Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily,
your daily guide to the cosmos. I'm
Anna.
Avery: And I'm um, avery. It's Tuesday the 2nd of
June, 2026 and this is season 5
episode 113.
Anna: What a week it's been in space already.
Blue Origin is picking up the pieces. After a
spectacular rocket explosion and the ripple
effects for NASA's moon plans are uh, growing
by the hour.
Avery: China quietly launched a brand new rocket
overnight and barely told anyone about it.
Anna: Starship is grounded again and this time
there's an IPO in the balance.
Avery: And NASA's Roman Space Telescope is getting
ready to change everything we know about
exoplanets. We're talking a hundred
thousand new worlds.
Anna: Plus, did you know Earth was once a planet
wide ocean of lava for 500
million years? New research is rewriting
the story of our early home.
Avery: And the Hubble Space Telescope has captured a
stunning new look at a galaxy on a cosmic
collision course. One that won't end for
hundreds of millions of years.
Anna: All that and more right here on Astronomy
Daily. Let's get into it.
Avery: Why don't you kick things off Anna with
today's big news update.
Anna: Okay. When Blue Origin's new Glenn
rocket exploded on 28 May, the
world was watching. But five days on the
full scale of the damage, not just to the
pad, but to America's lunar ambitions is
becoming painfully clear.
Avery: Let's recap what happened for anyone who
missed it. The new Glenn was undergoing a
static fire test. A uh, routine pre launch
engine ignition at Launch Complex
36 ahead of a planned June 4 launch.
Instead, all seven first stage engines
ignited. Something clearly went wrong and the
322 foot rocket was engulfed in a
massive fireball. The explosion could be seen
and felt for miles.
Anna: Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has
confirmed the company has begun clearing the
pad. But here's the critical problem. Launch
Complex 36 is Blue Origin's only
orbital launch facility. They have no backup.
And rebuilding a destroyed launch complex
isn't a matter of weeks.
Avery: And the mission that was sitting on that pad
wasn't just about Internet satellites. Blue
Origin was preparing to deploy Amazon's LEO
broadband constellation. But the new Glenn is
also the rocket that NASA is counting on to
carry its Blue Moon landers to the lunar
surface.
Anna: That's right. Just two days before the
explosion, NASA had signed a new agreement
with Blue Origin to launch a pair of New
Glenns carrying rovers to the moon. Rovers
that would be waiting for Artemis Cruise, the
Blue Moon Mark 1 Lander scheduled to deliver
the first hardware for NASA's Moon Base 1
mission this coming northern autumn will now
faces an uncertain delay.
Avery: And when the lander slips, the crew capable
blue moon mark two timeline slips with it.
One expert put it bluntly. NASA's moon based
plans are at this point quote, an
aspiration rather than being realistically
achievable in the next few years.
Anna: It's worth noting that SpaceX and United
launch alliance both successfully launched
rockets from elsewhere at the cape less than
24 hours after the new Glenn explosion.
A pointed reminder of the advantage of having
multiple launch pads.
Avery: A, uh, tough lesson and a sobering moment for
the whole Artemis program. We'll be watching
this one very closely.
Anna: On to our next story. And were the Chinese
being sneaky or just getting on with
business?
Avery: Well, while the world was focused on the Blue
origin explosion, China was quietly making
its own significant space history without so
much as a press release in advance.
Anna: On June 1, at 4:40am Eastern
Time, China's new Long March 12B
rocket lifted off from the Zhuquan Satellite
launch center in the Gobi Desert. Its very
first flight with no advance warning
whatsoever.
Avery: No announcement, no countdown, just
gone. China's 35th orbital launch attempt
of 2026 and arguably one of the most
technically significant.
Anna: The Long March 12B is China's answer
to SpaceX's Falcon 9. It's a two
stage kerosene and liquid oxygen rocket,
72 meters tall with a 20 ton payload
capacity to low Earth orbit. And crucially,
it's designed from the ground up to be
reusable. No recovery was attempted on this
maiden flight, but one is planned.
Avery: What makes it especially interesting is the
technology on board the rocket features what
engineers are calling dual brains.
Independent flight computers on both stages
that can process data and make real time
flight decisions autonomously. Think of it as
redundant artificial intelligence for the
rocket itself.
Anna: The debut mission successfully deployed
another batch of satellites for the Qian Fan
Constellation, also known as Thousand
Sails, China's answer to Starlink. If
this launch followed the typical batch size,
the Qianfan Constellation now has
approximately 180 satellites in
orbit.
Avery: And it was developed in just 21 months.
