60 Years of Star Trek and Counting

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by Adam Evertsson from Pixabay.

This week we celebrate the 60th anniversary of Star Trek, a simple science fiction story from 1966 that was first broadcast in Canada and barely lasted for three seasons. But from that tepid beginning arose an idea that led to multiple spin-off television series, movies, books, and more.

And it has been a hopeful show that took the dark edge off of science fiction. As creator Gene Roddenberry said back in 1985:

I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, we’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up – man, we’re going to be something!

Today we still have plenty of people attacking Star Trek for being too liberal or “woke” as they say using the word of the week, but the show was always that way.

Discussing battles with TV executives about women on the USS Enterprise, Mr. Roddenberry noted:

I had insisted on half women on board [the Enterprise]. The network came to me and said, ‘You can’t have half women. Our people say it will make it look like a ship with all sorts of mad sexual things going on — half men and half women.’ So we argued about it like a poker game and they finally said, ‘Okay. We’ll settle for one-third women.’ I figured one-third women could take care of the males anyway.

Star Trek moved forward before the rest of the country, but it saw a future that was slowly realized over time. And even if it seems we are going backwards at times, he understood that as well when he said:

I have nothing but admiration for this silly race of ours. Even with the Hitlers in it and so on. Sometimes it goes into ugliness, but, in all though, it is a beauty. It’s like a rose, which also has thorns. We’re something.

So let’s not get too depressed just because we seem to have a Ferengi in the White House. Think long term like Mr. Roddenberry, and move past the thorns.

Movies: The End of the Mandalorian

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Anzellans and Grogu in The Mandalorian and Grogu. (Lucasfilm)

If you were awaiting last week’s streaming roll out The Mandalorian and Grogu on Disney+, you may have come away both happy and disappointed. I was happy that I did not pay $18 for a movie ticket to see the Mandalorian mess, but I was disappointed about every other part of the experience.

This film is more evidence, if you needed it, that multi-billion companies are capable of producing lousy products. I am now glad that Star Wars: Andor came to a respectable end and did not go through this big screen process.

Basically, the Mandalorian television series started as an adult show with some extras for the kids, while the movie was basically a kids show with little adult supervision. We started with a sole Mandalorian defeating three ATATs with his bare hands, and ended with a multi-day montage of Grogu feeding a comatose Mandaloria in the woods. How did we get here?

It reminded me of the earlier movie disaster Star Trek: Section 31, where all of the pieces were there, but they were put into a blender with nothing but gray goo coming out of the other end.

If the Star Wars franchise needed a kids show, they should have stuck with the one season and done series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. That was an okay series. But The Mandalorian started as something else – more of a western like the initial Star Wars (IV, not the I crap) – that also spoke to re-establishing earlier traditions and fighting for something in common. I saw none of that in the film. We only had a metallic superman with a stuffed animal fighting large slugs for some nebulous Republic that never seemed worth fighting for. It was like the Ewoks on steroids by the end of the movie.

So is the Mandalorian series dead? It would seem so, and those who saw this movie were given no reason to go back to the original material. Maybe without the movie some people would have stumbled onto the Disney+ series and given it a try, but now they have been scared away by a silly story set in a galaxy far, far away.

It that’s what the universe has in store for all of us, let’s dismantle the rockets now.

Space Stories: A New Lunar Spacesuit, a Map of the Cosmos, and Modeling Planetary Systems

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by PixelLabs from Pixabay.

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—Ars Technica: “Wary of Artemis IV Timeline, NASA is Changing Lunar Spacesuit Design”

NASA has decided to use a simpler spacesuit for its initial missions to the lunar surface, Ars has learned. The agency announced the decision during an internal meeting this week as it seeks to accelerate its program to land humans at the south pole of the Moon as early as 2028. At the direction of Artemis Program Manager Jeremy Parsons, NASA will work with Axiom Space to develop a “Sortie Suit” variant of the planned spacesuit for the lunar surface. Sources said the Sortie Suit will be used for the initial landing missions flown on landers developed both by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Among the goals of the initiative are to lower the mass of the spacesuit, reduce its complexity, and simplify interfaces between the spacesuits and lunar landers.

—Wired: “Astronomers Have Completed the Largest Map of Space. Yes, You Can Play With It.“

The driving force behind our universe’s accelerated expansion remains one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy. While this force, which scientists refer to as dark energy, pervades our universe, we know almost nothing about it. Located on a remote mountain in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has spent the past five years mapping the cosmos with the goal of unraveling this mystery. The result is the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created. And now—with the release of the latest version of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, a free online tool for exploring the vast imaging data—you too can poke around the universe.

—Phys,org: “New Solar System Models Show Earth is No Fluke“

Over the past three decades, computer models of planetary system formation have gone from fairly crude representations to sophisticated simulations using thousands of different starting points. A paper presented at the Origins 2026 conference in Paris details innovative simulations of how our solar system might have formed without making assumptions about the planetary architecture with which we are so familiar. In his paper, Nader Haghighipour, a planetary scientist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, argued that his models, unlike previous models, incorporate many completely random starting points and, in turn, let physics drive the models’ ultimate evolution. As a result, these new models are much more complete and allow physics to dictate their outcomes.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.

Study Findings: Deimos’s Shape and Geology Explained by a Subcatastrophic Impact

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Image of Mars (left), Phobos (center), and Deimos (right). (NASA)

Nature Astronomy abstract of study findings:

Small planetary bodies record the processes that shaped the Solar System, but their surfaces and interiors often evolve in unexpected ways. Deimos, the potato-shaped, 12-km-diameter outer satellite of Mars, has a strikingly smooth surface covered by fine regolith, in contrast to its heavily cratered and grooved sibling, 22-km-diameter Phobos. Moreover, Deimos’s topography is dominated by a single large south-polar depression, whose formation we simulate to constrain the moon’s interior and surface geomechanical properties and to explain the origin and distribution of its regolith. Here we find that an oblique impact by a 320-m-diameter projectile can quantitatively account for this depression, the global regolith layer and surface features such as bright streaks and crater infill. Our results show that Deimos’s upper layers are extremely weak and that its interior is highly porous and dissipative, resembling the recently visited rubble-pile asteroids rather than lunar regolith. This suggests that small dark moons and asteroids, despite their specific histories, may converge on similar physical states.

Citation: Raducan, S.D., Agrusa, H.F., Asphaug, E. et al. Deimos’s shape and geology explained by a subcatastrophic impact. Nat Astron (2026).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-026-02956-w

Study-related stories:

Science Daily – “One Asteroid Strike May Explain Two Mysteries of Mars’ Moon Deimos”

Phys.org – “A Single Asteroid Impact May Explain the Appearance of Mars’ Moon Deimos”

Universe Today– “Mars’s Funky Moon Deimos was Shaped by an Impact”

Space Quote: Blue Origin to be Key Link With Red Planet

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the MTO orbiting Mars. (Blue Origin)

“[Mars Telecommunications Orbiter] is the backbone of America’s Mars exploration program for the next decade and beyond and will provide the reliable communications capacity that will keep future robotic and human missions connected to each other and to Earth…This awarded contract is a testament to the Blue Origin team that has been building Blue Ring with exactly this kind of mission in mind. We’re ready, and so is the hardware.”

–Statement by Tory Bruno, president, Blue National Security at Blue Origin, discussing the role of the planned MTO mission for NASA. The MTO is a firm-fixed-price contract with a maximum potential value of approximately $700 million. Part of the Moon to Mars Artemis program, the MTO is expected to be delivered to NASA no later than December 31, 2028.