Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center exerted almost 1 million lb. of force on a simulated rocket tank before it failed in the second round of testing designed to improve design models and take weight out of the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) and other vehicles.

HOUSTON — NASA began testing software patches intended to restore fine control over a crippled external cooling loop aboard the International Space Station on Dec. 17, while setting Dec. 21 to begin a three-spacewalk repair campaign. At the same time, NASA postponed until January plans for the Orbital Sciences “ORB-1” resupply mission to the six-person orbiting laboratory.

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), a sharp critic of NASA management and a vocal human rights advocate, announced Dec. 17 he will not seek re-election next year. Wolf’s decision opens the chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the U.S. space agency, and may allow closer space cooperation between the U.S. and China.

HOUSTON — The International Space Station’s mission operations team reported some progress Dec. 16 in its bid to manage the crippled thermal control system aboard the six-person orbiting science laboratory, but not enough to rule out unscheduled spacewalks this week to replace an external pump module housing the faulty flow control valve that is the source of the station’s ills.

KICKED UP: Scientists monitoring the lunar dust environment with NASA’s new Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (Ladee) and two other spacecraft did not detect any initial effects from Saturday’s touchdown of China’s Chang’e 3 lunar lander and subsequent operations with its small rover.

BEIJING — China will launch a sample return mission to the Moon in 2017, officials say, while declaring complete success for the current Chang’e 3 mission to land and deploy a lunar rover. The next mission, Chang’e 4, will be similar to the current effort, using a backup spacecraft and rover, but will be adapted to prove technologies for the sample-return mission, Chang’e 5, says Wu Zhijian, a spokesman for the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

NASA evaluators have selected SpaceX to lease and convert historic Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center for commercial spaceflight operations, waiting less than 24 hr. after the U.S. Government Accountability Office rejected a bid-process protest from Blue Origin. In what has been referred to as the “battle of the billionaires,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk trumped Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who has bankrolled Blue Origin’s efforts to develop commercial orbital and suborbital human launch systems.

HOUSTON — A U.S. International Space Station astronaut on Dec. 13 expressed confidence in NASA’s spacesuits and spacewalk procedures if they become an essential part of a strategy to resolve a cooling system problem that surfaced earlier this week, forcing a shutdown of some non-critical electrical systems and science experiments aboard the six-person lab.