NASA's Lunar Dreams in Jeopardy, China's Bold Moves, and a Lava World Reimagined

0:00 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.

0:35 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.

1:07 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.

1:40 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.

2:15 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.

2:50 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.

3:24 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.

3:57 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.

4:36 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.

5:08 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.

5:49 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.

6:24 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.

7:04 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.

7:42 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.

8:20 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.

8:57 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.

9:36 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.

10:08 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.

10:43 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.

11:21 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.

11:57 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.

12:29 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.

13:02 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.

13:42 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.

14:15 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.

15:00 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 us wherever you get your podcasts and share us with a fellow space fan.

15:35 We'd love to grow our community. Avery: Find us at astronomydaily IO and follow us on X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTubeMusic, and Tumblr, all @astrodaily. Anna: Pod for Avery I'm Anna Clear skies Avery: everyone, and stay curious.

15:58 Anna: Love.

16:03 Story soul.