NASA's Lunar Base Blueprint, Starship V3's Bold Launch, and the Secrets of Supernovae Revealed

Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily

briefing from the edge of the cosmos. I'm

Anna.

Avery: And I'm, um, Avery. It is Tuesday, the 26th

of May, 2026, and we have an

enormous show for you today.

Anna: NASA is literally, as we record this,

preparing to unveil the most ambitious lunar

plan in a generation. We're talking about a

permanent moon base.

Avery: Starship V3 made its dramatic debut.

A Soviet rover that vanished nearly 40 years

ago has quietly come back to life. And

the James Webb Space Telescope has pulled off

something no telescope has ever done before.

Anna: Plus, a supernova mystery that took 20

years to crack. And a finding about rocky

planets across the galaxy that could reshape

how we think about worlds like our own.

Avery: Let's get into it.

Anna: Our lead story today is one for the history

books. And uniquely, it is unfolding right

now as we speak, as we record this

episode. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman

is preparing to take the podium at NASA

headquarters in Washington, Washington, D.C.

for a 2pm Eastern press conference that could

define the next decade of human space

exploration.

Avery: The headline is NASA is announcing

a permanent moon base. A real one, not a

visiting program, not flags and footprints. A

sustained human outpost at the lunar South

Pole with a target date of 2036.

Anna: What we know going in is significant. The

program carries a price tag in the region of

$30 billion across a seven year

foundational phase. It centers on the lunar

south pole, chosen because that region

contains water ice in permanently shadowed

craters, which NASA plans to convert into

rocket fuel, oxygen and life support systems.

Avery: Critically, this plan effectively retires the

Gateway concept, the proposed orbiting lunar

space station that's been on the drawing

board for years. The thinking is that the

resources and launch cadence needed for

Gateway are better directed toward getting

people on the surface and keeping them there.

Anna: Nuclear power is central to the architecture.

Both the base itself and potential future

Mars missions are expected to rely on

nuclear, uh, electric systems, a choice the

Planetary Society has flagged as potentially

transformative for deep space operations.

As Casey Dreher put it, nuclear propulsion

could open up huge opportunities for energy

use in various science missions and crewed

missions around the solar system.

Avery: Phase one alone calls for approximately 22

launches to the Moon, including the Artemis

IV crewed landing by 2028.

Those early flights will serve as the proving

ground. If they go smoothly, the program

earns its next phase. If there are hiccups,

the timeline shifts.

Anna: Commercial partners will play a major role,

supplying rovers, habitat modules and

surface logistics. International

collaboration is also baked in, though the

competitive context is hard to ignore.

China has announced its own international

lunar research program targeting the 2000 and

30s, and multiple nations now have advanced

lunar capabilities.

Avery: NASA's framing going into today's briefing

has been unambiguous. As Isaacman put it in

the lead up, this time the goal is not flags

and footprints. This time the goal is to

stay.

Anna: By the time our listeners hear this episode,

those full details will be public. We'll have

complete coverage in tomorrow's edition. But

what a moment to be covering space news. The

moon isn't a destination anymore, it's

Avery: becoming an address staying with big space

news.

And this one delivered drama in Spades.

On Friday 22 May 2026,

SpaceX launched Starship V3 for the very

first time. Flight 12, the most

powerful and most sophisticated rocket ever

built, now in its third generation

configuration.

Anna: And it did not disappoint, though perhaps not

entirely in the way SpaceX had planned.

Let's walk through what happened, because

this is a story with multiple chapters. The

launch came from brand new Pad 2 at uh,

Starbase Texas, itself a uh first.

After two scrubbed attempts, one foiled by

a hydraulic pin issue literally in

the final minutes of the countdown, Starship

lifted off at 6:33pm

Eastern on Friday. All 33

Raptor engines on the super heavy booster

lit cleanly.

Avery: The ascent looked textbook right up until

approximately one minute and 42 seconds into

the flight, when one of the six vacuum Raptor

engines on the ship upper stage shut down.

Now, in most rocket programs, that's a

mission ending event.

