Starship Set for Flight 13, Japan's Reusable Rocket Breakthrough, and SpaceX's 100,000 Satellite Ambition

Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy daily for

Monday 13th July, 2026.

I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm, uh, Avery. And what a way to start

the week, because the week ahead is shaping

up to be a genuinely big one.

Anna: It really is. Coming up today,

SpaceX's Starship could fly again as

soon as Wednesday. And this time, it's

carrying real working satellites for the

first time, not the dummies of earlier

flights.

Avery: Japan quietly joins the reusable rocket club,

just one day after China did something

similar in spectacular fashion.

Anna: Plus, SpaceX asks permission to launch

100,000 satellites. Yes,

you heard that number right.

Avery: Physicists may have heard the faint whispers

of every star that's ever exploded. A

rocket company we've been following all year

signs a deal to launch from a second

continent.

Anna: And we close with a black hole in our cosmic

backyard that's behaving like it belongs at

the dawn of time, with some Aussie science

right at the heart of the discovery.

Avery: All that, plus what's in your skies this

week. Let's get into it.

Anna: Let's start at Starbase Texas, where

SpaceX is in the final stretch before

Starship's 13th test flight. And

if all goes to plan, we could see it fly

as soon as Wednesday, our time.

Avery: The pace over the past few days has been

something to behold. On Thursday, Booster 20,

the newest super heavy off the production

line, rolled out to the pad and was hoisted

onto its launch mount by those famous

Mechazilla chopstick arms.

Anna: And then on Friday, SpaceX lit up

all 33 of its upgraded Raptor 3

engines in a static fire test. And by all

accounts, it was a monster. One observation

team, measuring from about 10 km away,

recorded dramatically higher acoustic

pressure than previous tests, one of the

strongest events they've ever captured at

Starbase.

Avery: With that test in the books, the FAA's

advisories point to a large window opening as

early as Wednesday morning, Australian

Eastern time. As always with Starship, dates

can slip, but the hardware is stacked and

ready now.

Anna: This is the second flight of the Version 3

vehicle, the tallest, most powerful

iteration yet. Standing around

124 meters. Flight

12 back in May was V3's debut, and

it was a mixed bag. The ship suffered an

engine out during ascent and the booster

fumbled its boost back burn and ended up in

the Gulf instead of coming home.

Avery: So Flight 13 is essentially the do over.

Same suborbital profile, with the booster

aiming to nail that boost back and landing

burn at an offshore point and the ship

performing an in space raptor relight. Before

a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean,

which as we like to remind you, is our neck

of woods.

Anna: But here's the genuinely new for the

first time, Starship is carrying real

functional satellites rather than the mass

simulators of earlier flights. 20

Starlink V3s due to be deployed on

that suborbital arc where they'll unfold

their solar arrays and antennas and attempt

to talk to the ground before re entering.

Avery: And six of those satellites have been fitted

with camera suites specifically to scan

Starship's heat shield during the mission and

beam the IM home, helping SpaceX

work out when it's safe to bring a ship all

the way back to the launch site.

Anna: Keep that Starlink detail in your back pocket

because it connects directly to our third

story today. For now, eyes on Texas.

Come Wednesday morning, we'll have full

coverage of however it plays out.

Avery: From the biggest rocket in the world to one

of the smallest test vehicles making

headlines. And honestly, this might be my

favorite story of the day. On Saturday, Japan

flew and landed a reusable rocket for the

first time.

Anna: This is JAXA's RV X, the

Reusable Vehicle Experiment, and it took its

first hop at the Noshiro testing Center in

Akita Prefecture in Japan's north.

Avery: Now let's be clear about the scale here. This

wasn't an orbital flight. The whole thing

lasted about 40 seconds. The rocket

lifted off, climbed to roughly 11 or 12

meters, translated about 16

meters sideways, keeping itself

perfectly upright the whole time, and set

itself back down on its four landing legs.

