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Menon Docks at ISS, Starship Flight 13 Cleared & Sugar in Space
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Anil Menon launches to the ISS aboard Soyuz MS-29, Starship Flight 13 gets FAA clearance with real Starlink V3 satellites aboard, and astronomers detect the first sugar ever confirmed in interstellar space. Three stories that mark genuine inflection points in space exploration and astrobiology.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Anil Menon spent years deciding who was fit to fly to space. On July fourteenth, he made the trip himself.
The bigger structural story this week is Starship. The FAA has cleared Flight Thirteen for launch on July sixteenth, ending a two-month grounding that followed the May booster failure.
Flight Thirteen carries something no previous Starship test has carried: real, operational Starlink Version Three satellites. That's the signal.
Away from the launch schedule entirely, astronomers at Spain's Center for Astrobiology have published a finding in Nature Astronomy that deserves more attention than it's getting. They've detected erythrulose in a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way.
Three things to track from here. The Starship Flight Thirteen tile performance and engine restart.
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