Anna: Not here. Starship's flight computer

detected the shutdown, instantly

redistributed the burn load across the

remaining five engines, extending their

burn durations to compensate. The vehicle

stayed on trajectory Face X

spokesperson Dan Hewitt on the live

commentary put it this way, the flight was

within analyzed bounds even if it wasn't

fully nominal.

Avery: Ship 39 reached space deployed

22 dummy Starlink satellites,

including two specially equipped with cameras

that captured stunning imagery of Starship in

orbit, and then executed a controlled

atmospheric re entry, splashing down in the

Indian Ocean as planned. Elon Musk called

it epic and a goal for humanity.

Anna: NASA Administrator Isaacman, who was watching

in person at Starbase, wrote on X

One step closer to the moon, one step

closer to Mars. Given that Starship

is the intended vehicle for the Artemis

crewed lunar landing, that's not a casual

observation.

Avery: Now, the super heavy booster did not have

such a clean ending. Multiple engines failed

during the boostback burn, the stage went off

normal and it came down hard in the Gulf of

Mexico. Rather than completing a soft

splashdown. The FAA has opened the review

as a standard after any anomaly over

navigable waters.

Anna: SpaceX had planned a splashdown rather than a

tower catch on this first V3 flight,

so losing the booster was within acceptable

test parameters. The company has formally

declared most of its pre planned test

objectives as completed.

Avery: The V3 design brings significant upgrades

over previous iterations larger propellant

capacity, simplified aft sections, new

Raptor 3 engines with higher thrust and

reduced complexity and ground infrastructure

at uh Pad 2. Designed for a much higher

launch cadence, this flight was about proving

those systems in the real environment.

Anna: It proved quite a lot. Flight 13

will be very interesting indeed.

Avery: Now to a piece of science that genuinely made

us sit back and marvel. The James Webb

Telescope has done something no telescope has

ever managed before. It has watched a daily

weather cycle unfold on a planet in another

star system.

Anna: The planet in question is WASP

94ab, a hot Jupiter

about 690 light years from Earth in

the constellation Microscopium. It's a

gas giant 1.7 times larger

than Jupiter, orbiting its star every four

days at a distance of roughly 8 million

kilometers. Temperatures on its dayside

exceed 1200 degrees Celsius,

and it is tidally locked, meaning one face

always points toward its star, the other

always faces away.

Avery: The research team led by Sagnik Mukherjee,

a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State

University who began this work as a PhD

student at UH UC Santa Cruz, used Webb's

Nirri M Instrument and a technique

called transit spectroscopy to observe the

planet as it crossed in front of its host

star.

Anna: And what they found was extraordinary. The

leading edge of the planet, the side rotating

from night into day. The planetary morning

was blanketed with thick clouds made of

magnesium silicate. Sand clouds,

essentially the same mineral found in talc

and ordinary rocks on Earth, vaporized and

condensed high in an alien atmospher.

Avery: But by the time the trailing edge, the

evening side, came into view, those clouds

had completely disappeared. A cloudy

dawn, a clear dusk. A weather cycle

repeating every four days with the planet's

orbit.

Anna: Co author David Singh of John Hopkins

University captured the significance

beautifully. He said, I've been looking at

exoplanets for 20 years, and general

cloudiness has been a thorn in our side.

We've known for quite a while that clouds are

pervasive on hot Jupiter planets, which is

annoying because it's like trying to look at

the planet through a foggy window.

Avery: Webb's ability to separate the morning and

evening limbs of the planet something the

Hubble Space Telescope simply cannot do

gave researchers their clearest view yet of

the atmosphere itself. And what they found

there was a surprise.

Wasp94ab is far more Jupiter

like in composition than a decade of Hubble

data had suggested.

Anna: Previous measurements had indicated the

planet had hundreds of times more oxygen and

carbon than Jupiter. The new cloud

corrected analysis brings that down to

roughly five times a full order

of magnitude correction and a reminder

that unresolved clouds can seriously

skew our picture of what other worlds are

made of.

Avery: The team didn't stop at WASP 94ab.

