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Artemis 2027-2028 at Risk, Webb's Ancient Spiral & First Exosatellite
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA locks Artemis III for 2027 and a crewed Moon landing for 2028, but SpaceX's unresolved refueling dispute and competing Blue Origin architecture put the timeline under pressure. Plus: James Webb confirms an impossibly mature barred spiral galaxy 11.5 billion years old, and astronomers announce the first exosatellite candidate ever detected.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA just put firm dates on the next two Artemis missions. Summer twenty twenty-seven for an orbital docking test.
The sharper risk sits with SpaceX. Starship's lunar architecture requires in-orbit propellant transfer, and there's a significant disagreement about how many tanker launches that actually takes.
Away from lunar hardware, James Webb delivered something genuinely unexpected. A galaxy designated COSMOS-74706, spectroscopically confirmed at eleven and a half billion years old, is a fully formed barred spiral.
The other discovery worth attention comes from ESO's Very Large Telescope. Astronomers detected a Jupiter-mass object orbiting a brown dwarf in the CD-35 2722 system.
One quieter development worth noting: the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea has committed a hundred nights of observations to a coordinated partnership with NASA's Roman Space Telescope, beginning in twenty twenty-seven or later. Ground-based spectroscopy combined with Roman's infrared survey capability creates a complementary science pairing, targeting exoplanets, dark energy, and large-scale structure.
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