Spacecrafts, Slingshots, and Satellite Power

Anna: A rocket that got grounded by the weather.

It's back on the pad and ready to fly

tonight.

Avery: And the most powerful rocket ever built is

fueled, stacked and just waiting for a green

light. Flight 12 could happen any day now.

Anna: Plus a uh, spacecraft is about to use

Mars as a slingshot. And someone has

figured out how to beam electricity to

satellites using lasers.

Avery: Big day in space. Let's get into it.

This is Astronomy Daily.

Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your

daily guide to the universe and everything in

it. I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm um, avery. It's Wednesday the 13th of

May 2026 and this is season five

episode 101.

Anna: Episode 101. We've officially

passed the century mark. Thank you as always

to everyone listening. From Europe to

Australia, across the Southern hemisphere,

through the Americas and all of the northern

hemisphere and around the world.

Avery: Big program today, six stories, some real

science, a, uh, sky watching update, and a

trivia question to keep your brain ticking.

Anna: Let's start with the launch that almost

wasn't, but very much is.

Avery: If you were with us yesterday, you might

remember we mentioned that the SpaceX Dragon

cargo launch was looking a little shaky,

weather was a concern and sure enough NASA

and SpaceX called off the Tuesday evening

attempt.

Anna: And here we are, it is back on

the CRS 34 mission.

Dragon's 34th cargo run to the

International Space Station is scheduled to

lift off today, Wednesday the 13th of

May at 6:50 in the evening Eastern

Time. That's 8:50am M Thursday

morning for us here in Australia.

Avery: The Falcon 9 launches from Space Launch

Complex 40 at AH, Cape Canaveral Space Force

Station in Florida. On board, about

6,500 pounds, roughly

2,950 kilograms of supplies,

hardware and scientific experiments bound for

the ISS.

Anna: And there are some genuinely interesting

experiments in that cargo hold. There's a

project looking at how well Earth based

simulators actually replicate microgravity M

conditions, which matters enormously for

preparing future astronauts.

Avery: There's also a bone scaffold, uh, made from

wood. Yes, wood that could eventually lead

to new treatments for conditions like

osteoporosis and equipment to study how

red blood cells and the spleen adapt to the

space environment. With an eye on protecting

future long duration crews.

Anna: What makes this mission particularly special

though is the Dragon capsule itself. This is

the sixth flight for the specific vehicle,

setting a new record for a SpaceX cargo

craft.

Avery: Six flights for one capsule. That

reusability story just keeps getting more

impressive. If all goes to plan, Dragon

will dock with the Harmony Module's forward

port at around 7:35 in the morning

EDT on Thursday the 14th.

Anna: We'll keep an eye on that one.

RCS 34 the comeback launch

While one

Avery: rocket is heading to the ISS today, another

one is sitting on the pad in South Texas,

generating enormous anticipation.

SpaceX's Starship V3 Flight 12

could launch as soon as May 19th.

Anna: And the milestone from this week that has

engineers buzzing. The fully stacked V3

vehicle successfully completed its wet dress

rehearsal. That means it was fueled up for

the first time ever more than 5,000

metric tons of propellant. That's a number

so large it barely sounds real.

Avery: Standing 124 meters tall, that's

taller than a 40 story building. The V3

is a complete, complete redesign of the

Starship system. It features upgraded Raptor

3 engines, a new lattice structure for hot

staging, and massively increased payload

capacity. We're talking 100 metric tons

to low Earth orbit in a fully reusable

configuration. The previous version managed

around 35.

Anna: Flight 12 will be a suborbital test.

SpaceX is deliberately taking a step back in

ambition to validate the new V3

architecture before pushing for the booster

catch milestones we saw in Flight 11.

Both the booster and the ship are uh,

targeting splashdown on this one.

Avery: What's at stake? Quite a lot. SpaceX's has

a reported IPO on the horizon. NASA's

Artemis program needs a functioning starship

lunar lander and the company's banking on

this vehicle to grow Starlink and eventually

launch AI data centers into orbit.

Anna: The wet dress rehearsal is done. The static

fires are done. All they need now is an FAA

launch license. And that apparently is close.

Watch this space quite literally, if you

Avery: want a front row seat to some incredible

orbital Mechanics, this Friday, May 15th

is your moment.

NASA Psyche spacecraft is about to use Mars

as a gravitational slingshot.

