Starship V3 Maiden Flight, New Glenn Cleared, Cosmic Web Photographed | Weekend Wrap

0:00 Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily.

0:03 Your weekend wrap for Saturday, May

0:05 23, 2026. I'm

0:08 Anna.

0:09 Avery: And I'm, um, Avery. If you've been following

0:11 the news from Boca Chica, Texas, you already

0:14 know it's been quite a week for spaceflight.

0:17 Anna: Quite a week is an understatement.

0:20 Starship version 3 finally left the pad

0:23 last night. And while it wasn't a clean

0:25 sheet, it was absolutely a milestone.

0:28 We'll have the full story and all the drama

0:31 coming up shortly.

0:32 Avery: And in our second fresh story, we're heading

0:34 to a rival launch pad. Blue Origin has

0:37 just cleared the way for New Glenn to fly

0:39 again. After its spring mishap, the heavy

0:42 lift rocket race is firmly back on.

0:45 Anna: Then we'll take a look back at the best of

0:47 the week. The universe's hidden highways

0:50 finally photographed. Possible fingerprints

0:53 of dark matter in gravitational waves, uh, a

0:56 revolutionary new space telescope nearly

0:59 ready to fly, and a chip that could teach

1:02 spacecraft to think for themselves.

1:04 Avery: It's, uh, a full slate. Let's get into it.

1:07 Anna: So last night was the night. After a

1:10 scrubbed attempt, on Thursday, SpaceX

1:13 finally got Starship version 3 off the

1:15 ground for the very first time.

1:18 Avery: Flight 12 lifted off at

1:20 6:30pm Eastern from Pad

1:23 2, a brand new launch pad at

1:25 Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.

1:28 That's actually two first in one made

1:31 in flight of the V3 vehicle and

1:34 debut of the new pad.

1:36 Anna: And let's give credit where it's due. Elon

1:39 Musk himself called it epic. And for good

1:42 reason. The V3 Starship is a significant

1:45 redesign from previous versions. Both the

1:48 super heavy booster and the ship are powered

1:51 by the next evolution of SpaceX's Raptor

1:53 engine. They've simplified the aft sections,

1:56 increased propellant capacity, and built in

1:59 new hardware for future orbital refueling.

2:02 Avery: But, and it's a fairly significant but

2:05 not everything went to plan. The booster

2:08 performed well on ascent and nailed stage

2:10 separation. But the boostback burn went non

2:13 nominal, several engines dropped out, the

2:16 booster started to spin out of control, and

2:18 ultimately it came down hard rather than

2:21 completing its planned water landing in the

2:23 Gulf.

2:24 Anna: Meanwhile, up in the ship, one of the vacuum

2:27 Raptor engines shut down unexpectedly.

2:30 But the ship compensated using its sea level

2:32 Raptors and continued on its intended

2:35 trajectory, eventually splashing down as

2:37 planned in the Indian Ocean.

2:40 Avery: So the scorecard ship success

2:42 booster lost. But this was always billed

2:45 as a test flight, not a demonstration. And

2:48 given it was the maiden flight of a

2:50 significantly redesigned vehicle, getting the

2:52 ship home safely and gathering a mountain of

2:55 data on the booster anomaly is a genuinely

2:58 Useful outcome.

2:59 Anna: The stakes couldn't be higher for SpaceX

3:01 right now. NASA has picked Starship as the

3:04 lunar lander for the Artemis 4 crewed moon

3:07 mission in 2028. That means

3:10 SpaceX needs V3 to demonstrate

3:12 full orbital capability in orbit,

3:15 refueling, docking, and eventually a

3:18 crewed lunar surface landing. None of which

3:21 have happened yet.

3:22 Avery: And there's a financial dimension too.

3:24 SpaceX recently filed for an IPO and the

3:27 investment community is watching very

3:29 closely. A partial success like this

3:32 historic milestone, some anomalies,

3:35 is probably the best honest summary of where

3:38 the program stands.

3:39 Anna: Flight 13 is already penciled in for June,

3:42 which tells you how quickly SpaceX wants to

3:45 turn this around. Last night was the

3:47 beginning of V3's story, not the end.

