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NASA Moon Base Contracts, JWST's 16.5M Stars & Mars Methane Null Result
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA has signed commercial lunar lander contracts, making Moon Base a procurement reality — and a 2028 crewed landing is now the target. Plus: Webb resolves 16.5 million hidden stars in the Cigar Galaxy, Mars methane goes eight years undetected, and SpaceX fires up Starship 40.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA has just turned Moon Base from a policy ambition into a procurement reality. On June thirtieth, NASA Administrator Isaacman announced new commercial lunar lander contract awards, completing a supplier selection process that began just three months ago.
The crewed landing target is now early twenty twenty-eight. Artemis IV carries the weight of that milestone, the first human return to the lunar surface since Apollo Seventeen in nineteen seventy-two.
SpaceX completed a single-engine static fire test on Starship Forty at Starbase, Texas. This is part of the preparation for Flight Thirteen, the next integrated launch-and-landing test.
Shift to the telescope side. The James Webb Space Telescope has completed a sixty-five-hour infrared survey of Messier Eighty-Two, the Cigar Galaxy, and the result is extraordinary.
On Mars, a long-running question has sharpened into something more definitive. ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter has now completed eight years of atmospheric observations and has not detected methane.
One more development worth flagging. NASA's SWOT satellite captured the first high-resolution wide-area view of the tsunami generated by the eight-point-eight magnitude Kamchatka earthquake.
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