Anna: Psyche launched back in October 2023

and has been on a long fuel efficient journey

toward the asteroid belt, where it's heading

for a metal rich asteroid, also named

psyche, arriving in 2029.

But to get there, it needs a speed boost. And

Mars is about to provide one.

Avery: At about 12,333 miles

per hour. That's nearly 20,000 kilometers

per hour. The spacecraft will pass just

2,800 miles, or about 4,500

kilometers from the Martian surface.

The planet's gravity will effectively grab

Psyche, swing it around, accelerate it and

redirect its trajectory towards the asteroid

belt.

Anna: This is called a, uh, gravity assist and it's

one of the most elegant techniques in all of

space exploration. Instead of burning

precious fuel, you borrow energy from a

planet's orbital motion. It's been used on

missions dating back to Voyager.

Avery: But this by blight isn't just about speed.

It's a rare opportunity to calibrate Psyche

science instruments. While there's something

large enough to actually observe, the imager

will get its first proper workout. The

magnetometer may detect Mars's magnetic

field. And scientists are intrigued by the

possibility that the spacecraft might catch

glimpses of a faint dust ring or torus

surrounding Mars created by

micrometeorites striking the surfaces of its

two moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Anna: Several existing Mars missions, including the

Curiosity and perseverance rovers and

NASA's orbiters, will also be watching and

contributing data during the encounter.

Avery: Friday the 15th. Mark it in your calendar.

Psyche and M Mars an encounter 2.8

billion kilometers in the making Just before

Anna: I take us into our next story, a quick

reminder to check out the great deal our uh,

sponsor NORDVPN has put together for you. Get

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the price. You can check the details out via

the link in the show notes.

Alright, moving on. Here's a story that

sounds almost like science fiction, but it is

very much real and very much happening right

now. A Florida based startup called

Starcatcher Industries has just raised

$65 million to build what it

describes as the world's first power grid in

space.

Avery: The concept is called optical power beaming.

Starcatcher plans to launch a constellation

of satellites that will focus sunlight in the

form of laser light onto other solar panels

of other satellites that need more power. No

hardware modifications to the receiving

satellite required just extra electricity

on demand.

Anna: The company says its system can deliver up to

10 times more power to client satellites than

they could generate on their own, and its

CEO, Andrew Rush made an analogy

that I think really captures why this

matters. He said, and I'm paraphrasing

that every satellite is essentially on

camping trip. It carries its own power and at

some point it runs low.

Avery: Starcatcher wants to change that the same way

the terrestrial power grid enabled

revolutions in communications computing

here on Earth. An orbital power grid could

unlock the next generation of capabilities in

space, things like persistent Earth

observation, real time data processing and

advanced communications infrastructure.

Anna: The Series A round was oversubscribed,

meaning more investors wanted in than there

were shares available, and was led by B

Capital, with Shield Capital and Cerberus

Ventures also co leading. Notably, General

J. Raymond, the first chief of space

operations of the US Space Force, is joining

the board.

Avery: Starcatcher already holds the world record

for optical power beaming on the ground and

has completed an on orbit subsystem

demonstration. Now it's moving from validated

technology to scalable infrastructure.

An in space demonstration is planned for

later this year.

Anna: Mhm. Lasers in space, charging

your satellites. The future is something

else.

Avery: Alright, now we're going deep. This

one is for everyone who's ever stared at the

night sky and thought, why is any of this

here? And why does it work the way it does?

Anna: Physicists at Brown University in Rhode

island have published a paper in Physical

Review Letters proposing a potential solution

to one of the most vexing problems in all of

the cosmological constant problem.

Avery: Let's unpack that. The cosmological constant

is the mathematical term that describes the

energy driving the accelerating expansion of

the universe. Einstein introduced it,

famously, called it his greatest blunder, and

then died not knowing he'd actually been

right about it. Observations in the 1990s

confirmed the universe's expansion is indeed

accelerating.

Anna: Here's the Quantum field theory,

one of the most successful and rigorously

tested frameworks in physics, predicts that

vacuum energy, the energy inherent in empty

space, should make the cosmological constant

enormous, practically infinite. But

what we actually observe, a tiny, tiny

fraction of that prediction, the discrepancy

is around 120 orders of

magnitude. That's, uh, a one followed by

120 zeros.

Avery: It is, without exaggeration, the worst

prediction in the history of physics, and the

Brown University team thinks they may have

found a way to explain it.

