Anna: 40 seconds. That's all that stood between
humanity and the most powerful rocket ever
built, taking its first flight in a whole New
form.
Avery: 40 seconds. The countdown was running. The
rocket was fueled. Tens of thousands of
people were watching, including a certain pop
star who really should have been a good omen.
Anna: And then it stopped. Ground equipment
issues, rising propellant temperatures, a
scrub.
Avery: But here's the thing. Even in the scrub,
SpaceX dropped a bombshell that had nothing
to do with the rocket. A crewed mission to
Mars. A real one, with a commander already
named.
Anna: We have got a lot to unpack today. I'm
Anna.
Avery: I'm, um, Avery.
Anna: And, um, this is Astronomy Daily. May 22,
2026. Let's get into it.
Avery: Alright, let's set the scene. Thursday
evening, South Texas Starbase. The
brand new Starship version 3 is sitting on
the pad, fueled, stacked, frosted white
from cryogenic propellant. And the crowd has
been building all day.
Anna: This was supposed to be Flight 12, the debut
of the most powerful rocket ever built in its
most advanced configuration yet. And for
context, this is the first starship test
flight since way back in October of last
year. Seven months of development work,
two explosive setbacks on the test stand that
destroyed hardware. And now, finally,
here they are.
Avery: The launch window opens, weather clears.
SpaceX pushes to the back of the 90 minute
window to wait for upper level winds to ease.
And then the countdown starts ticking toward
Anna: T0 and it gets to T minus
40 seconds and it stops. It
restarts, goes back to T40,
stops again. Engineers are on the webcast,
working through it in real time. SpaceX
communications manager Dan Hoot is telling
viewers they're seeing issues with quick
disconnect lines and water diverters on the
launch tower.
Avery: And then propellant temperatures start rising
in the tanks. That's the clock running out.
The window closes.
Anna: Scrubbed a ah scrub at T minus 40
is genuinely frustrating. You're that close.
But it's also, as SpaceX themselves say,
completely expected behavior for a brand new
rocket on a brand new pad. You learn things
about these systems that you simply cannot
learn any other way.
Avery: So let's talk about what they're actually
trying to fly. Because Starship V3 is a
substantial step up from everything that came
before.
Anna: The V3 Starship. That's the upper stage
called ship 39 in this case and its
super heavy booster, booster 19
together generate around 18 million
pounds of thrust at liftoff. That is a
significant Increase over the V2
configuration. New engines on both stages.
Avery: The mission profile for Flight 12, when it
does fly, has Booster 19 splashing down in
the Gulf of Mexico while Ship 39 continues
on a suborbital trajectory and targets a
controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
And critically, the mission includes a Raptor
engine test during the coast phase. Important
Data for future DE orbiting burns on orbital
flights.
Anna: And if, uh, Flight 12 goes well, the word
from SpaceX is that Flight 13 could be the
first orbital starship launch. That's a
massive milestone. Now there's a bigger
picture here too, Avery. SpaceX recently
filed for an IPO. The company is expected to
go public within weeks. And Starship is
central to that story, demonstrating
meaningful progress on the next generation
rocket program. Right now matters in a very
real financial sense.
Avery: The good news is they get another shot
tonight. The launch window opens at 6:30pm
Eastern, closing at 8. Engineers have been
working through the night on those ground
systems. If you're listening to this and the
window hasn't opened yet, watch to space.
Anna: And now the part that honestly might be the
bigger story. Because while engineers were
troubleshooting at T minus 40, the SpaceX
webcast team did something remarkable. They
cut to a pre recorded interview
Avery: with a man sitting on Bouvet island, which
for context is widely considered the most
remote island on Earth. A tiny volcanic rock
in the South Atlantic, a nature reserve,
population zero.
Anna: This is Chun Wang, Chinese born
cryptocurrency entrepreneur, citizen of Malta
and the commander of the Fram 2 mission last
year. The first ever crewed spaceflight to
polar orbit. The man has form when it comes
to doing genuinely novel things in space.
Avery: And SpaceX announced that Chun Wang has
signed on to fly on the first commercial
starship Circumlunar mission, joining Dennis
Tito and his wife Akiko, who bought seats
back in 2022. A loop around the moon
on starship.
Anna: But that's not the headline. The headline is
what comes after the lunar flight.
Avery: Chun Wang will command the first crewed
Starship interplanetary mission. A
flyby of Mars. A two year mission.
And in Wang's own words, a lot of people talk
about going to Mars. We like Mars, we're
going to land on Mars, we're going to build a
colony on Mars. But let's get it started with
a flyby. It will light the fire, it will
ignite the imagination, it will build the
momentum.
Anna: No launch date was given, no full crew
manifest, but a commander is named, a
mission is defined. That's a real step
beyond the language of we intend to and
into the language of this person is going.
Avery: Remember, SpaceX's own timeline has Uncrewed
starships launching for Mars in the November
December 2026 transfer window. The pace
of this program, even with scrubs and
setbacks, is like nothing we've seen before.
Anna: One scrub doesn't change any of that. It will
simply become a footnote in space history
books. What matters is that the rocket is on
the pad. The ambition is extraordinary.
And tonight, maybe tonight, Starship
V3 flies for the first time.
Avery: And meanwhile, in other space news today,
staying with the theme of extraordinary
things happening in space, the James Webb
Space Telescope has given us another one.
Astronomers have directly imaged an exoplanet
called Epsilon Indi Ab, a cold
super Jupiter sitting about 12 light years
from ear, and found something nobody expected
to find there.
