New Mars Forums

SpaceX is unlikely to attempt a Mars mission in 2026 after all, according to CEO Elon Musk, marking a setback in his plans to colonize the planet.

“It would be a low-probability shot and somewhat of a distraction,” Musk told entrepreneur Peter Diamandis in a podcast recorded in late December and published this week.
In September 2024, Musk discussed SpaceX’s plans to send an uncrewed Starship rocket to Mars this coming year. At the time, Musk said the mission would test how reliably SpaceX could land its vehicles on the planet’s surface. If things went well, he estimated SpaceX could send crewed missions as soon as 2028.

But Musk has dialed back his optimism over the past year. In May, he gave his company a 50% chance of being ready for a launch in late 2026, which would coincide with a narrow window that occurs every two years when Mars and Earth align. A few months later, he said the uncrewed flight would “most likely” happen in 2029.

August 2025, Musk said there was a “slight chance” of a Starship flight to Mars in November or December 2026 crewed by Optimus, the humanoid robots being developed by Tesla “A lot needs to go right for that.”

A mission to Mars hinges on SpaceX being capable of refueling Starship’s upper stage in orbit, a complicated task that Musk told Diamandis could be achieved toward the end of 2026. Accomplishing orbital refueling is also crucial for SpaceX to complete a recently reopened contract to carry NASA astronauts to the moon.

SpaceX was on track to demonstrate its process — which involves launching tanker versions of Starship into orbit — in 2025, a NASA official said the year before. But the company missed that target and now plans to attempt its first orbital-refueling demonstration between Starship vehicles in June, according to internal documents viewed by Politico.

SpaceX, which is now developing the third generation of the reusable 404-foot Starship rocket, has also had difficulty testing its vehicle. Its first three flights of 2025 were failures, while the remaining two launch attempts were much more successful. The next iteration of Starship will be a “massive upgrade” over its predecessor, Musk has said.SpaceX was on track to demonstrate its process — which involves launching tanker versions of Starship into orbit — in 2025, a NASA official said the year before. But the company missed that target and now plans to attempt its first orbital-refueling demonstration between Starship vehicles in June, according to internal documents viewed by Politico.

SpaceX, which is now developing the third generation of the reusable 404-foot Starship rocket, has also had difficulty testing its vehicle. Its first three flights of 2025 were failures, while the remaining two launch attempts were much more successful. The next iteration of Starship will be a “massive upgrade” over its predecessor, Musk has said.

In addition to preparing for Mars and lunar missions, SpaceX dominates the commercial launch industry and runs a successful satellite-internet business. It plans to go public later this year in what could be a record-breaking listing that could help fund its plans for Starship as well as for space-based data centers.

Although SpaceX probably won’t be headed to the red planet in 2026, twin spacecraft will make the journey this year. Blue and Gold, a pair of satellites developed by Rocket Lab were launched into space last November by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to fulfill NASA’s Escapade mission.

The spacecraft are expected to attempt a trans-Mars injection engine burn in November 2026 and arrive at the planet in September of next year, according to NASA. The satellites will be operated by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and will gather data that could help humans land on or even settle Mars.

DreamHost experienced a major Denial of Service (DoS/DDoS) attack targeting its DNS servers in August 2017, which caused widespread outages for many of its customers' websites, including the Newmars forum. The attack overwhelmed DreamHost's infrastructure, making websites inaccessible by preventing them from resolving their IP addresses.
Details of the Incident
Nature of the Attack: The attacks were a large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which is designed to knock websites offline by overloading servers with malicious traffic.
Target: The primary targets were DreamHost's DNS (Domain Name System) servers (ns1, ns2, and ns3.dreamhost.com), which are essential for directing internet traffic to the correct websites.
Impact on Newmars Forum: As the Newmars forum likely used DreamHost's DNS services, it was one of the many sites affected by the resulting downtime.
DreamHost's Response: DreamHost acknowledged the powerful DDoS attack and worked to mitigate the issue. The company's acceptable use policy explicitly prohibits any activity that results in their servers becoming the target of a DoS attack.
Current Status
The 2017 incident was resolved a short time after it occurred. If you are experiencing current issues with the Newmars forum, it is recommended to check the DreamHost Status page for any ongoing incidents

