Starship V3 Has a Launch Date + Psyche's Mars Flyby + JWST Cosmic Web

Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily,

your daily guide to the Universe for Thursday

the 14th of May, 2026.

I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. Big show today, Anna. Uh,

we've got a rocket about to make history, a

spacecraft using Mars as a slingshot, and a

medieval poet who may have accidentally

written the world's first impact physics

textbook.

Anna: Coming up, SpaceX locks in a

launch date for the most powerful version of

Starship yet. NASA's Psyche

probe is just hours away from its dramatic

Mars flyby. The James Webb Space

Telescope has delivered its clearest ever

map of the universe's skeleton.

Avery: Coming up, a large coronal hole is sending a

surge of solar wind our way. Good news for

Aurora watchers in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Dragon cargo capsule has docked at the

International Space Station after a week of

weather delays. And we'll tell you why

researchers are re reading Dante's Inferno

through the eyes of a planetary scientist.

Anna: Stay with us. It's all coming up on

Astronomy Daily.

Avery: Let's go.

Anna: Then let's kick things off with a story that

has the space community buzzing.

SpaceX has officially announced the launch

date for Starship Flight 12, and

it is just five days away.

Avery: That's right, May 19 is now the target

for what may be the most anticipated rocket

test of the decade. This isn't just any

starship launch. Flight 12 will be the debut

of Starship version 3, a thoroughly

redesigned vehicle that SpaceX says has been

rebuilt almost from the ground up for full

and rapid reuse.

Anna: So what's actually changed? Well, the super

heavy booster now sports three grid

fins instead of the original six. Those are

the lattice like structures that help steer

it back through the atmosphere. The whole

vehicle is taller, heavier and more

capable than its predecessors.

Avery: The launch window opens at 6:30 in the

evening Eastern Time. That's 8:30 the next

morning here in Australia. On May 20th,

it'll lift off from Starbase in South Texas.

And um, importantly, this will be the very

first launch from Starbase's second orbital

launch pad.

Anna: Now, because this is a brand new vehicle

design, SpaceX won't be attempting to catch

the super heavy booster back at the launch

tower on this flight. Instead, both

the booster and the upper stage, known as

Ship, are targeting water landings. The

booster aims for the Gulf of Mexico and Ship

is targeting the Indian Ocean about 65

minutes after liftoff.

Avery: As for the payload, ship will carry 22

dummy Starlink satellites on the same

suborbital trajectory. And there's a clever

experiment. The last two of those dummy

satellites will actually scan Starship's heat

shield and beam images back to mission

controllers. They want to test whether they

can remotely assess heat shield integrity

from orbit.

Anna: There's also a single Raptor engine

relight planned in space, something that'll

be essential for future operational missions.

And SpaceX has deliberately removed one

heat shield tile to measure how adjacent

tiles behave under re entry stress when

there's a gap.

Avery: Full disclosure on the engineering nerves

here. The previous version of this booster,

called B18, was actually destroyed

during ground testing late last year when its

liquid oxygen tank imploded during a pressure

test. B19 has had a much smoother

road, passing three static fire tests in

the last three months, including a, uh, full

33 engine full duration burn.

Anna: We will of course, be watching this one very

closely. Mark your calendars May

19th. We'll have full coverage in the next

episode. Enormous stakes, enormous

rocket.

Avery: While everyone's eyes are on Starship next

week, there's something happening tomorrow

that deserves just as much attention, at

least for the science crowd. NASA's Psyche

spacecraft is about to use Mars as a cosmic

slingshot.

Anna: This is one of those elegantly clever

things about orbital mechanics. The

Psyche mission is ultimately headed for a

metal rich asteroid, also called

Psyche, out in the main asteroid belt

between Mars and Jupiter. It launched back

in October 2023, and it's been

gradually building speed using its solar

electric propulsion system ever since.

Avery: But solar electric propulsion is quiet and

efficient rather than fast. So to get the

extra kick it needs, the team planned this

Mars flyby from the very beginning. On

May 15th. That's tomorrow, Psyche

will pass just 2,800 miles from the Martian

surface. That's closer than the orbit of

Mars own moon, Phobos.