Anna: Water ice clouds. Not ammonia clouds,
which is what Jupiter, like planets are
supposed to have. Hatchy, thick water
ice clouds similar to cirrus clouds here on
Earth, hiding in the atmosphere of a world
seven and a half times the mass of Jupiter.
Avery: The discovery comes from a team led by
Elizabeth Matthews at the Max Planck
Institute for Astronomy, using Webb's mid
infrared imager, the MIRI camera, which was
able to directly image the planet's faint
heat emission. The planet orbits its star at,
uh, roughly Neptune's distance from our sun,
making it far colder than most exoplanets.
Webb has studied surface temperatures
somewhere between -70 and positive 20
degrees Celsius.
Anna: What makes this significant isn't just the
discovery itself. It's what it says about our
models. Current atmospheric models for
exoplanets didn't predict water ice clouds in
a world like this. They expected ammonia.
The fact that thick water ice layers appear
to be masking the ammonia signal means our
frameworks need updating.
Avery: And it has practical implications for how we
search for other cold planets. If water ice
clouds make some wavelengths look much
fainter than expected, we may be missing
worlds that don't fit the standard brightness
profile.
Anna: The researchers put it this JWST
is finally letting us study solar system
analog planets in detail. As lead author
Elizabeth Matthews said, if we were aliens
several light years away, looking back at our
sun, this is the first telescope that could
study Jupiter in detail. We are living in the
golden era of exoplanet science, from 12
light years
Avery: away to right here in our own galaxy.
And a discovery that reshapes how we
understand the invisible forces holding the
Milky Way together.
Anna: Astronomers at the University of Calgary
have produced one of the most detailed maps
ever made of the Milky Way's magnetic field
and found something deeply unexpected hidden
inside it. A magnetic flip, a
reversal in the field's direction cutting
diagonally through one of our galaxy's main
spiral arms, the Sagittarius arm.
Avery: The data came from a new radio
telescope at the Dominion Radio
Astrophysical Observatory in British
Columbia, Canada. The instrument
scans the sky at multiple radio
frequencies simultaneously, allowing
researchers to trace the galaxy's
magnetic structure using a technique
called Faraday rotation, measuring
the way radio waves shift when they pass
through magnetized plasma.
Anna: In most of the galaxy, the magnetic field
flows in a consistent direction along the
spiral arms. But in the Sagittarius
arm, the team found a, uh, diagonal
reversal. The field essentially flips
orientation across a diagonal line, cutting
through space. This is the first time this
structure has been mapped in three
dimensions.
Avery: The finding matters because the galaxy's
magnetic field isn't just a curiosity. It
shapes where gas flows, where new stars can
form, and how the galaxy itself evolves
over billions of years. A detailed map of
that field gives astronomers a reliable
baseline for future studies that reach far
beyond our own galaxy.
Anna: Bead researcher Dr. Rebecca Booth described
it as revealing a hidden structure.
What looks like empty space is anything
but empty. And thanks to this work, the
invisible architecture of our own galaxy
is no longer just a theory. It can be
studied, tested, and built upon.
Avery: And finally today, a successful launch close
to home, at least for our Australian and New
Zealand listeners.
Anna: Rocket Lab fired off another electron rocket
this morning from its Launch Complex 1 on the
Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. Mission
name Viva Le Strix. The payload was
a synthetic aperture radar satellite called
Strix 7, built for the Japanese Earth
imaging company Synspective.
Avery: This is the ninth time Rocket Lab has
launched a Strix satellite for Synspective. A
relationship going back to 2020. And with
another 18 missions already booked through to
2030, the constellation
Synspective is building will eventually
provide continuous SAR imaging of Japan
and surrounding regions. Data used for
urban development, planning, infrastructure,
monitoring, and disaster response.
Anna: Synthetic aperture radar is worth a quick
note for those unfamiliar. It's a type of
imaging that works in total darkness and
through cloud cover, While optical
satellites can't see through weather or at
night. SAR satellites illuminate the
surface with radar pulses and build a
detailed image from the return signal. That's
why Synspective called the Constellation
Strix, the genus of owls they
see in the dark.
Avery: The electron rocket itself is now 70
flights into its operational life. Small,
dedicated, reliable, it's become the
workhorse of the smallsat launch market. And
this mission is a textbook example of what it
was designed for. A commercial customer. A
specific orbit, a uh, clean deployment Rocket
Lab doing what Rocket Lab does.
Anna: And that is your Astronomy daily for Friday,
May 22, 2026. What a
morning to be alive.
Avery: And following space news, Starship
V3 gets another shot tonight. A crewed
Mars flyby has a Commander Webb is
rewriting Exoplanet atmospheric science.
Our own galaxy just revealed a hidden
magnetic structure and rocket Lab quietly
keeps building humanity's eyes in Orb, a
hillside in New Zealand.
Anna: If you're watching the starship launch
tonight, you can follow live coverage@sp
SpaceX.com window opens 06:30
Eastern and as always, all the links, show
notes and further reading are at
astronomydaily IO.
Avery: If you're enjoying the show, a uh subscribe a
review, a uh share it all helps us reach more
space enthusiasts around the world. We
genuinely appreciate every single one.
Anna: And before we go, a quick reminder about the
special money saving deal our uh, sponsor
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And currently for not very much money.
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Anna: I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery bae.
Anna: Curious. Keep looking up. We'll see you
tomorrow on Astronomy Daily.
Avery: Astronomy Daily
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