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Starship's Orbital Countdown, Crew-13 & the Youngest Exoplanet Ever Seen
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX targets September 28 for Starship's first fully orbital mission carrying 26 Starlink satellites — but FAA clearance is still the wildcard. Plus Crew-13 clears for October 1 launch, NASA greenlights the PRIMA infrared observatory, and astronomers catch a planet forming in real time.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
September twenty-eighth is either the day Starship becomes a real orbital vehicle, or the day SpaceX finds out what still needs fixing. Flight fourteen is targeting that date for the first fully orbital Starship mission, carrying twenty-six Starlink V3 satellites and planning to stay aloft for nearly ten hours.
While Starship waits on regulators, NASA's more routine operations are moving. The Crew-thirteen astronauts landed in Florida on September twenty-sixth, and an October first launch aboard Falcon nine is now locked following a Flight Readiness Review.
NASA also moved forward this week on a longer horizon. The agency has greenlit PRIMA, a far-infrared observatory targeting a two thousand thirty-three launch with a one-point-two billion dollar budget.
On September twenty-sixth, a Falcon nine lifted off from Vandenberg carrying USSF-three-eighty-five, a classified Space Force payload. The booster completed its tenth flight.
On the science side, astronomers have confirmed the youngest exoplanet ever observed. Elias two-twenty-four b is under one million years old, and it's still actively pulling material from the disk surrounding its star.
Stepping back, the commercial lunar pipeline continues building. Blue Origin, Firefly, Intuitive Machines, and Voyager are all preparing landers for NASA payload deliveries between twenty-twenty-six and twenty-twenty-eight.
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