Anna: The world's most powerful rocket is on the
launch pad and it's launching tomorrow. We
have the full Update on Starship V3 and
the bittersweet shadow hanging over the
launch site.
Avery: In the cold darkness of the Moon's south
pole, scientists want to build the most
precise navigation system ever created.
Lasers and craters permanently
frozen in shadow.
Anna: A, uh, space startup you might know best for
its space station ambitions just revealed a
surprise new business. Astronomy Daily
Season 5 Episode 107 let's go.
Avery: Ready when you are.
Anna: It's launch eve for the most anticipated
rocket test of 2026. SpaceX's
Starship V3, the biggest, most
powerful rocket ever built, is on the pad at
Starbase in South Texas. Confirmed go for
launch Thursday, May 21st.
Avery: We've been following this one for a few days
now, Anna, and this is genuinely the launch
where the stakes couldn't be higher for NASA,
for SpaceX, for the whole future of deep
space travel.
Anna: Let's run through what's happening and why it
matters. The launch window opens at
6:30pm Eastern Time on Thursday.
That's 8:30 Friday morning for listeners in
Australia and New Zealand. 90 minutes to get
off the pad.
Avery: This is Flight 12, the 12th Test
of the fully stacked Starship vehicle. And
um, the very first for the completely
redesigned version 3 architecture. It's
been seven months since Starship last flew
back in October 2025, so the
pressure has been building.
Anna: And it's the first flight From Starbase Pad
2, a brand new launch complex. So
there are a lot of firsts stacked up in this
one mission.
Avery: What are the main test objectives for Flight
12?
Anna: The Booster Super Heavy will attempt a, uh,
controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico
about seven minutes after launching. No
Mechazilla catch attempt this time. This is a
new vehicle and SpaceX wants clean data
before pushing for that. Meanwhile, the upper
stage ship 39 heads on a
suborbital trajectory partway around the
world.
Avery: And it ends in the Indian Ocean, which puts
the re entry path right over Western
Australia. For our Southern Hemisphere
audience, there is a real chance of a visible
streak across the Predawn sky around
65 minutes after launching.
Anna: The upper stage has some fascinating
objectives. It'll deploy 22 dummy
Starlink satellites. Two of those are
specially modified. They'll scan Starship's
heat shield from outside and beam images back
to mission controllers. That's a completely
new capability testing how the team might
assess heat shield readiness for future
return to Starbase missions.
Avery: And there's a deliberately removed heat
shield tile to measure what happens
aerodynamically when one is missing. Plus a
Raptor engine relay in space and a
structural stress maneuver on the rear flaps.
SpaceX is loading this flight with data
collection.
Anna: Now, before we go further with the excitement
and we are genuinely excited, we do need
to acknowledge something. On 15 May, a
worker died at the Starbase site in South
Texas. According to reports, the person was a
contractor who died after a fall in the early
hours of that Friday morning OSHA is
investigating.
Avery: SpaceX has not publicly commented. Our
thoughts are with the person's family and
colleagues. It's a reminder that behind every
spectacular launch is a workforce of
thousands of people doing difficult,
sometimes dangerous work that deserves
acknowledgment.
Anna: And there is a broader context here. A, uh,
2025 analysis using OSHA data
found that Starbase has a significantly
higher worker injury rate than comparable
aerospace facilities. That's something the
industry and regulators need to keep in focus
as the pace of operations accelerates.
Avery: With that noted, the launch itself. Why does
NASA need Starship V3 to work so
badly?
Anna: Because Starship is the designated lunar
lander for Artemis 4. That's the mission that
will actually put boots back on the moon,
targeted for 2028. NASA
needs SpaceX to prove Starship can get to
orbit, refuel there, dock with an Orion
capsule and descend to the surface. None of
that has happened yet. This test is the
foundation.
Avery: B3 is also supposed to be the baseline
vehicle for crewed missions eventually. And
SpaceX's plans for orbital data centers,
Mars missions, everything a lot is
riding on a clean test tomorrow.