21 months from concept to first successful
flight of a new heavy lift rocket. That's a
remarkable pace by any standard.
Anna: And in other Chinese space news, and it's
been a busy week. The three member Shenzhou
Uh, 21 crew returned safely to Earth on
29 May 2026, wrapping
up a record 210 day mission
aboard the Tiangong Space Station. Commander
Cheng Liu, Wu Fei and Cheng Hongzhang are all
in good health. It was a mission that had
some added drama. A suspected space debris
strike had damaged the window of their
original return capsule, requiring China to
launch an emergency replacement spacecraft to
bring them home.
Avery: China's space program is accelerating on
every front simultaneously. The pace is
extraordinary.
Anna: Next up, you could say it's been a rough few
days for commercial spaceflight and Starship
hasn't escaped the turbulence. The FAA has
formally grounded SpaceX's Starship version
3 rocket following what it's designated a uh,
Mishap during Flight 12 on 22
May.
Avery: Let's remind listeners what happened on
Flight 12. It was the debut of the Version 3
configuration, a significant upgrade with new
Raptor 3 engines featuring a simplified
design and increased thrust. The launch
itself looked spectacular. The booster
separated cleanly and delivered the upper
stage to its intended trajectory.
Anna: But then things went wrong during the boost
back burn. When the super heavy booster fires
its engines to arc back toward the recovery
zone, it couldn't light all the planned
engines. A partial burn ended early. The
booster then attempted a landing burn, failed
to ignite and hard splashed into the Gulf of
Mexico or Gulf of America, depending on where
you live. Meanwhile, one of the three vacuum
Raptor vacuum engines on the upper stage also
failed, though SpaceX was still able to steer
it to the intended splashdown in the Indian
Ocean.
Avery: The FAA has now determined that constitutes a
mishap under federal launch licensing rules
and SpaceX must complete a, uh, full
investigation led by SpaceX but overseen
by the FAA. Before Starship can fly again.
The FAA must approve the final report and
any corrective actions. This is the seventh
time Starship has been grounded in three
years.
Anna: Industry observers are currently pointing to
a July to August 2026 window for
Flight 13 May. SpaceX may also choose
to skip the booster, catch on that flight and
repeat the Gulf splashdown profile while the
Raptor 3 issues are understood.
Avery: Now here's where this gets particularly
interesting. SpaceX filed its public
IPO prospectus with the SEC on
May 20, just two days before Flight
12. The company is targeting a uh,
NASDAQ listing under the ticker
SPCX, with shares
potentially trading as early as June 12.
And its entire growth story is built
around starship.
Anna: In the S1 filing, SpaceX stated, and
we're paraphrasing here, that its growth
strategy depends on increasing launch cadence
and payload capacity, which in turn depends
on the successful development of Starship at
scale. A grounding right before the IPO
roadshow is not ideal.
Avery: High stakes all around. We'll keep following
both the investigation and the IPO timeline.
Anna: Okay, let's take a breath from all the rocket
drama and look ahead to something genuinely
thrilling. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space
Telescope is heading to Kennedy Space center
this month with a launch target of early
September 2026. And what it's going to do
is nothing short of staggering.
Avery: To put it in perspective, since the dawn of
the exoplanet era, we have confirmed around
6,300 planets beyond our solar system.
That's across decades of work from Kepler,
Tess, Hubble and every ground based
observatory on Earth. Roman is expected
to find approximately 100,000
more in just five years.
Anna: 100,000 15 times
everything we've ever found in half a decade.
How?
Avery: It comes down to Roman's extraordinary
combination of Hubble class resolution and a
field of view at least 100 times larger.
Where Hubble would photograph a postage stamp
of sky, Roman photographs a full
page spread with the same sharpness. It
can survey the sky up to a thousand times
faster than Hubble.
Anna: And critically, Roman will be looking in
places we've barely explored. Its galactic
bulge Survey will observe approximately 100
million stars in the dense, understudied
heart of the milk Milwaukee regions where
most planet hunting missions have never
ventured. It will find planets using both the
transit method and gravitational
microlensing, which can detect planets that
don't even transit their stars.
Avery: Roman is also expected to find a significant
population of rogue planets, worlds
drifting through the galaxy without a star to
orbit. We currently know of only a handful.
Roman could reveal thousands.
Anna: And then there's the coronagraph instrument,
a ah, technology demonstrator that will
directly image a handful of large planets
around nearby stars. Testing techniques
intended for a future mission to photograph
Earth like worlds around sun, like stars.
