Now Playing
Starship V3 Thursday Launch: IPO Billions, Moon Stakes & Heat Shield Test | May 21
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Starship V3 makes its long-awaited return Thursday with a redesigned vehicle, a deliberate heat shield damage experiment, and a two-trillion-dollar IPO riding on the outcome. Plus: Blue Moon thermal testing, Webb's atmosphere-free super-Earth, and ESA's Smile satellite launch.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX is scheduled to fly Starship for the first time in seven months this Thursday evening, and the stakes couldn't be more concentrated into a single test flight. Flight twelve targets a Thursday EDT launch window with a heavily redesigned vehicle.
The mission profile adds another layer of pressure. Flight twelve will deploy twenty-two Starlink simulator satellites, and two of them will photograph tiles that SpaceX deliberately damaged.
The financial dimension makes this test flight unusually consequential. SpaceX is targeting a Nasdaq debut on June twelfth under the ticker SPCX.
While Starship was standing down, Blue Origin wasn't waiting. Blue Moon Mark One completed thermal vacuum testing at Johnson Space Center, with NASA confirming the milestone on May fourth.
Away from Earth orbit entirely, the James Webb Space Telescope published peer-reviewed results on May fifth confirming that LHS three eight four four b, a super-Earth forty-eight light-years away, has no atmosphere. It's a dark, basalt rock.
Two other developments are worth tracking. ESA's Smile satellite, a joint mission with China, launched successfully on May nineteenth aboard a Vega-C rocket.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.