Fry: What’s it called now?
Farnsworth: Urectum.
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God I hope not.
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Now the russian side will be able to prank the US side by sending the robot arm over to knock on the door.
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Disruptor rocket bros almost revive a thruster tech that NASA buried*, and poison the Earth.
* This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here …
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The article talks about tests in the 1970’s 
In Ignition! Dr. John D. Clark notes (pg. 177-179) that it was the late 1950’s that Hg was considered as a propellant. (PDF is available.)
(di-methyl mercury) was extremely toxic, and a long way from harmless.
…
I solemnly and formally wrote the whole thing up, complete with graphs, labeled it - dead pan - the “Ultra High Density Propellant Concept,” and sent it off to the Bureau. I expected to see it bounce
back in a week, with a “Who do you think you’re kidding?” letter attached. It didn’t.
[The boss] directed us, forthwith, to verify the calculations experimentally, and NARTS, horrified, was stuck with the job of firing a mercury-spewing motor in the middle of Morris County, New Jersey.
In March 1960 it was tested, but in the desert… 
Not, however, as an ion propulsion engine fuel on that date…
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Have they tried depleted uranium, maybe in a plasma? With that mass and a high delta-V…
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Just need to have some kind of hypergolic combination of Mercuric-Fluorine and RFNA and we’ll be off to the races!
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Ooooh… We can watch for suspicious changes in the “Gravity Field”… 
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Today is the 55th anniversary of the Soyuz 1 mission, which ended tragically with the first ever in-flight death of a cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov. There’s a great and detailed writeup of the Soyuz 1 flight and the preceding unmanned test flights by Anatoly Zak. Here’s a brief overview:
First test flight, November 1966. It was supposed to involve two separate launches of similar spacecraft that would automatically dock in orbit. However, when the first launch failed to enter the correct orbit, it was discovered that engineers had misread the assembly instructions and some of the thrusters had been installed backwards. The second launch was aborted, and they tried to land the first craft, but it disintegrated on reentry.
Second test flight was scheduled for December 1966. This time, while still on the launchpad, the emergency escape system triggered erroneously, detaching the Soyuz capsule from the top of the rocket and setting the full fuel tank on fire. It exploded, leading to three deaths among the ground crew and many injuries.
Third test flight, February 1967. This flight finally reached the correct orbit and performed more or less OK in space, with issues relating to remote control from ground bases. But the reentry went badly, it crashed into the frozen Aral Sea, over 500 km off target, with enough to force to kill anyone onboard.
Looking at this track record, somebody decided that the next flight would be piloted. The Soyuz craft hadn’t completed a single successful test flight. The engineers reportedly compiled a list of 203 technical issues that still needed to be resolved, and tried to get it to the Kremlin in order to stop the launch. Yuri Gagarin, who had been appointed as the backup pilot, tried to switch places with Komarov, hoping that they wouldn’t dare risk his life. But they needed an impressive show to keep up with the Space Race, and the timing was dense with important dates in the Soviet liturgical calendar (the year of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, Lenin’s birthday, Worker’s Day, etc.), so they went ahead with the launch of Soyuz 1 on April 23, 1967.
Immediately after reaching orbit, problems became evident: one of two solar panels failed to deploy, as did a sensor required to automatically stabilize the spin. Komarov tried to correct the spin manually, but the lopsided weight distribution due to the undeployed solar panel made it impossible, so even the one working solar panel was not generating as much power as it should. The second launch was aborted (because obviously they originally planned to risk two crews in untested spacecraft to perform an untested docking procedure) and Soyuz 1 was ordered to reenter. Once again, the lopsided shape led the capsule to reenter badly, at a steep ballistic trajectory. The main parachute got stuck in its container and was never released, despite manual activation by Komarov. The rockets that were supposed to soften the landing only fired after the capsule had crashed into the ground at 200 km/h. They started a fire, which meant that rescue crews could only reach Komarov’s charred remains after several attempts to extinguish it.
The whole enterprise can be generously described as criminal recklessness. Most tragedies in spaceflight have been caused by small faults whose risks were difficult to evaluate. For example, the O-ring issue in Challenger was fairly subtle and only known to a small group of specialists who were not able to overrule the decisions of the huge bureaucratic organization. But with Soyuz 1 the risks were glaringly obvious. Everyone involved, from minor technicians to the Politburo, must have known enough about the track record to constantly ask “hold on, are we really, absolutely sure about this?”. As a preventable disaster, it was the space equivalent to Chernobyl.
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The US Space Force has created a unit, the 19th Space Defense Squadron, to monitor activity in the region beyond Earth’s geosynchronous orbit, all the way out to the Moon and yonder.
[…]
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I read the book about the lunar rover development, Across the Airless Wilds, and it went into great detail on how they solved the navigation problem. The Apollo 14 astonauts had an extremely difficult time navigating and were unable to meet all their mission goals, missing their primary objective by only 60 feet.
For the rovers used on Apollo 15, 16 and 17 they ended up using a fairly simple inertial navigation system, based off steering angle and distance travelled.
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