Anna: The launch window opens at 6:30 Eastern
Thursday evening. 8:30 Friday morning,
Australian Eastern Time. SpaceX will
livestream from about 45 minutes before
liftoff. We'll link everything in the show
Notes next up.
Avery: Today, here's, um, an idea that sounds like
science fiction, but is grounded in some very
serious physics. What if the
coldest, darkest, most inhospitable
places on the Moon turned out to be the ideal
location for one of the most precise
instruments ever conceived?
Anna: You're talking about the permanently shadowed
craters near the lunar south pole.
Avery: Exactly. Researchers at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology
in the US have published a proposal this
week that's genuinely elegant. These
polar craters never, ever receive direct
sunlight. Because of the Moon's very low
axial tilt, they've been in permanent
darkness for billions of years. Temperatures
inside reach around 16 Kelvin. That's
minus 257 degrees Celsius,
almost absolute zero.
Anna: And that makes them special for lasers.
Avery: Incredibly special. The most stable
lasers in existence rely on silicon
optical cavities, essentially a pair of
ultra precise mirrors in a rigid housing.
The problem is that even the tiniest
temperature fluctuation or vibration will
cause the laser frequency to drift. On Earth,
you need enormously complex cryogenic
cooling systems and vibration isolation
just to keep them stable. In one of these
lunar craters, nature provides all of that
for free.
Anna: The near absolute zero temperature
eliminates thermal noise. The near perfect
vacuum eliminates atmospheric interference.
And the bedrock of a lunar crater is
extraordinarily stable compared to any
location on Earth.
Avery: Jun Ye, the lead researcher at nist, put it
beautifully. He said as soon as he understood
what these permanently shadowed regions could
offer, he he felt it would be the most ideal
environment ever for a super stable laser.
Anna: So what would such a laser actually be used
for? This isn't just a cool physics
experiment.
Avery: Not at all. The applications are immediately
practical for everything humanity is planning
to do on the moon. First, navigation.
As we build up Artemis infrastructure at the
lunar south pole, spacecraft and landers
currently have to rely heavily on Earth based
tracking systems. That's slow,
imprecise and increasingly impractical as
lunar activity ramps up. A laser
locked to this kind of ultra stable cavity
could provide a GPS like timing backbone.
A master reference signal that spacecraft,
landers and astronauts could navigate by
an independent
Anna: lunar positioning system that's
genuinely transformative for long term
operations.
Avery: There's more. The same laser could enable
ultra precise distance measurements between
satellites in lunar orbit, critical for
mapping and coordination. It could serve as
the first atomic clock on an extraterrestrial
body, establishing a lunar timescale.
And this one caught my eye. It could
potentially support gravitational wave
detection from the lunar surface.
Anna: The Moon has been discussed as a future
gravitational wave observatory site. Because
it lacks the seismic noise that limits
detectors on Earth, a laser like this would
be a key component.
Avery: This is still a proposal, but it's the kind
of forward thinking infrastructure planning
that needs to happen now before the crewed
missions arrive. Because you really don't
want to be figuring out lunar GPS after
the astronauts are already there.
Anna: Before moving on to our next story, a quick
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Avery: When when you can find a link to our special
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get NordVPN.
Anna: Now you might know vast as the California
startup building haven one the commercial
space station that launched last year as
humanity's first privately owned orbital
outpost. But this week, VAST made an
announcement that raised a few eyebrows.
They're getting into the satellite business.
A pivot, an expansion really.
On 19 May, Vast announced a new
line of high power satellites distinct
from their space station work. They're
positioning this as a separate business line,
entering a market currently dominated by
established players like Boeing and Airbus in
the geostationary orbit segment, as well as
the emerging high throughput LEO operators.
Avery: High power satellites. What does that mean
specifically? Higher power than standard
communication satellites?
Anna: Exactly. High power satellites can
generate significantly more electrical power
from their solar arrays, which translates
directly into more powerful transmitters and
more bandwidth capacity. They're attractive
for government customers, defense
applications and premium commercial
communications sectors where performance
outweighs launch cost as a priority.
Avery: And VAST has the manufacturing expertise from
Haven One to draw on.