he query refers to a specific discussion or incident on a forum related to the "New Mars Image Server" and a potential phpBB3 denial of service issue at DreamHost.
Based on search results, the issue appears to be a forum-specific problem where bots/crawlers caused high server load, which the site administrator addressed by blacklisting IP addresses, rather than a large-scale attack on DreamHost's infrastructure. DreamHost has, however, experienced large-scale, unrelated DDoS attacks targeting their DNS servers in the past (e.g., in August 2017).
Details of the Incident
Nature of the Issue: The problem at the "New Mars Image Server" (newmars.com) was likely caused by automated bots or scrapers, rather than a malicious, coordinated denial-of-service attack. These bots generated excessive traffic and server load by repeatedly requesting non-existent files or creating new sessions, leading to service interruptions.
Mitigation: The forum administrator implemented a fix by identifying specific bot user-agent strings and blacklisting problematic IP addresses, which successfully stopped the issue. They also discussed implementing Q&A CAPTCHAs to prevent spam registrations and closing the board during maintenance as prevention methods.
DreamHost's Stance: DreamHost prohibits all forms of denial of service attacks and related activities under its Acceptable Use Policy. If abuse is detected, they may take action to secure the account, including suspension or termination of service.
General Guidance
If you are experiencing similar issues on a phpBB board hosted by DreamHost:
Check logs: Review your access logs for unusual activity, especially repetitive requests from specific IP addresses or abnormal user-agent strings.
Configure phpBB settings: Utilize phpBB's built-in spam prevention tools, such as Q&A CAPTCHAs, and configure spider/robot settings to handle legitimate bots efficiently.
Update software: Ensure your phpBB installation, themes, and any plugins are kept up to date to patch known vulnerabilities that could be exploited to cause a DoS.
Contact Support: If you suspect an ongoing attack affecting your server performance, you should contact DreamHost support immediately. They can help identify the cause and potentially whitelist ModSecurity rules or apply server-level mitigation if necessary

I am very enthusiastic with the appointment of Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator!

Here's a link to this excellent interview!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnwyh2B … WL&index=1

The odds favor their survival,  but the lethal uncertainty is nowhere near zero.  Initially,  the excuse was eliminating the skip and just going for direct entry.  I do not see anything of that plan in the recent stories.  This reminds me eerily of Challenger and Columbia. 

I am still disappointed seeing the entire debate framed only as "fly what you have" vs "total redesign".  Total redesign is NOT required,  all they need to do is go back to the labor-intensive hand-gunned heat shield.  There is NO REDESIGN associated with that!  They already HAVE that design!  They already flew it!

Doing that would enable them to work out how to cast those tiles with the hex cores in the them,  and fly such a thing,  even as a subscale test article,  to see it actually work right.  I already showed how to do that revised processing with an extrusion press,  here on these forums,  and I already sent that idea to them via a contact I knew within NASA,  who has since retired.  I NEVER EVER heard back from their heat shield people,  to whom my contact forwarded my materials.  "Not invented here" is a real flaw shared by lots of big organizations! 

But it would definitely work,  because the fibrous nature of the charred hex helps tie the otherwise weak carbon char together.  It's a composite material that is better than just the carbon char from the polymer alone.  I know that because of my experience with ablatives in ramjets and solid rockets.  If you cannot reinforce the char,  it goes away too quickly,  in one fashion or another.  Which experience goes way beyond sample testing in an arc jet tunnel,  and running CFD codes that usually do not deserve to be believed,  without confirmation testing!  I'm talking real burn experiences with real motors and engines here!

The Artemis 1 failure already proved that fiber reinforcement contention of mine!  The only difference between Artemis 1 and the first Orion that flew was that they deleted the hex to cast the tiles instead of hand-gunning the polymer into a hex core already attached to the capsule,  like Apollo.  Which is what flew on the first Orion.  That's NOT a FULL re-design of anything,  it's only a variation on the cast tile processing they now prefer (at the risk of the crew's lives,  I might add,  if they don't do something to reinforce that char).

GW

For GW Johnson...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo … e130a&ei=8

I think this is the best way to preserve items that would disappear over time.

The story at the link above reports on a personal review of the heat shield for Artemis II by the new NASA director.

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On the eve of the first crewed flight of the Artemis program, NASA’s top leadership has zeroed in on a single, unforgiving piece of hardware: the Orion capsule’s heat shield. The final go or no-go review of that system is not just a technical milestone, it is a public test of whether the agency has truly learned from the scorching lessons of Artemis I and is ready to send astronauts back toward the Moon.

