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Booster Abort Decoded, Euclid's 900M Galaxies & China's Moon Race
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX's Starship Flight 15 booster catch failed — but the abort logic worked exactly as designed, and Saturday's spacecraft catch attempt is now the number that matters. Plus: Euclid's landmark 900-million-galaxy dataset, China's two-launch lunar architecture, and the Pentagon's $300M hedge against a looming launch capacity gap.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The booster catch failed. That's the headline from Starship Flight Fifteen, and the reason it failed tells you something useful about where this program actually stands.
The spacecraft, though, did exactly what it was supposed to do. It reached orbit, deployed twenty-six Starlink Version Three satellites, and kept flying.
While Starship dominated the conversation, ESA's Euclid space telescope released what may be the most consequential astronomy dataset in years. The DR1-Foundation release contains observations of more than nine hundred million galaxies, sixty million quasars, and fifteen thousand gravitational lensing candidates.
China formalized its crewed lunar architecture at a Beijing aerospace conference, and the approach is more straightforward than NASA's Artemis model. Two launches, orbital rendezvous around the moon, descent to the surface.
The US military has been watching SpaceX's Falcon Nine wind-down and doesn't like what it sees. In the past two weeks, the Pentagon committed one hundred fifty million dollars each to Stoke Space and Rocket Lab, a three hundred million dollar hedge against a projected launch capacity shortfall that some estimates put at over one hundred fifty missions by twenty thirty.
Blue Origin quietly withdrew from NASA's commercial space station competition, narrowing the field for whoever builds the post-ISS orbital platform. Whether that reflects a strategic choice or a capacity constraint isn't clear yet.
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