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Milky Way's Giant Star Wave, Roman Telescope & Starlink at 11,000
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A giant wave of stars rippling through the Milky Way, NASA's Roman Space Telescope set for August 30, and SpaceX's 100th orbital launch of 2026 — space news is moving fast. Today's episode also covers the first extragalactic stellar stream, dark matter mapping beyond the Milky Way, and the lunar cargo race heating up.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX just completed its one hundredth orbital launch of twenty twenty-six, and that number deserves a moment of clear-eyed attention before we move on. A Falcon nine lifted off from Vandenberg carrying twenty-nine Starlink satellites.
The context behind that launch rate matters. Starlink has now crossed eleven thousand operational broadband satellites in low Earth orbit.
Closer to launch is NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, confirmed for August thirtieth on a Falcon Heavy out of Kennedy Space Center. Roman is positioned at the Sun-Earth L two point, the same gravitational sweet spot as the James Webb.
Shift to the science, and the picture gets stranger in the best possible way. Data from ESA's Gaia spacecraft has revealed an enormous wave of stars rippling outward from the galactic center, affecting stars between thirty thousand and sixty-five thousand light-years away.
The dark matter story this week is also worth holding onto. Astronomers have detected the first stellar stream found outside the Milky Way, inside an ultra-diffuse galaxy called UGC nine zero five zero dash Dw one.
NASA has also released updates on five commercial partners building next-generation lunar cargo landers, part of the longer-term architecture for a permanent Moon base. The details remain at the progress-report stage, but the competitive field is active.
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