Author: Eric Berger

An old theater rises above the center of Baikonur, a dusty town in Kazakhstan near the cosmodrome from which Russians have launched humans into space since 1961. Long ago, Soviet soldiers mingled in its lobby and sat in its uncomfortable wooden chairs to watch propaganda films. In those early days, the Soviets often bested the United States with space milestones.

Today, after launches of Russian, American, and other astronauts to the International Space Station, the fliers’ families gather along with NASA officials in the theater to watch the Soyuz spacecraft dock to the orbiting laboratory. Afterward, they will offer celebratory toasts in the lobby against a backdrop of large, beautiful murals depicting Russia’s three great space pioneers. There’s the rocket visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky on the left, Yuri Gagarin in the middle, and aerospace engineer Sergei Korolev on the right.

All of those men have been dead for nearly half a century, and the Russian space program has been in a long slumber for most of the time since then. Yes, Russia is one of only two nations capable of putting humans into space, and it has an enviable record of launch safety, having not lost crew members since Soyuz 11 in 1971. Additionally, the most reliable American rocket, the Atlas 5, uses the exceptionally well-built Russian RD-180 engines to power its ascent into space.

Thanks to an infusion of Congressional funding, NASA has accelerated development of a telescope that could answer some of the most fundamental questions about both the universe and nearby exoplanets. At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Monday, NASA's Paul Hertz said the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) project will formally begin this year instead of 2017.

Hertz, who directs NASA's astrophysics division, made the announcement after Congress increased funding for the new flagship telescope project to $90 million for fiscal year 2016, far above the president's $16 million budget request. The telescope's 2.4-meter mirror is designed to measure light from nearly 400 million galaxies and 2,600 exoplanets during its primary, six-year mission.

The WFIRST project emerged as a top priority for NASA after astronomers, in their last decadal survey in 2010, said that such a mission would answer some of their most important questions. The project has evolved over time, but it is now being designed to take advantage of a spy satellite donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Observatory in 2012. The mission could launch within about a decade.

The Falcon 9 rocket not only survived, it now appears increasingly clear it did so in good shape. On Sunday SpaceX released a new photo of the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket that it successfully landed two weeks ago. Aside from soot, produced by the rocket's engines, the Falcon 9 booster appears to be structurally intact.

That was the assessment of SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who tweeted, "No damage found, ready to fire again," on New Year's Eve. Musk has said the flown booster will undergo "static fire" testing on the launch pad, in which the rocket is restrained while its engines are fired. After testing the rocket is expected to become a valued artifact, although Musk has not said where its final resting place will be.

During a conference call with reporters after the launch and successful recovery of the Falcon 9 rocket on December 21, Musk said he expects the company will attempt to refly a Falcon 9 rocket sometime in 2016.

Scott Kelly is no Mark Watney, the potato-growing botanist in The Martian. On Sunday, the NASA astronaut, who is spending a year on the International Space Station, tweeted a photo of the latest crop of plants from the station's space garden, saying, "Our plants aren't looking too good. Would be a problem on Mars. I'm going to have to channel my inner Mark Watney."

The plants are part of a NASA experiment designated Veg-01, an effort by NASA to make its astronauts more independent of Earth by developing the technology that will eventually allow them to grow food in space. The plants are being grown in a special "veggie facility" with a calcined clay media. The initial test crops were primarily species of lettuce.

Astronauts had their first harvest of lettuce in August from romaine seeds that had been on the station for 15 months before being planted. After cleaning their crop with sanitizing wipes, astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren dressed them with balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil before sampling the lettuce. The space farmers declared their crop to be "awesome" and tasting "kind of like arugula."

Spend any time around NASA public affairs specialists, as I do, and you'll eventually get the eye roll. It comes when someone inquires about aliens or faked moon landings or all manner of other nonsense. One of the more recent eye-rollers originated in Russia, where officials said sea plankton was growing on the exterior of the International Space Station. (It wasn't.)

"If you think that's bad, you should Google 'NASA hiding,'" one space agency official told me. So I did—and here are the first five things I found.

1. Aliens in space!

The first search result is a Gawker story from August, which links to a YouTube video of space station footage showing a "pink spot" near the orbiting laboratory. The Gawker author had some fun with the story, but plenty of other Web sites treated the object as mysterious, possibly of extra-terrestrial origin.