3:50 Avery: One more thing worth noting. There was a

3:52 fascinating site announcement just before

3:55 launch. Cryptocurrency billionaire

3:57 chun Wong, the Fram 2 mission commander who

4:00 circled the poles in Dragon earlier this

4:03 year, announced he'll lead the first starship

4:05 flyby of Mars. A crewed Mars

4:08 flyby, not a landing.

4:10 Anna: But still, the ambition levels in this

4:12 industry right now are genuinely something

4:15 else. We'll be tracking all of it as Flight

4:17 12's data gets analyzed and preparations for

4:20 Flight 13 begin.

4:22 Avery: And speaking of heavy lift rockets, Blue

4:24 Origin had some significant news of its own

4:27 yesterday. The company has officially

4:29 completed its investigation into the new

4:31 Glenn NG3 mission failure from April

4:34 and the FAA has signed off on the report.

4:37 Anna: So New Glenn is cleared to fly again. Let's

4:40 quickly recap what happened back on April 19,

4:43 M NG3 lifted off from Cape Canaveral carry an

4:46 AST Space Mobile's Bluebird 7 satellite.

4:49 The good news? The booster nailed its landing

4:51 on the drone ship. Actually the first ever

4:53 reuse of a new Glenn booster, which was a

4:56 genuine milestone.

4:58 Avery: The bad news? The second stage ran into some

5:00 trouble during its second burn. Blue Origin

5:03 traced it to an off normal thermal condition

5:06 that prevented one of the BE3U engines from

5:09 reaching full thrust. The result was Bluebird

5:11 7 ending up in an orbit too low for its

5:14 onboard propulsion to recover from. The

5:16 satellite was deorbited. A, uh, costly and

5:19 embarrassing outcome.

5:21 Anna: The FAA grounded New Glenn while the

5:23 investigation ran. And now, five weeks

5:25 later, Blue Origin has its clearance back.

5:28 The corrective actions have been accepted and

5:30 the path to the next launch is open.

5:33 Avery: The timing is actually quite pointed, isn't

5:36 it? This news, landing on the Same day

5:38 Starship V3 makes its debut. Two

5:41 of the world's most powerful rockets, both

5:43 dealing with growing pains, both, uh, pushing

5:45 toward their next flights.

5:47 Anna: And for Blue Origin, the Pressure is real.

5:50 New Glenn is supposed to launch the first

5:52 ever Blue Moon crewed lunar lander test

5:54 flight later this year. That's one of NASA's

5:57 two contracted Artemis Landers alongside

5:59 Starship.

6:00 Avery: Any further delays to New Glenn's schedule

6:02 ripple directly into the Artemis timeline.

6:05 AST Space Mobile, who lost a Bluebird 7

6:08 satellite, said in their May earnings call

6:10 that they're looking forward to the next New

6:12 Glenn launch, which will carry four Bluebird

6:15 satellites to make up for it. No firm date

6:17 yet, but the investigation being closed is

6:19 step one, Two rockets,

6:21 Anna: two milestones, one Wild Friday and

6:24 spaceflight. Not bad for a weekend rap lead

6:26 in.

6:27 Avery: Alright, time to roll back through the week,

6:29 four stories that caught our eye. From the

6:31 very fabric of the universe to the future of

6:34 space exploration.

6:35 Anna: Let's start with one that genuinely stopped

6:38 me in my tracks.

6:39 Avery: The cosmic web. For decades we've known

6:42 it exists. This vast invisible skeleton

6:45 of matter that connects galaxies across the

6:47 entire univers universe. We've modeled it in

6:50 supercomputer simulations. We've inferred its

6:52 existence from the way galaxies cluster. But

6:55 actually photographing it, actually seeing a

6:58 filament of the web that had always been

7:00 beyond reach until now.

7:03 Anna: An international team of astronomers this

7:05 week published the sharpest direct image ever

7:08 captured of a cosmic web filament. The image

7:11 shows a strand of intergalactic hydrogen gas

7:14 stretching 3 million light years, connecting

7:17 two galaxies that were actively forming when

7:19 the universe was only about about 2 billion

7:21 years old.