Anna: And it'll be moving at over

12,300 miles per hour,

nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour.

Mars's gravity will grab the spacecraft,

whip it around and send it on its way faster

and on a tilted trajectory that would have

been prohibitively expensive to achieve with

propellant alone.

Avery: The mission team has been preparing for this

for months. Back on February 23rd,

they fired the spacecraft's thrusters for,

uh, a full 12 hours to fine tune the

approach. And since May 7th,

Psyche has been sending back early images.

First a distant star field, then a

crescent shaped Mars, growing larger by the

day.

Anna: Those images aren't just pretty, they're

functional. The imaging team is using this

period to calibrate their cameras and

practice the techniques they'll need when

Psyche eventually arrives at the asteroid

in late 20. It's essentially

a dress rehearsal.

Avery: One unique visual because Psyche is

approaching from Mars's night side, the

planet currently looks like a crescent, just

a thin sliver of sunlight on the edge, very

much like our own crescent Moon. After

closest approach, mission controllers expect

to see a near full Mars view. As the

spacecraft swings around to confirm

Anna: the flyby was successful, the team will

monitor radio signals through NASA's Deep

Space Network. And there's a bonus science

objective, too. Psyche will use its

instruments to search for any faint dust

rings that might surround Mars

created by micrometeorites striking

Phobos

Avery: and Deimos asteroid arrival

2029 but tomorrow is a big

milestone. We'll have the results in our next

episode.

Anna: Now for something that puts everything, and

we mean everything, in perspective.

Astronomers using the James Webb Telescope

have produced what they're calling the most

detailed map ever made of the cosmic

web.

Avery: The cosmic web is, well, it's the

universe's skeleton. Imagine the largest

structure that exists, a vast network of

dark matter filaments and gas sheets

interwoven across billions of light years,

connecting galaxies and galaxy clusters

together. Between those filaments are

enormous, almost entirely empty regions

called voids. That's the cosmic web.

Anna: And now, for the first time, we have a

truly detailed map of it, one

that stretches all the way back to when the

universe was only about 1 billion years

old. The research was led by a team at

the University of California, Riverside,

using what's known as the Cosmos Web

Survey, the single largest observing program

that Webb has ever conducted.

Avery: The map charts the positions of over

164,000 galaxies

plotted across 13.7 billion

years of cosmic history. Think about that

A map of 164,000

galaxies spread across nearly the entire age

of the universe. Published in the

Astrophysical Journal.

Anna: What makes this such a leap forward is

precision. Webb's infrared instruments can

detect galaxies that were completely

invisible to older telescopes and can

measure their distances with far greater

accuracy. That's what allows you to place

each galaxy precisely in its cosmic

context, rather than just knowing roughly

where it sits.

Avery: The lead author, Jose Hatamnia, a

graduate student at UC Riverside, put it this

for the first time, scientists can study how

galaxies evolve within cluster and

filamentary structures across of

cosmic time, from the universe's infancy

right up to the present day.

Anna: And the images from this map are genuinely

beautiful. The dense clusters and filaments

show up as bright yellow in the

visualizations. The voids are dark,

great sweeping emptiness between the cosmic

threads. It really does look like a web.

Avery: The implications reach well beyond

aesthetics. Understanding how the cosmic

web formed and evolved over time is key to

understanding why galaxies look the way they

do today, why some are large spirals, others

are elliptical, others are irregular, and

how dark matter has shaped the universe we

live in.

Anna: One of the most stunning results from the

cosmos Webb data is that the cosmic web

appears to have been in place much earlier

than some models predicted, meaning the

universe organized itself into this vast

structure surprisingly quickly after the Big

Bang.

Avery: Webb continues to rewrite the textbooks. This

one is a landmark result.

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Avery: Alright, let's get back to today's space and

astronomy news.

Anna: Now for something that Southern Hemisphere

listeners may want to keep an eye on this

weekend our sun has been busy and the

results could mean auroras for sky watchers

across Australia, New Zealand and southern

South America.

Avery: A large coronal hole has rotated into what's

called a ah, geoffective position, meaning

it's pointing directly at Earth. Coronal

holes are regions in the Sun's outer

atmosphere where the magnetic field opens

outward into space rather than looping back,

allowing a fast stream of solar wind to

escape directly into the solar system.

