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Starship's Orbital Debut, Black Hole Star Formation & 6,366 Exoplanets
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX targets September 22 for Starship Flight 14 — its first real orbital mission with Starlink payload and heat shield reentry test. Plus: Harvard's VLT survey flips the script on black hole feedback, and the exoplanet archive breaks 6,300 confirmed worlds.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Starship is hours away from its first attempt to reach orbit, carry real payload, and come home through fire. SpaceX has set September twenty-second as the target date for Flight Fourteen, with liftoff scheduled for seven fifteen in the morning Central Time.
On the booster side, SpaceX has made targeted modifications after July's engine failures. Ice clogging was the core problem then.
The heat shield is where the real engineering story lives. Data recovered from previous ocean landings drove a set of concrete changes: new tile retention mechanisms, curved tile designs that better manage plasma flow, and adjusted thermal pathways.
The commercial pressure behind this flight became clearer this week. Two companies have now publicly committed to payload slots on a twenty-twenty-eight Starfall mission.
Away from launch operations, a Harvard-led survey of nine nearby galaxies has produced findings that challenge how galaxy formation models work. The study used the Very Large Telescope's MUSE instrument to build three-dimensional maps of ionized gas around active galactic nuclei.
Briefly: the confirmed exoplanet archive crossed six thousand three hundred sixty-six worlds this week, with six new additions including microlensing discoveries and two warm Jupiters. The pace of confirmation remains steady.
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