Anna: 40 seconds and 11 meters might not sound

like much, but everyone in this game starts

with a hop. SpaceX's grasshopper did

exactly these baby steps more than a decade

ago. And look where that led.

Avery: The vehicle itself is about 7.3

meters tall and 1.8 meters across,

Co developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy

Industries. And the engine is a hearty little

thing. It's survived 165

combustion tests on the ground.

Anna: The project lead Takashi Ito told reporters

he felt, quote, a great sense of relief,

which after that many years of development is

probably an understatement. Next up,

JAXA wants to push rvx to around 100

meters altitude and the agency is also

collaborating with France and Germany on

reusable rocket technology more broadly.

Avery: And here's the thing that makes this a story

about a weekend rather than a single flight.

This came just one day after China netted

a long March 10B booster out at sea

on its first ever orbital class landing,

which was our lead story

Anna: On Saturday's show two Asian space

powers cracking two different pieces of the

reusability puzzle within 24 hours of each

other. The era of the throwaway rocket really

is drawing to a close, and the club SpaceX

had all to itself for nearly a decade is

suddenly getting crowded.

Alright, remember those 20 Starlink V3

satellites hitching a ride on Flight 13?

Here's why they matter so much. SpaceX

has just filed an application with the US

Federal Communications Commission to operate

a, uh, next generation constellation of up to

100,000 satellites.

Avery: 100,000 for

context, SpaceX currently has roughly

10,000 Starlinks in orbit already

by far the largest constellation in history.

With approval for 15,000. This

filing asks for nearly 10 times that.

Anna: The paperwork went in early last week, and

the wider world caught on when astronomer and

satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell spotted

the filing. Facex calls it the Gen3

system. And interestingly, the application

doesn't even use the word starlink.

Avery: The satellites themselves would be big units,

around 2 tons each, so heavier than most of

what's flying today, parked in very low

Earth orbit, shells roughly between

320 and 480km

up at inclinations covering essentially the

whole planet.

Anna: The pitch is multi gigabit symmetrical

broadband, meaning uploads as fast as

downloads, with expansion into entirely

new slices of radio spectrum. And the framing

throughout the filing is all about artificial

intelligence. SpaceX argues the world's

AI devices will need massive uplink

capacity and that this constellation would

carry their words the majority of the world's

Internet traffic.

Avery: Worth being clear on what this is not. It's

separate from that even wilder proposal we

covered back in February, the one seeking up

to a million satellites acting as orbital

data centers. This is the communications

network that was the computing network.

Anna: And crucially, the whole thing is contingent

on Starship. You Simply cannot loft

100,000 two ton satellites on Falcon

9. By one analysis that would take well

over 3,000 launches. It only

pencils out if Starship starts flying

regularly with big satellite batches. Hence

Wednesday's flight carrying those first V3

test units.

Avery: Uh, now we'd be remiss not to mention the

other side of this ledger. Astronomers are

already wrestling with satellite streaks in

their data. Atmospheric scientists are

studying what thousands of re entering

satellites do to the upper atmosphere and

orbital debris trackers are watching low

Earth orbit get busier by the month.

100,000 satellites is a different

category of question altogether.

Anna: The FCC will take public comment before

anything is decided, and history suggests

these mega requests get trimmed

substantially. But even the ask tells you

where SpaceX believes the future is heading

and how central starship is to all of it.

Avery: Okay, deep breath, because this next

one is the kind of story that reminds you why

we love this field. Physicists in

Japan may have detected for the first time

the accumulated whisper of every star that

has ever died in a supernova.

Anna: This comes from Super Kamiokande, a gigantic

neutrino detector sitting a full kilometer

underground in Gifu Prefecture, Japan.

Picture a cathedral sized tank of

50,000 tons of ultra pure water

lined with thousands of golden light sensors

buried under a mountain.

Avery: Neutrinos are often called ghost particles.

