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Starship Ship 40 Recovered, Chang'e-7 Launches & Mega-Earth Found
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX recovers Ship 40 after 24 days at sea, China targets the lunar south pole for water ice, and TESS finds a rocky planet 23 times Earth's mass. Today's episode covers five major stories shaping space exploration right now.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A cosmic explosion lasting seven hours just forced astrophysicists back to the drawing board. The Webb Space Telescope detected gamma-ray burst GRB 250702B, and its duration alone is the problem.
Closer to home, SpaceX has done something that wasn't guaranteed just a few weeks ago. Ship 40, the upper stage from Starship's July twenty-fourth flight test, has been successfully recovered after twenty-four days at sea and towed to Christmas Island.
China's Chang'e-7 mission is targeting a Sunday launch window, heading for the lunar south pole with one primary objective: find accessible water ice. The mission is aimed at Shackleton Crater, one of the permanently shadowed regions where ice is most likely to persist.
The White House has released the first major update to U.S. space transportation policy since two thousand thirteen. The headline target is one thousand launches per year by two thousand thirty.
One more discovery worth flagging. TESS identified a rocky exoplanet called GJ 523b that's two and a half times Earth's width and twenty-three times Earth's mass.
The two metrics that matter most in the near term are whether Webb's follow-up observations on GRB 250702B can narrow down which of those three mechanisms is actually responsible, and whether Flight 14 achieves the upper-stage catch in September. Both are unresolved at scale.
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