Anna: That's presumably part of the logic. Building
a space station requires solving very hard
problems around long duration power systems,
thermal management, structural integrity in
orbitall, things that translate well into
satellite manufacturing. Bast seems to be
betting they can leverage that expertise into
a new revenue stream.
Avery: It's, um, an interesting strategic move.
Space stations are enormously capital
intensive with a very long return horizon.
Satellites are a more established market with
clearer near term revenue. It diversifies
their business in a meaningful way.
Anna: Haven One remains their flagship product.
This isn't an abandonment of that vision, but
it signals that VAST is thinking about itself
as a broader space infrastructure company,
not just a station operator. One to watch.
Avery: Time now for a black hole story. When the
James Webb Space Telescope started returning
data from the early universe, it created a
beautiful problem. It found black holes that
were too big. Impossibly big by our
models. Supermassive black holes in
galaxies just 800 million years after
the Big Bang. Far more massive relative to
their host galaxies than anything we see in
the modern universe.
Anna: And that shouldn't be possible under our
standard understanding of how black holes and
galaxies co evolve.
Avery: Right. The conventional model says black
holes and galaxies grow together in a kind
of feedback loop. Star formation, gas
accretion, they regulate each other. The
ratio of black hole mass to galaxy mass is
fairly consistent in the local universe,
around a, uh, tenth to half a percent. But
JWST kept finding early galaxies where
the black hole was grotesquely oversized
relative
Anna: to its host galaxy, the
overmassive black holes. So what's the new
explanation?
Avery: New research published this week on Arxiv,
led by Muhammad Latif at UAE University,
proposes a, uh, compelling mechanism in the
earliest Cosmic environments. Certain
galaxies were extraordinarily gas rich
and embedded in particularly dense dark
matter halos. That combination created
conditions where gas could fall into the
central black hole far faster than the
surrounding galaxy could form stars.
Anna: Though the black hole got a head start, it
never lost exactly.
Avery: The researchers call this rapid early phase
episodic super Eddington accretion. The black
hole was consuming gas at rates that exceed
the theoretical limit that normally governs
how fast accretion can proceed in these
extreme early environments. That limit may
have been routinely broken.
Anna: This paper also identifies these over massive
black holes as potentially the missing link
between what are called heavy seeds, the
primordial black holes that formed from the
collapse of the very first massive stars, and
the luminous quasars we observe later in
cosmic history.
Avery: There is also a separate but related finding
this week on JWST's data from two
specific early galaxies, named in the
research as Kola 1 and Nepla 4,
seen just 800 million years after the Big
Bang, where the black holes appear to have
grown far faster than their host galaxies.
The JWST spectroscopy detected
broad hydrogen emission lines, a, uh,
telltale signature of gas swirling rapidly
around the supermassive black hole.
Anna: That we're getting closer to a, uh, coherent
story of how the universe's largest
structures assembled themselves in those
first billion years. JWST keeps
delivering.
Avery: If you thought the James Webb Space Telescope
changed everything, and it did, you should be
paying close attention to what's coming next.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
is now confirmed for launch as early as
September 2026. That's eight months
ahead of its mandated deadline, and it's
under budget, which almost
Anna: never happens with flagship space telescopes.
Avery: Almost never. NASA administrator Jared
Isaacman announced the updated timeline at a
news conference at Goddard Space Flight
center in April. And since then, the
telescope has completed construction and is
being prepared for shipment to Kennedy Space
center in Florida. It'll ride to orbit on a
SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
Anna: Walk us through what Roman actually does,
because I think a lot of people haven't heard
as much about it as they will once it
launches.
Avery: Roman is built around the primary mirror
that's similar in size to Hubble, about
2.4 meters across. But where Hubble
sees a relatively narrow field of view.
Roman's Wide Field Instrument captures a
patch of sky at least a hundred times larger
in a single exposure. And it surveys the
sky at, uh, more than a thousand times
Hubble's speed.
Anna: That's an almost incomprehensible upgrade
in survey capability.
Avery: By the end of its planned five year primary
mission, Roman is expected to accumulate
around 20,000 terabytes of data.
