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.

In a bid to boost the ability to track orbital debris that could endanger satellites, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is seeking methods for the uncued detection of objects in low-inclined low Earth orbit (LILO). The LILO project is part of Darpa’s OrbitOutlook (O2) program to bolster the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) with new sensor, database and validation capabilities. The SSN is tasked with observing and tracking space objects.

ON HOLIDAY: The U.S. House of Representatives recessed for the holidays without taking up a Senate version of legislation to extend third-party indemnification for the space-launch industry, but contracts already in the works will not be affected when indemnification expires at year-end. Both houses of Congress have adopted extensions of indemnification, which protects launch companies if third parties are injured in a launch failure. But the House bill extends indemnification for only one year, while a Senate measure adopted Dec. 12 would grant a three-year extension.

MMT deferred a “go/no go” decision on resupply mission