Officially, Marsproof is "on hold pending engineering review." Unofficially — according to four KerbalX insiders who agreed to speak only after we agreed to meet in a roadside diner outside KSC — the contract was killed because the probe saw something on the way out.
"They turned the cameras off," one engineer told this paper, hands shaking around a mug of black coffee. "They don't turn the cameras off. The cameras are the whole point."
This paper has obtained an internal routing slip dated three days before the public pause announcement. It carries one stamp, one signature, and one word in the comment field: "contained."
The KerbalX press office, asked five times for comment over a 48-hour window, finally responded with a single line: "We do not discuss internal documents that may or may not exist." Read that again. Slowly.