By personally scrutinizing the Orion heat shield before Artemis II, the new NASA chief is signaling that the agency’s confidence must be earned, not assumed. The outcome of that review will shape when the mission flies, how the crew returns, and how the public judges NASA’s willingness to confront uncomfortable risks in full view.

From char loss mystery to root cause
The scrutiny now focused on Orion’s heat shield began the moment the uncrewed Artemis I capsule was pulled from the Pacific and hauled back to shore. After NASA recovered the Orion spacecraft and transported it to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, engineers found that parts of the charred layer on the ablative shield had come off in ways they did not fully predict, a surprise for a system designed to burn away in a controlled fashion during reentry. That discovery triggered a long investigation into why chunks of material were shedding, and whether the pattern hinted at a deeper design flaw in the thermal protection system that guards the crew module.

Investigators eventually traced the problem to how the material behaved under the specific heating and airflow conditions of the Artemis I trajectory, rather than to a single manufacturing defect or obvious structural crack. NASA has described how the charred layer on Orion’s base heat shield experienced unexpected char loss, prompting teams to dissect the shield, model the aerothermal environment, and compare test data with flight telemetry. That work set the stage for the current go or no-go decision, because it forced NASA to decide whether the anomaly could be bounded with analysis and minor tweaks, or whether a more invasive redesign was needed before putting people on board.

Why Artemis II depends on a single shield
The stakes of that decision are clear when I look at what Artemis II is supposed to do. The mission will send a crew of four, including Christina Koch, on a loop around the Moon and back to Earth, exposing Orion to a high-speed reentry that is only slightly less punishing than a direct lunar return. Koch and the other members of the Artemis 2 crew are eager to launch on their mission, but their path home runs straight through the same thermal environment that stripped away char on Artemis I, and any uncertainty about the shield’s performance becomes a direct question about crew safety.

NASA has already acknowledged that the next flight is a crucial stepping stone toward a sustained lunar presence and, eventually, the kind of deep-space expeditions needed for crewed Mars missions. The agency’s decision to proceed with Artemis II using the existing Orion heat shield design, rather than ripping it out, followed an extensive review of the Artemis I data and a formal update to the broader Artemis flight plan. That choice effectively ties the schedule for returning humans to lunar orbit to the confidence engineers and leadership can place in a single, upgraded but not fundamentally redesigned shield.

Skip entry, schedule pressure, and a narrow launch window
The technical debate around Orion’s protection system is inseparable from the way the capsule comes home. For Artemis I, NASA used a “skip entry” profile in which Orion dipped into the atmosphere, then briefly bounced back out before making its final descent, a maneuver that spreads heating over a longer path but also creates complex aerodynamic loads. NASA traced the problem in part to Orion’s skip entry trajectory, noting that the pattern of char loss matched the phases when the capsule was skimming the upper atmosphere and then diving back in, which is why the same profile for Artemis II has drawn so much attention from engineers and outside analysts alike.

All of this is unfolding against a tight but flexible launch window that could open as soon as early February. NASA’s Artemis II mission is currently targeted to launch in February, with officials describing a window that stretches from Feb. 6 to April 10 and is broken into several distinct periods of possible liftoff opportunities. Local coverage has underscored how the mission, updated at 10:24 PM EST, will be the first time astronauts fly around the Moon since Apollo, and that schedule pressure is now colliding with the need to be absolutely certain about the heat shield’s behavior on another skip entry.

nside the new NASA chief’s go/no-go moment
Into this mix has stepped a new NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, who has made a point of personally engaging with the Orion heat shield issue. In a detailed review session described by space reporter Eric Berger, Isaacman pressed engineers on what went wrong with Artemis I and what had changed for Artemis II, before ultimately expressing full confidence in the system. That level of openness and transparency is exactly what should be expected of NASA, Berger wrote, noting that Isaacman had only been sworn in on December 18 when he convened the review that would effectively serve as the final go or no-go check for the shield, a moment captured in Jan coverage of the meeting.

What stands out to me is how candid the internal conversation appears to have been. According to a detailed account shared by one attendee, the NASA team spent most of the session walking through charts and models before, toward the end of the meeting, agreeing to discuss something that no one really liked to talk about: the residual risk that cannot be engineered away. One of the NASA engineers said that even with all the analysis, there is still a nonzero chance of unexpected char behavior, a comment that surfaced in a However detailed community write-up of the review. Isaacman’s decision to accept that residual risk, while insisting on continued testing and monitoring, is the essence of a go call in human spaceflight.

