moon; September’s observation supplied a real horizon to the flight camera in space.

Earth and the Moon offer known targets, stronger communications and time to improve procedures. At Jupiter, the encounters will be distant, fast and scientifically scarce. The apparent detour through Venus has preserved the fuel needed to conduct that tour, while the lunar images supplied something equally valuable: a navigation method tested before the real icy moons fill the camera. ESA had not yet released the evaluated performance result, so the size of any improvement remains unreported.

The post To reach Jupiter, Juice took a detour past Venus, then returned to Earth on 28 September for a successful gravity boost while using our Moon to rehearse the navigation it will need around Jupiter’s icy moons. appeared first on Space Daily.

In March 2001, one of the largest objects humans had ever put in orbit was about to fall out of the sky, and a fast-food chain saw a marketing opportunity in the wreckage.

The object was Mir, the Russian space station — about 130 tonnes of hardware that had circled Earth for 15 years. Russia had run out of money to keep it up, so engineers were steering it down for a controlled, fiery death over the empty South Pacific. And floating out there in the ocean, waiting for it, was a giant bullseye that said “Free Taco Here.”

The bullseye in the sea

The stunt was pure Taco Bell. The company built a 40-by-40-foot vinyl target — its bell logo ringed by a bullseye, the words “Free Taco Here” in bold letters — and anchored it in the South Pacific about ten miles off the coast of Australia, along Mir’s expected re-entry path.

The promise: if the core of the plummeting space station struck the target, every single person in the United States would get a free taco. Roughly 280 million people. The company set up a countdown clock on its website and fed a hungry international press corps four days of coverage, tying its brand to what news anchors were solemnly calling one of the great celestial events of the era.

It was a promise engineered to be impossible to lose — and, almost certainly, impossible to pay out.

Why the insurance was the smart part, not the scared part

The detail everyone remembers is that Taco Bell bought an insurance policy against a direct hit. It’s tempting to read that as nerves — as if the company genuinely feared it would owe America ten million tacos. The truth is closer to the opposite, and it’s what makes the stunt a small masterpiece.

Taco Bell hired a Dallas firm called SCA Promotions — a company whose entire business is insuring exactly these kinds of prize offers. For a modest premium, SCA takes on the risk of a giant payout that is extremely unlikely to happen. And a piece of a space station hitting a 40-foot raft in the open Pacific was about as unlikely as promotions get: the target was a speck, the ocean is unimaginably vast, and Mir was coming down along a track thousands of miles long.

So the insurance wasn’t fear. It was the mechanism. It let Taco Bell dangle a genuinely enormous prize — free tacos for the entire country, an estimated $10 million liability — while its actual exposure was just the small, fixed cost of the premium. The company got to look daring and generous while a specialist quietly absorbed a risk that was never going to materialize. That is the whole trick of prize-indemnity marketing, performed here on a planetary stage.

Mir missed, obviously

On March 23, 2001, Mir blazed back into the atmosphere and broke apart, its surviving fragments splashing down in the South Pacific — closer to Chile than to Australia, and nowhere near the taco raft. The bullseye bobbed, un-struck. No free tacos for America.

Nobody at Taco Bell was surprised, or sorry. The company had never needed Mir to hit the target; it had needed the world to spend four days talking about Taco Bell and a space station in the same sentence, which the world dutifully did. As a fallback, the chain rolled out its real promotion — the one it had wanted to push all along — a “consolation” deal of two tacos for 99 cents. The falling space station was just the world’s most expensive attention-getter, and Taco Bell got to use it for the price of a vinyl sheet and an insurance premium.

The genius of aiming at the impossible

Strip the stunt down and it’s a clean lesson in how modern marketing actually works, which is why people still tell the story a quarter-century later.

Taco Bell risked almost nothing and bought enormous, global, free publicity — the kind money can’t easily buy directly — by attaching itself to a genuine, once-in-a-generation news event and making a promise it was statistically guaranteed not to have to keep. The insurance policy, the part that sounds like caution, was really the engine of the audacity: it converted a terrifying-sounding liability into a fixed, trivial line item, freeing the company to be as bold as it liked.

The Russians spent 15 years and billions of dollars building Mir, and its final act, on the way down, was to serve as a free billboard for a taco chain that had wagered a coupon it knew it would never have to honour. Mir aimed for an empty patch of ocean and hit it. Taco Bell aimed for the front page and hit that. Only one of them was ever really trying to miss.

The post In 2001, Taco Bell anchored a 40-foot floating target off Australia and promised every American a free taco if the falling Mir space station hit it — and the company took out an insurance policy against a direct strike before the 130-ton station came down appeared first on Space Daily.