One windy night at Elon Musk’s SpaceX facility in McGregor, Texas, Lonnie LeBlanc and his co-workers realized they had a problem.

They needed to transport foam insulation to the rocket company’s main hangar but had no straps to secure the cargo. LeBlanc, a relatively new employee, offered a solution to hold down the load: He sat on it.

More than a year and a half after its first flight on Mars, the Ingenuity helicopter has set a new record.

The little 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) chopper completed its 35th flight on December 3 and reached a new altitude record of 46 feet (14 meters).

Before the first launch attempt of the Artemis I mission last Monday, Wayne Hale, a former program manager of NASA’s space shuttle program, shared a note of caution on Twitter that the day could end up disappointing:

Bill Harwood, a longtime space reporter at CBS News, responded, “I think you’re being optimistic!”

The launch of the NASA Artemis I rocket was scrubbed for a second time on Saturday after another fuel leak. 

Artemis Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson finally halted the countdown at 11:17 a.m. EDT after three to four hours of effort.

The team then started to work to de-tank the rocket. 

Launch controllers were unable to troubleshoot a hydrogen leak – which was detected at 7:15 a.m. EDT – that reoccurred twice in a cavity between the ground and flight side plates of a quick disconnect. 

NASA was expected to make a second attempt to launch the Artemis I moon rocket on Saturday after they were forced to scrub the initial launch on August 29 due to an engine issue.

However, the planned launch will not now take place on Saturday as a result of a fuel leak.

"The #Artemis I mission to the Moon has been postponed. Teams attempted to fix an issue related to a leak in the hardware transferring fuel into the rocket, but were unsuccessful," NASA's official Twitter account announced.

There is another launch window on Monday.

Elon Musk, Time Magazine’s 2021 “Person of the Year,” said in an interview with the magazine that he expects his company to be “landing on Mars” within the next five years.

“I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years,” the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla said.

Musk’s vision for Mars is clearly much larger than merely landing on the red planet.

“The next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there,” Musk said in the report. “Sort of like a futuristic Noah’s ark.”

When we gaze into the vast night sky from our terrestrial home, space certainly seems like an overwhelmingly wild and desolate place: an empty plain primed for settlement. When Star Trek debuted in the ’60s and began calling space “the final frontier,” it was in the midst of a geopolitical race to the moon with the Soviet Union. “Final frontier” became synonymous with a spirit of space expansion that is deeply, perhaps distressingly, American.