Launch Eve: Starship V3 Ready for Liftoff | Lunar Laser Navigation Breakthrough | VAST Ventures into Satellites

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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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.

In this episode