Anna: Their insight draws an analogy with something

called the quantum hall effect, an exotic

phenomenon in condensed matter physics, where

electrical conductance in certain materials

is held perfectly steady, regardless of

imperfections, because of the topology,

the mathematical shape of the quantum state.

Avery: The researchers found that the simplest

formulation of quantum gravity has a

mathematically analogous structure, something

called the Chern Simons Kodama state. And

in that framework, the cosmological constant

becomes essentially locked in place. It's

protected by topology. The quantum

fluctuations that should be destabilizing it

are simply too small or improbable

Anna: to shift it, which, if it holds up, would

explain why the constant has the value it

does, not because of some extraordinary fine

tuning, but because the universe's geometry

protects it.

Avery: The authors are the first to acknowledge this

is a beginning, not an ending. There's a lot

of detailed work still to do, but it's a

genuinely new idea in one of the oldest

unsolved problems in physics, and that

deserves a moment.

Anna: We end today in the Jovian system And

with an image that has had planetary

scientists genuinely excited.

Avery: On 1 May, NASA's Juno spacecraft

completed a close flyby of Thebe, the

second largest of Jupiter's inner moons. And

when we say close, we mean it.

Juno passed within just 3,100

miles or 5,000 kilometers of thebe's

surface. The resulting image captures detail

at a resolution of about 1.9 miles

per pixel. The sharpest view we have ever had

of this world.

Anna: Thebe sits at the outer edge of Jupiter's

faint ring system. And that position is no

coincidence. Scientists believe Thebe

plays an active role in shaping one of

Jupiter's most delicate structures, the so

called gossamer ring. Dust shed from

Thebes surface gets swept into the ring,

helping maintain it.

Avery: The image was captured using Juno's Stellar

Reference Unit, an instrument whose primary

job is navigation imaging star fields to keep

the spacecraft oriented. But its exceptional

sensitivity in low light conditions has made

it a surprisingly powerful secondary science

instrument. It's previously discovered

shallow lightning in Jupiter's atmosphere and

revealed the structure of Jupiter's ring

system.

Anna: And now it's given us Thebe up close. A

small irregular world, heavily cratered,

ancient, playing a uh, quiet but essential

role in the dynamics of the solar system's

largest planet.

Avery: Juno continues to surprise us even this deep

into its extended mission. What a spacecraft.

Anna: Before we go, let's take a look at the sky

above you this week. Southern Hemisphere

listeners.

Avery: This morning, if you were up early enough,

you may have caught Saturn and a slender

crescent moon sharing the sky in the east

just a few degrees apart in Pisces.

Saturn's ring system is tilted towards us

again after years at southerly declinations,

so conditions are improving every month.

Anna: Also in the pre dawn sky, Neptune is in the

area, though you'll need binoculars or a

telescope for that one.

Avery: Tomorrow morning, Thursday the 14th, Mars

makes its own crescent moon pairing. A thin

sliver of moon sitting about 4 degrees from

the red planet, both visible to the naked eye

under a reasonably dark sky.

Anna: And looking ahead, the flower moon, May's

full moon arrives on May 31 and it

will be a blue moon. That's the second full

moon in a single calendar month. It won't

actually look blue, but it's a lovely thing

to know.

Avery: Clear skies to all of you out there now,

trivia time.

Anna: Today's trivia question ties into our Psyche

mission story.

Avery: The asteroid 16 Psyche is thought to be the

exposed metallic core of an ancient

protoplanet. Scientists believe it may be

composed primarily of two elements.

Anna: What are they Oh, I know that one. The

answer Nickel and Iron Psyche is

thought to be a, uh, remnant planetary core,

the building blocks of rocky worlds stripped

bare by billions of years of collisions.

Studying it from orbit could give us the

closest thing we'll ever have to a look

inside the Earth itself, which

Avery: is remarkable when you think about it. We

can't drill to our own planet's core, but we

might be able to

Anna: fly around one that is everything for today's

episode of Astronomy Daily, episode

101. Thank you for spending part of your day

with us.

Avery: If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe,

leave a review and tell a space curious

friend. Every listener matters.

Anna: You can find us at astronomydaily,

IO and across all major podcast

platforms, and you can follow us on social

media. Astrodaily Pod we'll be back

tomorrow with

Avery: the latest from the universe. Until then,

keep looking up from Anna and Avery

Clear skies.

In this episode