Anna: This particular coronal hole is both large

and positioned right at the solar equator,

which means the high speed solar wind stream

it produces is aimed squarely in our

direction. That stream is expected to begin

reaching Earth on Friday, which is tomorrow.

Avery: Our time base weather forecasters have

issued a uh, G2 moderate geomagnetic

storm watch for Friday the 15th.

G2 conditions are significant enough to push

aurora visibility well beyond the polar

circles. For Southern Hemisphere observers,

that means southern Australia, Tasmania and

New Zealand could all be in play.

Anna: There's also a separate, slightly earlier

event to watch, a coronal mass

ejection. A blob of solar plasma was

launched on May 10 during an M

M5.7 flare from Active

Region 4436. That CME

may deliver a, uh, glancing blow today or

tomorrow, potentially adding some extra

activity before the main solar wind stream

arrives.

Avery: So what should you do if you want to catch

the show? Tonight and Friday night are your

best windows? Get away from city lights, find

the clear southern horizon and check the

Bureau of Meteorology's Space Weather Alert

page or apps like space weather live for

real time, KP Index updates. If it hits

KP5 or above, look south.

Anna: Clear skies and fingers crossed.

For those of you hoping to see the Southern

lights this weekend, now for

Avery: something a little different. What if one of

the greatest works of medieval literature was

also accidentally a, uh, reasonably accurate

description of a planetary impact event?

Anna: That is the argument being put forward by

Timothy Burberry, a professor at Marshall

University in West Virginia, in research

presented at the European Geosciences Union

General assembly in Vienna earlier this

month. And once you hear it, it's

genuinely hard to unthink.

Avery: So, the basics. Dante Alighetti wrote

the Divine Comedy in the early 1300s.

That's the 1300s. The inferno is the

first part of that work. And it describes

Hell as an inverted conical pit beneath

Jerusalem. Nine concentric circles

descending downward to a frozen core where

Satan is trapped.

Anna: Now, for seven centuries, readers have

interpreted this as spiritual allegory,

pure and simple. Satan fell from

heaven and was imprisoned at the Earth's

center. Mount Purgatory was created on

the opposite side of the globe from the

displaced Earth. Vivid imagery,

profound theology, end of story.

Avery: Or so everyone thought. Burberry's

argument is that if you strip away the

religious symbolism and look at what Dante is

actually describing as a physical event,

it maps remarkably well onto the structure of

a complex impact crater.

Anna: In his interpretation, Satan acts as

a high velocity impactor, an

asteroid sized object striking the southern

hemisphere at tremendous speed,

drilling through the crust to the Earth's

core. The nine circles of Hell. They

closely resemble the concentric terraced

rings that large impacts create as

shockwaves propagate outward, the same

structures you see in major impact basins

on the Moon and Venus.

Avery: The specific comparison Burberry makes is to

the Chicxulub impact, The asteroid strike

66 million years ago that ended the age of

the dinosaurs and left the 150

kilometer crater beneath what is now the Gulf

of Mexico. Chicxulub is one of the best

studied complex impact structures on Earth.

And its internal geometry, peak

rings, terraced walls, central basin,

mirrors what Dante described.

Anna: Mount Purgatory rising on the opposite

side of the globe. That would be the central

peak, or in some large impacts, an

antipodal feature, a mountain created by

the focused seismic energy of the impact

converging on the far side of the planet.

Avery: It's a real phenomenon now, and, um,

this is important. Burberry is not claiming

that Dante had secret knowledge of impact

physics. He's proposing something more

interesting than that, that Dante

intuitively applied the best physics

available to him in the 14th century to think

through what a catastrophic fall from heaven

would look like as a real physical event. And

in doing so, he stumbled into something that

looks a lot like what we now know about

impact craters.

Anna: The research was presented under the flag of

what Burberry calls literary

geomythology, the idea that ancient

texts and myths sometimes preserve

intuitions about natural phenomena long

before science has the tools to formally

describe them. The nine Circles of Hell

as Multi Ring Impact Basin

Satan as Oblong Asteroid

it's quite a thought.