Scientists will use that to investigate
around 100,000 exoplanets, hundreds
of millions of galaxies, billions of
stars. And the mission team fully expects to
find phenomena that have never been observed.
Anna: The primary scientific targets are dark
energy and dark matter, the invisible
scaffolding of the universe that we know must
exist but can't directly see. Roman should
be able to map how much dark matter is
distributed across cosmic time in a way
that's never been possible before.
Avery: It also carries a coronagraph instrument, the
most advanced starlight suppression
technology ever flown in space, which will
enable direct imaging of planets around
nearby stars. That's a key stepping stone in
the
Anna: search for earth like worlds September
2026 mark the calendar.
Astronomy is about to get very, very busy.
Avery: Our final story today involves a visitor from
beyond our solar system and two new
revelations about it that are genuinely
extraordinary.
Anna: The interstellar comet 3 I
HE L A S. We've spoken about this before on
Astronomy Daily. It was officially discovered
on 1 July 2025 by the
ATLAS telescope network in Chile, the third
interstellar object ever detected passing
through our solar system.
Avery: And there are two new developments this week.
The first, researchers have found that 3i a
atlas was actually being imaged by the Vera C
Rubin Observatory in Chile for more than a
week before its official discovery. The Comet
nearly became 3i Rubin. Images from
between 21 June and 2 July
2025 show it clearly in Rubin data. But
the observatory was still in its science
validation phase at the time, not yet in full
operation. Nobody was looking at those frames
in real time.
Anna: That's a fascinating footnote about the state
of our sky survey infrastructure. Had Rubin
been fully operational, we would have had
over a week of additional early tracking
data.
Avery: And that matters enormously for
characterizing these objects. The earlier you
catch them, the better you understand their
trajectory, their composition, their size.
Anna: The second development is even more striking.
Research led by the University of Michigan
and published in Nature Astronomy
reveals that the water inside 2i
Atlas is unlike anything we've ever
found in our own solar system. Specifically,
its ratio of heavy water water
molecules, where one hydrogen atom is
replaced by deuterium, is at least 30
times higher than anything found in comets
from our own solar system.
Avery: Thirty times? That's not a small difference.
Anna: It's a profound one. Deuterium is a heavier
isotope of hydrogen, and the ratio of
deuterium to regular hydrogen in water is a
chemical fossil. It records the temperature
conditions where the water formed. High
deuterium means the water formed in an
extremely cold environment, far colder than
the outer reaches of our own solar system.
Avery: So 3 IA atlas forms somewhere colder
and stranger than anything in our
neighborhood. A different kind of planetary
system, possibly much further from its parent
star.
Anna: The researchers at ALMA Observatory described
it beautifully. They said each interstellar
comet brings a little bit of its history, its
fossils from elsewhere in the galaxy. We
don't know exactly where 3 IA Atlas came
from, but with instruments like ALMA and
Rubin and jwst, we're beginning to
read the chemical biography of another star
system.
Avery: And the comet itself is estimated to be
nearly 12 billion years old. Its
parent star system may no longer exist. We're
reading the message from a stellar
civilization of ice and rock that formed
before our sun was born.
Anna: Space travel in slow motion across
12 billion years before we go
a, uh,
Avery: quick heads up for your skies tonight. Look
west after sunset and you'll find a lovely
pairing. Jupiter glows brightly beside the
waxing crescent moon. The crescent acts as a
natural pointer. Jupiter will be the
brightest star like object nearby. No
telescope needed, though. Binoculars will
show Jupiter's four Galilean moons as tiny
dots in a line. Southern Hemisphere viewers
look northwest after dark. Enjoy it.
Anna: That's Astronomy daily for Wednesday,
May 21, 2026.
Season 5 Episode 107
Big Day Tomorrow with Starship. We'll be
watching.
Avery: If you're enjoying the show, please
subscribe, leave a review and tell a fellow
space enthusiast. Find us at astronomydaily
IO and across all platforms as
astrodaily. Pod. This is Anna and
Avery. Keep looking up.