7:22 Avery: 3 million light years. The Milky Way

7:25 itself is only about a hundred thousand light

7:28 years. Across this filament is 30

7:30 Milky Ways laid end to end.

7:33 Anna: To pull this off, the team used muse, the

7:35 Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer mounted on

7:38 the European Southern Observatory's Very

7:41 Large Telescope in Chile. And it wasn't

7:43 quick. They spent hundreds of hours gathering

7:46 observations to detect a structure this

7:49 faint. The result was published in Nature

7:51 Astronomy and represents one of the most

7:54 ambitious observing campaigns ever conducted

7:57 in a single region of the sky.

7:59 Avery: What makes this particularly exciting

8:01 scientifically is that the image matches

8:03 cosmological simulations so closely.

8:06 The structure of the cosmic web. The way gas

8:09 flows along these filaments to feed galaxy

8:11 formation. The real universe looks exactly

8:14 like what our models predicted. That's a

8:16 powerful validation of our understanding of

8:18 large scale cosmic structure.

8:20 Anna: The team's lead researcher described

8:23 capturing the light from this filament, light

8:26 that traveled for nearly 12 billion years

8:28 to reach us, as a way to precisely

8:31 characterize its shape. And importantly,

8:34 this opens a new observational window.

8:37 Now that we've done it once we can start

8:39 building up a picture of the web one filament

8:42 at a time.

8:43 Avery: If you haven't seen the image, look it up.

8:45 The simulations next to the real data are

8:48 extraordinary.

8:49 Anna: Now this one comes with appropriate

8:52 scientific caution, but if it holds up, it

8:54 could be one of the most significant

8:56 detections in the history of physics.

8:59 Avery: We're talking about dark matter, the

9:01 invisible substance that makes up roughly

9:03 85% of all matter in the universe, and

9:06 that we have never directly detected. We know

9:09 it's there from the way galaxies rotate from

9:12 gravitational lensing, from the large scale

9:14 structure of the cosmos, but directly

9:17 never caught it until maybe

9:20 now.

9:21 Anna: A team at MIT has developed a new model

9:23 that predicts how dark matter could leave a

9:26 subtle imprint on gravitational waves.

9:29 The ripples in spacetime we detect when black

9:32 holes merge. The idea is

9:35 if two black holes happen to spiral through a

9:37 dense cloud of dark matter on their way to

9:40 merging, that dark matter slightly alters

9:43 their orbital dynamics and those tiny

9:45 changes get encoded in the shape of the

9:48 gravitational waves.

9:49 Avery: It's using one incredible detection,

9:52 gravitational waves, to search for another

9:54 invisible phenomenon. Layers of detection

9:57 on detection.

9:58 Anna: And when the team tested their model against

10:01 real data from ligo, the Laser

10:03 Interferometer Gravitational Wave

10:05 Observatory, one signal stood out.

10:08 One black hole merger event occurred to carry

10:11 exactly the kind of distortion their model

10:14 predicted for a dark matter environment.

10:17 Avery: Now, important caveat, this is one signal,

10:20 one candidate. It needs to be replicated,

10:22 scrutinized and tested against alternative

10:25 explanations before anyone declares victory.

10:28 But the methodology is sound, the physics is

10:30 elegant, and the possibility that we are

10:33 holding in our hands the first direct

10:35 fingerprint of dark matter is genuinely

10:38 extraordinary.

10:39 Anna: The paper appeared in Physical Review Letters

10:42 this week. A, uh, prestigious venue that

10:44 doesn't publish lightly. We'll be watching

10:46 this story very closely, alright?

10:49 Avery: From the very small and invisible to the very

10:52 large and imminent. NASA's Nancy

10:54 Grace Roman space telescope has been in

10:56 development for years. And this week we got

10:59 the news that it's not just on track, it's

11:01 ahead of schedule.

11:03 Anna: NASA announced that Roman is now targeting

11:06 launch as early as September 2026,

11:09 a full eight months ahead of its original May

11:12 27 deadline. And crucially, it's under

11:15 budget. In a space program landscape where

11:17 overruns are practically expected, that's

11:20 a genuine achievement.