Roman is also hunting dark energy and dark
matter.
Avery: NASA administrator Jared Isaacman described
the accelerated development as a true success
story. The telescope is now targeting a
September launch ahead of its May 2027
commitment. It's heading to Kennedy Space
center this very month.
Anna: Roman is going to be extraordinary. Our
audience is going to be hearing a lot about
this one.
Avery: Now, um, here's a question to ponder. Picture
the very young Earth. Four and a half billion
years ago, the Moon has just formed from the
debris of a catastrophic collision. The
surface is an ocean of molten rock. As far as
you can see. The atmosphere is a thick,
toxic steam. How long did that last?
Anna: OSU scientists had assumed not very long,
geologically speaking, A few tens of millions
of years, perhaps before the planet cooled
and solidified. But according to A striking
new preprint from the researchers at the
Kaptain Astronomical Institute in the
Netherlands. The answer might be up to half a
billion years.
Avery: Half a billion years. To put that in
perspective, that's longer than the entire
history of complex animal life on Earth.
The planet was essentially a global lava
ocean for that entire time.
Anna: So what kept it molten for so long? The
researchers point to two key factors working
together. First, the Moon. At that early
stage, the newly formed Moon was orbiting the
Earth much closer than it does today. That
proximity created enormous tidal forces.
Imagine the Moon's gravity kneading the
interior of the planet like dough. That tidal
heating alone would have kept the mantle
churning and molten.
Avery: And the second factor, the atmosphere.
Anna: In the early Earth, the thick steam
atmosphere acted like a thermal blanket,
trapping heat and dramatically slowing the
rate at which the planet could radiate energy
into space and cool down. Without that
atmospheric insolation, the magma ocean would
have solidified much faster.
Avery: But here's the part that makes this more than
just a story about ancient geology. The
research also found that these prolonged hot,
chemical rich conditions would have been
ideal for producing hydrogen cyanide,
a molecule that sounds poisonous, but is
actually considered one of the key building
blocks of life's precursor chemicals.
Rna, amino, um, acids.
Anna: So the very conditions that kept Earth molten
may also have set the stage for life to
eventually emerge. A 500 million
year lava world as a cradle for biology.
It's a remarkable reframing.
Avery: The paper is currently available as a pre
print on Arxiv with full peer review to
follow. We'll be watching for the published
results.
Anna: And we close today with something beautiful.
A brand new image from the NASA and ESA
Hubble Space Telescope that was released this
week as Hubble's picture of the Month.
Avery: It shows the spiral galaxy Messier
88 M8, about 63 million
light years away in the constellation Coma
Berenices. It's a gorgeous object.
Tight, symmetrical spiral arms outlined by
sparkling pink and blue star clusters
draped in knotted clouds of dust with a
warm glowing heart.
Anna: But what makes this image scientifically
fascinating is the story behind what we're
seeing. M M88 is a member of the Virgo
Cluster, a collection of more than a thousand
galaxies bound together by gravity. And M
M88 is currently about 2 million light
years from the cluster's center on a long
inward journey that will unfold over hundreds
of millions of years.
Avery: And that, uh, journey is already leaving
marks. Researchers have found that M M88
has significantly less cold gas in its outer
regions than you'd expect for a galaxy of its
size. Cold gas is the raw fuel for star
formation, and it's being stripped away by a
process called ram pressure stripping, where
the gravitational influence of the cluster
environment essentially blows material off
the galaxy like wind stripping lead from a
tree.
Anna: You can actually see the effect in the image.
The leading edge of the galaxy's gas disk
appears compressed and piled up like snow
in front of a plow. The galaxy is being
reshaped in real time by its environment,
and in roughly
Avery: 200 to 300 million years, M88
will reach its closest encounter with
neighboring giant Messier 87,
the galaxy whose supermassive black hole gave
us humanity's first ever photograph of a
black hole back in 2019. Their
gravitational interaction will reshape both
galaxies
Anna: profoundly, a cosmic drama unfolding
across timescales almost too vast to
comprehend. And Hubble is letting us watch it
in a single, breathtaking image that is
Avery: Astronomy Daily for Tuesday, 2nd
June 2026. What a show
today. From exploding rockets to a hundred
thousand new worlds, from Earth's ancient
fire to, uh, a galaxy's long journey through
the cosmos.
Anna: If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow
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Avery: Find us at astronomydaily IO and follow
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@astrodaily.
Anna: Pod for Avery I'm Anna
Clear skies
Avery: everyone, and stay curious.
Anna: Love.
Story soul.