They found the same cloud cycle pattern on

two other hot jupiters, WASP 39b

and WASP 17b, suggesting this

isn't an anomaly, but a recurring feature of

how hot Jupiter atmospheres behave.

Anna: Researchers now plan to extend the survey to

planets on highly eccentric orbits.

Worlds that experience dramatic temperature

swings where even more extreme weather

patterns may be waiting to be discovered.

Avery: Weather forecasts for alien worlds we are

living in remackable times.

Anna: For nearly 20 years, astronomers have

been puzzled by a class of stellar explosions

so bright they break the rules. Super

luminous supernovae. Stellar deaths that

produce 10 times or more the visible light of

an ordinary supernova up to a hundred

times brighter in some cases. The question

has always been what is powering them

now?

Avery: Data from NASA's Fermi Gamma Race telescope

has delivered the first definitive answer and

it involves one of the most extreme objects

in the known universe.

Anna: The story centers on SN2017

EGM, first spotted by

ESA's Gaia mission back in May 2017.

An international team led by Fabio Acero uh

at the French national center for Scientific

Research has now confirmed that Fermi

detected gamma rays the most energetic

form of light coming from this event.

Avery: That confirmation matters enormously because

gamma rays carry the fingerprint of what's

actually happening at the core of the

explosion. And what Fermi's data reveals is

a magnetar a neutron star born in the

same stellar collapse that triggered the

supernova.

Anna: To understand why that's significant,

consider what a magnetar is. When a

star many times the mass of our sun

exhausts its fuel and collapses, its

core can compress into a neutron star

roughly the size of a city. Magnetars

are the most extreme version of those

objects, spinning hundreds of times per

second, generating magnetic fields a

thousand times stronger than those of

ordinary neutron stars the most

powerful magnetic objects in the known

universe.

Avery: The model works like the newborn

magnetar's furious rotation generates an

outflow of electrons and positrons,

matter and antimatter particles that forms a

vast cloud of energetic particles. That

cloud pumps energy back into the expanding

shell of stellar material, supercharging the

explosion and making it shine far brighter

than any ordinary supernova.

Anna: The team compared optical and gamma ray data

from SN2017 EGM

against theoretical mod models of exactly

this process, and the match was compelling.

As Fabio Acero put it, for nearly

20 years, astronomers have searched Fermi

data for gamma ray signals from thousands of

supernovae. And while a few intriguing

hints have been reported, none were

definitive until now.

Avery: This is a genuine first, a direct

observational window into the engine driving

the most powerful stellar explosions in the

cosmos,

Anna: and it opens a new avenue for future

research. The team has assessed how the

upcoming Tarenkov Telescope Array

Observatory, a UH next generation ground

based gamma ray facility, will perform at UH

detecting similar events. The era of

magnetor forensics is just beginning.

Avery: A mystery that's been open since the early

2000s finally cracked. And the answer

is a star corpse the size of a city

spinning like a cosmic dynamo.

Anna: Here's a finding that quietly challenges one

of our most fundamental assumptions about

what planets are made of. And it matters a

great deal for how we think about

habitability beyond our solar system.

Avery: A new paper submitted to the Astrophysical

Journal proposes that the structure we take

for granted here on Earth a dense metallic

core surrounded by a silicate mantle topped

by a thin crust may be the exception rather

than the rule for rocky planets across the

galaxy.

Anna: For decades, planetary scientists have used

our solar system as the template. Earth has

a metallic core. Mars has one. Mercury,

though radically oversized relative to the

rest of the planet, has one. The assumption,

largely unchallenged, was that rocky

planets formed this way. Heavy metals sank

to the center during the molten phase early

in planetary history, creating the

familiar layered structure.

Avery: But when you look at the full range of rocky

planets now cataloged and we have confirmed

over 6,000 exoplanets as of this year,

with many hundreds in the rocky category. The

diversity of compositions is striking.

Rocky planets form in vastly different

stellar environments with different ratios of

iron, silicate and other materials depending

on the chemistry of their parent nebula.

