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Starship's Orbital Payload, Youngest Exoplanet & Launch Market Reset
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX targets Starship Flight 14's first orbital insertion carrying 26 live Starlinks, while astronomers confirm the youngest exoplanet ever caught mid-formation. Plus NASA's 41-tech commercial push, Crew-13's October launch, and a pricing reset shaking the global launch market.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA has just committed to forty-one commercial technologies it's betting will get humans to the Moon and Mars and keep them there. That's not a wish list.
The other major development this cycle is Starship. Flight fourteen is scheduled for September twenty-eighth, with a launch window opening at seven fifteen in the morning Central Time.
Away from Earth entirely, astronomers have confirmed the youngest known exoplanet. It's called Elias two-twenty-four b, and it's still actively accreting material from the protoplanetary disk surrounding its host star.
One more development worth flagging. At World Space Business Week, Blue Origin, Arianespace, and Firefly all made the same argument: cost-per-kilogram pricing is unsustainable.
Crew-thirteen is also confirmed for early October, launching from Cape Canaveral with NASA astronauts Watkins and Delaney, Canadian astronaut Kutrik, and a Roscosmos cosmonaut under the existing cross-flight agreement. Routine rotation, but the mixed-nation crew composition under current geopolitical conditions is its own quiet signal.
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