Now Playing
Webb Reads Alien Rock & Starship Eyes First Orbit | Sep 28
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
JWST directly reads the surface of a rocky exoplanet for the first time — no atmosphere needed. Plus, Starship Flight 14 targets orbital velocity, and what Flight 13 proved about reusability.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Forty-eight light-years away, a scorched world has just told us what it's made of. That's not a metaphor.
The planet is tidally locked, meaning one face bakes permanently under its star while the other stays in permanent dark. That geometry makes it too hostile to hold an atmosphere, and the absence of sulfur dioxide in the MIRI spectrum tells us something else: no recent volcanism.
Switching to closer-to-home developments. SpaceX has moved the Super Heavy booster to the Starbase launch pad in Texas, positioning Starship for its fourteenth test flight, targeting September twenty-eighth.
Flight 13 on July twenty-fourth made the case for how far the system has come. The Super Heavy booster executed a controlled landing.
The honest assessment on Flight 14 is that orbital insertion and booster recovery during an orbital-class mission remain untested. Thirteen flights of incremental progress also included several explosive endings.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.