Anna: The researchers argue that many of the most

common rocky planets in the galaxy, so

called super Earths and sub Neptunes,

may have form in conditions where metallic

core formation simply didn't occur in the

same way or at all. Without that

dense metallic core, you don't get a global

magnetic field generated by a dynamo effect.

Avery: And that has profound implications for

habitability. Earth's magnetic field shields

our surface from the solar wind. Without it,

our atmosphere would gradually be stripped

away over geological timescales Mars

lost most of its magnetic field billions of

years ago. And look at it now.

Anna: If the majority of rocky planets across the

galaxy lack that protective magnetic

shielding, the calculus for finding life

friendly worlds changes considerably.

Avery: It's a sobering and fascinating paper and

a reminder that our solar system, for all its

familiarity, may be showing us a rather

unusual version of what planets typically

look like.

Anna: We're closing tonight with a story that has

everything Cold War history, a, uh,

decades long mystery, a surprising

rediscovery, and a laser beam fired

from New Mexico to a hillside on the moon.

Avery: Pass your minds back to November 1970.

The Soviet Union lands Luna 17 on the

Moon's sea of rains. Mada imbrium.

Out rolls Lunohod 1, a bathtub

shaped eight wheeled Rover bristling with

scientific instruments. The world's first

remote controlled vehicle to operate on

another world.

Anna: It was designed for a relatively short

mission. Instead, it kept going,

surviving 11 lunar day night cycles,

traversing roughly 10.5 kilometers of

the lunar surface, sending back thousands of

photographs and mountains of scientific data.

Then, in the autumn of 1971,

contact ceased. Mission over.

Avery: But here's the thing. Mounted on Lunohod 1

was a French built laser retroreflector,

a passive optical device that requires no

power whatsoever. Its only job is to bounce

laser light back toward wherever it came

from. And that device was still there,

perfectly intact, waiting.

Anna: The problem was that no one knew precisely

where Lunokhod 1 had ended its journey.

The rover had moved across the surface during

its mission, and without high resolution

orbital imagery, pinpointing its final

resting place to the precision needed for

laser ranging was impossible. For

nearly 38 years, it sat there,

silent, invisible,

scientifically tantalizingly out of reach.

Avery: Then, in 2010, um, everything changed.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sent back

high resolution imagery of Mare Imbrium, and

researchers spotted it, the rover and its

landing platform still sitting exactly where

they'd been left.

Anna: With updated coordinates in hand, a team from

the Apache Point Observatory lunar laser

ranging operation in New Mexico. The

Apollo project fired laser pulses at

the site in April 2010. And Lunokhod

1 fired back, not metaphorically.

Avery: The retroreflector returned approximately

2,000 photons per shot,

roughly four times stronger than the returns

from Lunokhod 2, and stronger than expected

from a reflector that had spent nearly four

decades exposed to the lunar environment.

Anna: The location turns out to be scientifically

valuable in ways researchers hadn't

anticipated. Lunokhod 1 sits closer

to the lunar limb than any of the Apollo

reflectors, a position that improves

measurements of the lunar librations, the

subtle wobbles in its rotation, which in

turn help refine models of the lunar

interior.

Avery: And there's a puzzle that the recovered

reflector is helping solve. Near Full

Moon, the strength of laser returns from all

reflectors drops by a factor of 10. No

one fully understands why Lunokhod

1's strong returns from a different geometry

are providing new clues.

Anna: Long term laser ranging, now including this

recovered Cold War relic, has given us some

of our most precise measurements of how the

Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth,

uh, at about 3.8 centimeters per year,

and has contributed evidence for the

existence of a fluid lunar core.

Avery: A rover that fell silent in

1971, rediscovered from

orbit, resurrected by a laser pulse,

and still contributing to science today.

Sometimes the best stories don't end, they

just go quiet for a while.

Anna: And that wraps up Astronomy daily for

Tuesday, 26 May 2026

from a moon base that could redefine human

civilization to a Soviet rover

whispering back from the lunar surface.

What a day to be paying attention to the

cosmos.

Avery: If today's episode sparked something for you,

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