One of 2016’s most anticipated space missions will have to be postponed more than two years—and might even be canceled—due to a faulty seismometer. The InSight lander was to have launched in March and studied the interior structure and geological processes on Mars, including Martian tectonic activity.

The seismometer itself worked fine, NASA officials said, but there was a problem with the 22cm sphere that creates a vacuum so that the instrument can function on the harsh surface of Mars. Three times this summer and fall the sphere leaked, and three times engineers thought they had fixed the problem. Then, on Tuesday, a fourth leak was confirmed. With the launch date looming and not enough time to address the issue, NASA scientists had to make a difficult decision.

“This just reflects the difficulty when you challenge scientists and engineers to do things they’ve never done before,” said John Grunsfeld, who leads NASA’s science mission directorate, in a teleconference with reporters. “Sometimes things don’t work out.”

SpaceX did it. On Monday night the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket soared into space, separated from the second stage, and then made a guided flight back to a landing site in Florida. The historic flight marked the beginning of the orbital economy by promising a future of dramatically lower launch costs.

The company had twice tried to land on an autonomous drone ship. The first time the rocket hit too hard and exploded on impact. The second attempt again landed slightly too hard, breaking two of its legs and tipping over. The third attempt, at a newly designated landing site less than a mile from SpaceX's processing facilities in Florida, looked almost too easy on terra firma.

"I wasn't at all confident that we would succeed, but I'm really glad of it," Musk said in a teleconference Monday night, in response to a question from Ars. "It's been 13 years since SpaceX was started. We've had a lot of close calls. I think people here are overjoyed."

Just a little more than a week ago astronaut Kjell Lindgren prepared to take the ride of his life. The experience of returning to Earth inside a Soyuz spacecraft—likened to a fireball—may well be the most exciting thrill ride known to humans. Even before he departed for a year-long mission to the International Space Station, Soyuz reentry veteran Scott Kelly explained the ride thusly: "Even If I had hated the last six months, I would have done it all again for that last 20 minutes in the Soyuz.” This was fresh in Lindgren's mind as he strapped into the Soyuz spacecraft early on December 11.

"Scott had talked about that as well, in conversations we had had," Lindgren told Ars in an interview. "That certainly set an expectation in my mind for it being a lot of fun. We sometimes talk about things being fun, or type II fun, where it’s kind of fun in retrospect, but while you’re going through it, it’s maybe a little more arduous. I wasn't sure what this would be."

The ride begins quietly. Boring, even.

In what may be a first in spaceflight history, SpaceX delayed the commercial launch of a satellite payload on Sunday to wait for better weather not to liftoff, but rather to land the booster of its Falcon 9 rocket.

The rocket company's chief executive, Elon Musk, announced the decision Sunday afternoon via Twitter. According to Musk, "Monte Carlo" simulations of landing weather on Sunday and Monday at a complex along the Florida coast showed better conditions on Monday. "Punting 24 hours," he said. The new launch time is 8:33pm ET on Monday. The forecast calls for an 80 percent chance of acceptable launch weather.

SpaceX is attempting make its return to flight after an accident in June with its Falcon 9 rocket. Not only is the company launching 11 ORBCOMM communications satellites, it is flying an upgraded variant of the Falcon 9 rocket, and trying to return an orbital rocket safely back to the ground for the first time. Previously SpaceX tried to recover the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on autonomous drone ships, without success.

For astronomers seeking to build the world's largest telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, it will be anything but a Mele Kalikimaka. Hawaiian media reported that heavy machinery parked near a construction site atop the mountain since March was removed on Wednesday.

The removal marked another victory for native Hawaiians who are protesting construction of the 55-meter-tall facility on top of Mauna Kea, saying it desecrates sacred ground. “There was a lot of joy and gratitude,” said Hawane Rios of the mood among those protesting construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope.

Earlier this month the organizers of the telescope project, led by the California Institute of Technology, suffered a major setback when the Hawaii Supreme Court invalidated the land use permit that had been issued by the state's Board of Land and Natural Resources. At the time, the telescope's chairman said, "We are assessing our next steps on the way forward. We appreciate and thank the people of Hawaii and our supporters from these last eight-plus years."