They have almost no mass, no electric charge,

and they stream through planets, through you,

through everything, barely ever interacting.

Trillions have passed through you since we

started this story.

Anna: Now, somewhere in the universe, a, uh,

massive star collapses and explodes as a

supernova several times every second.

Each of those blasts releases an absolutely

staggering flood of neutrinos. And since the

universe began, all those neutrinos from all

those explosions have been quietly

accumulating, spreading out, filling space.

Avery: That accumulated flux has a name, the

diffuse supernova neutrino background

theorists have predicted it for decades.

Nobody had ever seen a hint of it. The signal

is impossibly faint, like straining to hear a

whisper from the far side of a stadium during

a rock concert.

Anna: Until now. After analyzing nearly

5,000 days of data, that's more than 13

years of watching the Super Kamiokande

collaboration, some 250 researchers

across 60 institutions has reported the

first observational indication of that

background. Background. The results were

presented at the big International Neutrino

Physics conference in California.

Avery: A key breakthrough was chemistry of all

things. The team dissolved gadolinium into

the water a few years back, which makes the

tank far better at flagging the specific

signature of electron antineutrinos

exactly the flavor the supernova background

should deliver.

Anna: Now the honest caveat. This is an indication

not yet a gold plated discovery. The excess

they see needs more data to reach that

threshold. That's where Hyper Kamiokande

comes in, the even bigger successor detector

under construction, which together with Super

K, should settle the question.

Avery: And if it holds up, then we've gained

something extraordinary. A, uh, way to read

the entire history of star death in the

universe. How many stars exploded when

and what they forged, written in particles

that have traveled untouched, cross borders

billions of years.

Anna: The whispers of every star that ever died

finally reaching our ears. That's just

gorgeous science.

Now for an update in a saga long time

listeners will know well. Isar Aerospace,

the German company behind the spectrum rocket

we've been following since way back in March,

has signed a deal to launch from a second

continent.

Avery: Isar has inked a 10 year agreement with

Canada's Maritime Launch Services for a

dedicated launch complex at Spaceport Nova

Scotia, near the town of Canso on

Canada's Atlantic coast. Headline value

around US$150 million,

made up of quarterly facility fees over the

decade plus additional per launch charges,

with options to extend a, uh, further 10

years.

Anna: And Isar isn't just renting a patch of

concrete. The company plans to pour roughly

$100 million of its own into building out

the pad. And it stood up a Canadian

subsidiary to anchor the operation.

Construction is slated to begin later this

year. First orbital launches are targeted for

2028, and the ambition is up to 40

launches a year from the site by 2029.

Avery: The deal was actually signed at a NATO

defense industry summit in Turkey. And that's

not incidental. Canada has flagged sovereign

launch capability as a strategic priority.

The federal government took its own 10 year

lease at the same spaceport earlier this

year. And Isar's pitch is bringing end

to end launch capability to allied nations.

Anna: Geography helps, too. Nova Scotia's

Atlantic coast lets rockets head over open

water into polar and sun synchronous orbits,

the workhorse trajectories for Earth

observation without overflying anyone.

Avery: Now the deliciously cheeky footnote.

Spectrum has not actually reached orbit yet.

Its debut from Norway ended in a fireball

seconds after liftoff, and a second attempt

was scrubbed in June over fluid system

issues. But investors clearly believe

the company raised 270 million

euros that same month.

Anna: When we first covered Spectrum's troubles

back in March, this was a company fighting

for its next launch window. Sixteen months

on, it's planning operations on two

continents. Whatever else you say about the

new space race, the ambition curve only

points one way.

Avery: And for our final story today, a, uh, galaxy

that's been misbehaving in the most

scientifically wonderful way with

Australian researchers and Australian

telescopes right in the middle of it.

Anna: The galaxy goes by the extremely catchy

name SDSSJ

1105-460714-52024.

Let's just call it J1105.