Rollout, wet dress, and what still worries engineers
Even as the heat shield debate plays out in conference rooms, the hardware for Artemis II is moving toward the pad. NASA plans to roll out the Space Launch System rocket for the mission on Jan. 17, a key step that will lead into a full “wet dress rehearsal” where teams load the core stage and upper stage with more than 700,000 g of cryogenic propellants, roughly 2.65 m liters, and run through the countdown. During wet dress, teams demonstrate the ability to load more than 700,000 g of supercold fuel without leaks or valve issues, a rehearsal that must succeed before anyone worries about the heat shield’s performance on the way home.

Behind the scenes, though, some specialists remain uneasy about how much of the Artemis I anomaly has been retired by analysis alone. A detailed video breakdown posted in Jan by an independent analyst revisited the Orion heat shield investigation and walked through what char loss really means for the structure underneath, highlighting how localized material shedding could, in a worst case, expose underlying layers to higher heating than expected. That follow-up on Orion underscored that while NASA’s official line is that the shield is safe for flight, there is still a healthy debate in the technical community about whether the current design has enough margin for the long-term Artemis roadmap.

Delay debates, outside critics, and the politics of risk
The path to this moment has already included one major schedule reset. In Dec, NASA announced that it would delay the next flight of the Aremis program, Artemis 2, pushing the mission back from its earlier target so engineers could fully understand the heat shield behavior and other systems. That decision, dissected in a widely viewed explainer on why NASA is not fixing the heat shield on Artemis II, made clear that the agency preferred to accept a longer gap between flights rather than rush a redesign that might introduce new unknowns, a tradeoff that was laid out in detail in a NASA-focused analysis of the delay.

Critics have also questioned whether the nomination of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire pilot with his own commercial spaceflight ambitions, has overshadowed the technical issues around Orion. In Dec, one commentator argued that the Isaacman nomination risked pulling attention away from the hard engineering questions and toward personality-driven coverage, urging viewers on Thursday to focus instead on the new information about the heat shield and its test history. That perspective, shared in a detailed Thursday breakdown of the nomination, reflects a broader tension: NASA must balance the political optics of bold leadership with the unglamorous work of resolving char patterns and thermal margins.

Crew confidence and the long road back to the Moon
For the astronauts assigned to Artemis II, the heat shield debate is not an abstract engineering exercise. Christina Koch has spoken about how she and her crewmates are preparing for a mission that will test not only Orion’s systems but also the procedures and teamwork needed for later landings, and Koch and the other members of the Artemis 2 crew are eager to launch on their mission as soon as NASA gives the final green light. Their confidence rests on the assurance that the same shield which protected an uncrewed capsule through a skip entry will do the same with four people strapped inside, a point underscored in a feature on how Koch and the crew are training for the unknowns they might encounter around the Moon.

NASA’s own messaging has tried to thread the needle between caution and ambition. Agency leaders have emphasized that the Artemis architecture, including Orion’s heat shield, is being built not just for a single lunar flyby but for a series of increasingly complex missions that will eventually support long-duration stays on the surface and, further out, crewed Mars expeditions. Local television coverage in Jan, updated by reporter Meghan Moriarty and reporter Hayley Crombleholme, has highlighted how the Artemis II mission to launch in February is framed as a historic return to deep space that must still clear a rigorous safety bar before liftoff. That framing, captured in a Meghan Moriarty segment, shows how the final go or no-go on the heat shield has become a proxy for the public’s trust in NASA’s entire lunar strategy.

What the final call will really decide
As the rollout date approaches, the agency is also refining its launch opportunities and contingency plans. NASA has broken the Artemis 2 launch window into three periods, each with a restricted set of possible liftoff times that balance lighting conditions, communications coverage, and the geometry of the return corridor. That structure, outlined in a Jan update on how Artemis 2 will move to the pad and aim for dates between Feb. 6 and April 10, underscores how tightly the mission’s trajectory, including the skip entry, is woven into the calendar.

In parallel, public-facing explainers have reminded viewers that the heat shield will face its biggest test yet when Orion comes back from the Moon with people on board. One recent overview noted that the same skip entry profile that contributed to char loss on Artemis I will again be used to manage g-forces and heating, and that NASA traced the earlier problem in part to that trajectory while still concluding the system is safe for flight. That assessment, summarized in a Jan report on the upcoming mission, makes clear that the final go or no-go check by the NASA chief is less about discovering a new flaw and more about affirming that the agency is willing to own the residual risk it has already mapped.