Avery: The Divine Comedy simultaneously one of

history's greatest literary achievements, and

apparently a geophysical thought

experiment.

Anna: Who knew Wrapping up our main stories

today with an update to a mission we've been

following this week. After not one but

two weather scrubs, the SpaceX Dragon

cargo capsule for NASA's CRS

34 mission has successfully docked with

the International Space Station.

Avery: The launch finally got off the ground from

Cape Canaveral on Wednesday evening. After

scrubs on both Tuesday and Wednesday due to

weather, Dragon arrived at the ISS today,

May 14, docking autonomously to the

forward port of the Harmony Module.

Anna: On board about 6,500

pounds, roughly 2,950

kilograms of science experiments,

supplies and hardware for the expedition's

74 crew. BASA astronaut Jack

Hathaway and ESA astronaut Sophie

Adenow were on duty to monitor Dragon's

approach and docking.

Avery: Now, some of that cargo is genuinely

fascinating. One investigation, called Green

Bone, involves a scaffold made from wood that

researchers believe could be used to help

grow bone cells in microgravity. The

goal is to develop new treatments for bone

fragility conditions, particularly

osteoporosis Wood derived growing

bone in space.

Anna: There's also the ODESSI study, which is

testing how accurately Earth based simulators

can replicate actual microgravity

conditions. Scientists will compare

bacteria behavior in true space

conditions against results from ground based

labs, and if the data differs, it

could mean some of our ground based

conclusions about microgravity biology

need to be revised.

Avery: And a third investigation is looking at how

red blood cells and the spleen change

in the space environment, crucial data for

protecting the health of astronauts on long

duration missions to the moon and eventually

Mars.

Anna: This Dragon capsule known as

C209 is actually making its

sixth flight to the ISS. That's a record for

a SpaceX cargo craft and a sign of just

how reliably reusable these vehicles have

become. It's expected to stay at the station

for about a month before returning to Earth

with completed experiments splashing down off

the coast of California in mid June.

Avery: Despite the weather delays, CRS 34

is on its way. Science is being done.

Good news all round.

Anna: Time now for your Sky Watcher's Corner, our

weekly guide to what's worth looking for in

the night sky. And this week, Avery, we've

got a very timely one.

Avery: We do. As we mentioned in story four,

there is a real chance of aurora activity

this weekend for the Southern Hemisphere

observers with a, uh, G2

geomagnetic storm watch in effect from Friday

the 15th. The Southern Lights, the

Aurora Australis could be visible from

southern Australia, Tasmania and New

Zealand.

Anna: The best viewing is away from city light

pollution with a clear, unobstructed southern

Horizon. Check the KP index. If it

reaches 5 or higher, you're in business.

Apps like Space Weather Live and my Aurora

Forecast give real time updates. Bundle up,

be patient and look south.

Avery: And while you're out there Friday evening,

remember that just hours earlier, NASA's

Psyche spacecraft will have completed its

Mars flyby, slingshotting around the red

planet on its way to a metal asteroid.

Mars itself is in the pre dawn sky this week

near Saturn. Early risers can catch both

as the sky lightens before sunrise.

Anna: A weekend of space events right on our

doorstep. Don't miss it.

Avery: That's everything from us for this Thursday

edition of Astronomy Daily. What a show.

Starship V3 on the launch pad.

Psyche swinging past Mars. The

universe's skeleton mapped in unprecedented

detail. Aurora alerts for the Southern

Hemisphere. Dante moonlighting as an

impact physicist and Dragon safely

at the station.

Anna: Before we go, a quick trivia. The

Chicxulub impact crater, the one that helped

end the dinosaurs 66 million years ago,

is buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico and the

Yucatan peninsula. At roughly

150km across, it's one of the

largest confirmed impact structures on Earth.

And now possibly in medieval Italian

poetry.

Avery: Links to everything we've covered today are

in the show Notes. Find us at astronomydaily

IO and follow us on social media

astrodaily pod. And if you enjoy the

show, please leave us a rating and a review.

It genuinely helps new listeners find us.

Anna: From all of us here at Astronomy Daily, keep

looking up clear skies and we'll see you

tomorrow.

Avery: I saw every day

the stories be told.

Stories.

In this episode