It's a spiral galaxy in the constellation

Leo, about 1.8 billion light years

away, which sounds far, but in cosmological

terms, it's practically our backyard.

Avery: For more than eight years now,

J1105 has been blazing in

radio waves. Its radio emission jumped more

than 20 fold and simply hasn't dimmed

at radio wavelengths, it's shining around 10,

quadrillion times as intensely as our Sun.

Most radio flare ups near black holes last

days or weeks. This has lasted the

better part of a decade, the first source of

its kind ever seen.

Anna: An international team led by Stefani Camosa

at the Max Planck Institute for Radio

Astronomy pulled together new observations

and years of archival data from radio

right through to X rays and published the

results in the Astrophysical Journal.

Avery: And um, here's the the black hole at AH

J1105's center is comparatively

lightweight, but it's growing at a ferocious

rate, gorging on infalling matter and

firing off a newly launched jet of particles

at nearly the speed of light. That

combination, a small black hole growing

incredibly fast, is something astronomers

have only ever seen in the early universe in

the first billion years or so after the Big

Bang.

Anna: Which is what makes this so valuable. The

early universe is agonizingly hard to study.

Those baby galaxies are impossibly faint and

distant. But J1105 is close

enough that you can literally see its two

spiral arms in survey images. It's like

finding a living fossil, a creature from the

dawn of time, alive and well down the street,

available for study in exquisite detail.

Avery: And the Aussie connection runs deep. Follow

up observations use CSIRO's Australia

Telescope Compact Array at Narabi

alongside the 100 meter Effelsberg Dish in

Germany. CSIRO's Phil Edwards is

a co author and he describes

J1105 as the prototype of

a new class of galaxies that uh, undergo

rapid changes in radio emission.

Anna: Hovey Rose from the University of Sydney is

on the team too and made the point that these

high energy events let us study physics in

some of the most extreme environments in the

universe.

Avery: And this is just the opening act when the

Square Kilometer Array comes fully online

with its core sites right here in Australia

and in South Africa. Surveys should start

turning up more of these long duration radio

transformers.

Anna: A window into the dawn of time hiding

in plain sight in leo. Not bad for a Monday.

Avery: Alright, let's send you outside because this

is one of the best sky watching weeks of the

month.

Anna: Tomorrow evening brings the New Moon. For us,

That's Tuesday evening, the 14th at uh,

7:44pm Eastern Australian time,

9:44pm for our new Zealand listeners.

And New Moon means the darkest skies of the

month.

Avery: And July's dark skies are made for one

thing above all the Milky Way. The

galactic core is riding high for Southern

Hemisphere observers right now. That glorious

dense band through Sagittarius and

Scorpius nearly overhead in the evening.

Get away from city lights this week. Give

your eyes 20 minutes to adjust. Leave the

phone in your pocket and

Anna: just look up in the evening west.

Brilliant Venus is impossible to miss after

sunset, stepping eastward through Leo and

for the early risers. Reddish Mars is hanging

near Aldebaran in the pre dawn east, with

Saturn well

Avery: placed higher up and one for the telescope

owners. Comet 10P Tempel 2 is

brightening in the evening sky, currently

around magnitude 7 to 8 as it heads toward

its early August closest approach to the Sun.

And here's the kicker. Southern Hemisphere

observers get the better view with the comet

sitting higher in our

Anna: sky, dark skies, the galactic core

overhead, and a comet that favors the south.

Sometimes the universe just hands us the good

seats.

Avery: And that's Astronomy Daily for Monday 13

July, Starship on the pad for Wednesday,

Japan's first reusable hop

100,000 satellite ambition, the

whispers of dying stars, Yessar's

transatlantic leap, and the Black Hole is

showing us the dawn of time.

Anna: If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit

subscribe wherever you're listening and leave

us, uh, a review. It genuinely helps new

listeners find the show. You'll find all our

episodes and [email protected]

I'm Avery. And I'm Anna. We'll see you

tomorrow on Astronomy Daily.

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