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Starship's Orbital Debut, JUICE Flyby & the Lunar South Pole Race | Sep 28
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Starship Flight 14 makes its first orbital attempt on September 28th, carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites on a 10-hour mission that unlocks NASA's entire Artemis architecture. Plus: ESA's JUICE gravity assist, Europe's post-ISS strategy, and why the lunar South Pole race is narrowing fast.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Starship is on the pad, fully stacked, and the first orbital launch attempt is forty-eight hours away. That's the lead today, and it earns it.
There's a financial wrinkle worth tracking alongside the technical one. A lockup expiration on September twenty-fourth made three hundred and twenty-eight million SpaceX shares eligible for sale.
September twenty-eighth is also significant beyond Starship. ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, JUICE, performs its third Earth gravity assist at seven forty-five in the morning Eastern Time on the same day.
Europe has been quietly building a three-track strategy for post-ISS access to space, and the pieces are becoming clearer. ESA signed a seven hundred and sixty million euro cargo contract, funded by Italy, toward a European space station bid.
The sharpest political signal this week came from former NASA administrator Bill Nelson, whose memoir puts the U.S.-China lunar competition in blunt terms. Nelson argues Beijing is planning permanent infrastructure at the lunar South Pole, and that the United States is no longer the obvious frontrunner to get there first.
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