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Starship Flight 13 Launches Real Starlinks & Webb Finds a Hidden Planet
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Starship Flight 13 takes flight with real Starlink V3 satellites for the first time, while the James Webb Space Telescope uncovers a third planet in a system astronomers thought they knew. Plus: a Soyuz docking, Mars impact records, and military satellites.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Starship Flight 13 is on the pad and scheduled for July sixteenth, and this one is different from anything that came before it. For the first time, the vehicle is carrying real Starlink V3 satellites.
The stakes run deeper than a single demonstration. Starlink V3 satellites are physically larger than their predecessors, designed specifically to fit Starship's payload bay rather than Falcon 9's.
Away from the launch complex, the James Webb Space Telescope has turned up something unexpected in a system astronomers thought they knew well. Beta Pictoris, a young star just sixty-three light-years away, already had two confirmed planets.
On the ground floor of orbital operations, a Soyuz MS-29 capsule docked successfully at the International Space Station on July fifteenth. NASA astronaut Anil Menon and cosmonauts Sergey Dubrov and Anna Kikina are now aboard for an eight-month mission.
Two more items worth tracking. Perseverance has confirmed that rock layers along the rim of Jezero Crater preserve a record of repeated asteroid impacts from roughly four billion years ago.
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