11:22 Avery: So what is Roman and, um, why should we be

11:24 excited? In short, it's the widest field

11:27 infrared telescope ever launched, where

11:30 James Webb is designed to stare deeply at

11:32 individual targets with extraordinary

11:35 precision. Roman is designed to survey

11:37 enormous swaths of the sky. Think of Webb

11:40 as a powerful telephoto lens and Roman as

11:43 an astonishing wide angle camera for the

11:45 entire cosmos.

11:47 Anna: And the numbers are staggering. Over its

11:50 five year primary mission, Roman is expected

11:53 to discover tens of thousands of new

11:55 exoplanets, catalog battle billions of

11:58 galaxies and observe tens of billions of

12:00 individual stars. NASA administrator

12:03 Jared Isaacman put it simply. What would take

12:06 the Hubble Space Telescope 2000 years

12:09 to survey Roman can do in a single

12:11 year.

12:12 Avery: Its primary scientific goals are dark energy

12:15 and dark matter, probing the accelerating

12:17 expansion of the universe and mapping the

12:19 invisible mass that shapes cosmic structure.

12:22 But given the sheer scale of what it will

12:24 observe, astronomers expect Roman to deliver

12:27 surprises that nobody has even thought to

12:29 predict yet.

12:30 Anna: Roman will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon

12:33 Heavy rocket to the Sun, Earth L2

12:36 Lagrange Point, about a million and a half

12:38 kilometers from Earth, in the same cosmic

12:41 neighborhood as James Webb. September

12:44 can't come soon enough.

12:45 Avery: And our final highlight this week takes us to

12:48 a quieter but potentially very consequential

12:51 development. A new computer chip that could

12:53 fundamentally change how deep space missions

12:56 operate.

12:57 Anna: NASA has been testing a uh, next generation

13:00 radiation hardened space computer chip

13:02 designed to give spacecraft the ability to

13:05 make intelligent decisions independently

13:07 without waiting for instructions from Earth.

13:10 Avery: And that matters more than it might sound

13:13 right now. Deep space probes are

13:15 fundamentally reactive. They carry out pre

13:17 programmed instructions and when something

13:19 unexpected happens, they wait for guidance

13:22 from ground control at the distance of

13:24 Saturn. That's a one and a half hour round

13:26 trip for a radio signal at the outer planets.

13:29 It can be three to five hours for a mission

13:32 to the nearest star. We're talking years.

13:34 Anna: A spacecraft with genuine onboard

13:37 intelligence could detect an anomaly, assess

13:40 it, and respond, all without waiting for

13:43 a human to weigh in from millions of

13:45 kilometers away. Or it could

13:47 autonomously identify scientifically

13:50 interesting targets and choose to observe

13:52 them in real time, rather than waiting for a

13:55 pre planned observation sequence.

13:57 Avery: The chip being tested is described as showing

13:59 performance that opens up real possibilities

14:02 for autonomous operations. Radiation

14:04 hardening is the critical piece here. Deep

14:07 space is a, uh, punishing environment for

14:09 electronics and chips that work perfectly in

14:11 a lab can fail catastrophically when hit by

14:14 cosmic rays. Getting that balance right

14:17 is genuinely hard engineering.

14:19 Anna: We're still in the testing phase, but this is

14:22 the kind of foundational technology that a,

14:24 uh, decade from now we'll look back on as the

14:26 point where the next generation of truly

14:29 independent robotic explorers became

14:31 possible.

14:32 Avery: And that is your weekend wrap for Saturday,

14:35 May 23rd.

14:36 What a week to be following space news.

14:38 Anna: Starship V3 in the air. New Glenn

14:41 cleared to fly again. Cosmic web

14:44 photographed for the first time, hints of

14:46 dark matter and gravitational waves, Roman

14:49 almost on the pad, and AI chips that could

14:52 give our spacecraft minds of their own.

14:55 Avery: The universe keeps delivering, and so do we.

14:58 Astronomy Daily is available wherever you get

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15:27 Avery: We'll be back on Monday with the latest from

15:29 the Cosmos. Until then, keep looking up.

15:31 Anna: Clear skies, everyone.

15:44 Avery: The stories the

15:45 tongue.