¶Flight 11 on Monday? In the wake of Flight 10’s success at the end of August, SpaceX plans to launch the next test flight of Starship as early as next week (NET Monday 10/13, with the launch window opening at 6:15 p.m. CT), returning to a quicker cadence of flights after the hiccups of Flights 7-9. The mission profile for Flight 11 will be similar to Flight 10, as the company flies its last Block 2 Starship vehicle (Ship 38) and a reused Booster 15 (previously flown on Flight 8). Booster 15 will reuse 24 of its 33 Raptor engines and test a new 5-engine relight pattern during its initial landing burn before eventually hovering and splashing down in the Gulf—there’s little upside in attempting another tower catch before the under-construction Booster 18 (the first Block 3 Booster, which features Raptor 3 engines) rolls out for Flight 12. Ship 38 will perform another in-vacuum Raptor relight, deploy eight more Starlink mass simulators, and test the heat shield in new and unkind ways. Its final flight phase will add a “dynamic banking maneuver” that will be required in a future return-to-Starbase-for-tower-catch scenario. The subsequent Flight 12 will be the next significant step for the superheavy rocket, featuring Block 3 of the Starship architecture for both the Ship and Booster. |
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 | Flight 11. Credit: SpaceX |
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¶Papers- A supermassive black hole, which may have formed through the direct collapse of a gas cloud, was spotted in the Infinity Galaxy (paper). If confirmed, this candidate would be the first black hole formed directly from the collapse of a gas cloud instead of from a stellar supernova. (While different from the suspected direct collapse black holes of the early Universe, this would still be a revolutionary finding.)
- Based on new simulations, hypothesized Hycean exoplanets—worlds with thick hydrogen atmospheres and global oceans—appear much less likely to exist than previously thought.
- A new explanation for hypervelocity white dwarfs: mergers of rare white dwarfs that contain significant helium in addition to carbon and oxygen may result in the heavier of the merging pair undergoing a staged, double detonation thermonuclear explosion. In such an event, material from the disrupted lighter star ends up on the surface of the heavier star and undergoes a runaway thermonuclear explosion. This explosion compresses the heavier star’s core and results in a supernova. Simulations show that this could accelerate whatever remains of the lighter star to over 2,000 km/s, past the Milky Way’s escape velocity (paper), and explain some white dwarfs that we’ve seen careening toward intergalactic space.
- A 160-m wide asteroid struck the North Sea 43 million years ago (pre-review paper), creating a tsunami ~100 meters tall and leaving a well-preserved underwater crater (3 km across, with a surrounding 20 km-wide zone of circular faults).
- JWST spotted an ancient galaxy—viewed at roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang—with no detectable oxygen, suggesting that it may be one of the long-predicted, but never observed, pristine galaxies hosting Population 3 stars (paper). These primordial stars were the first stars in the Universe, which hadn’t yet started exploding and producing significant amounts of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium through stellar nucleosynthesis. (In astronomer parlance, these are low metallicity stars, due to those wackos considering anything heavier than helium a metal.)
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¶Neutron draws nigh. Rocket Lab is still pushing for a first launch of its medium-lift Neutron rocket before the end of the year. In a recent interview, Peter Beck detailed their progress toward launch, noting that most components have been qualified and final engines are being built and tested. Neutron, designed to be partially reusable, joins the small but complex reusable orbital rocket party, which is currently made up of Falcon 9 (partial reuse; fully operational), New Glenn (partial reuse; operational, but not yet reused), Starship (full reuse; reused, but only partially operational), Long March-12A (partial reuse; LM-12 is operational, reusable variant still in testing), Stoke’s Nova (full reuse; in development), Zhuque-3 (partial reuse; first expendable launch likely delayed to 2026, reuse following), and Tianlong-3 (partial reuse; accidentally partially operational; first expendable launch likely delayed to 2026). Neutron takes a different tack on deleting standard rocket parts compared to Starship’s development strategy; in Neutron’s case, the rocket completely discards the need for a launch tower, going pad-only by moving all upper-stage umbilical and launch support systems inside its first-stage fairing, which fully envelopes the expendable, bare second stage (the second stage hangs inside the lovingly monikered “Hungry Hippo” reusable fairing; we’re v. interested to see how stage separation goes). The upper payload portion of the rocket is also modular and separable from the boost section, allowing Rocket Lab to reuse the fairings, avionics, and second-stage support systems many more times (50-100) than the company expects to be able to reuse tanks and engines (~20x). Neutron will be able to loft up to 15 tons to orbit in an expendable configuration, with lighter payloads allowing droneship and return-to-launch-site first-stage reuse flight profiles. Neutron will launch from the recently completed Pad 0D, constructed at the Mid Atlantic Regional Spacesport on Wallops Island, VA. Beck and Rocket Lab plan to launch Neutron once in its first year of operations, three times the following year, and 7x in year three, eventually working toward an ambitious 24-hour turnaround time between launches. |
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 | A render of Rocket Lab’s soon-to-fly Neutron medium-lift rocket, in the midst of its “Hungry Hippo” fairing disgorging an expendable upper-stage ready to scale LEO constellations. Credit: Rocket Lab |
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¶News in brief.Over 85% of NASA’s staff has been furloughed due to government shutdown, with most of the unfurloughed staff working on Artemis ● Colorado startup Albedo Space, who is currently checking out their Clarity-1 VLEO imaging satellite, is moving away from their intended commercial imagery business in favor of providing VLEO buses to payload providers (with hopes of capturing the defense market) ● Kuva Space concluded their W-Cube mission whose 3U cubesat became the first spacecraft to transmit a test 75 GHz (W-band) signal to a ground station ● Japanese SAR satellite developer Synspective purchased 10 additional Electron launches from Rocket Lab ● California reentry startup Inversion Space unveiled their very slick looking Arc reentry vehicle ahead of its first orbital flight next year ● Maxar Space Systems and Maxar Intelligence rebranded to Lanteris Space Systems and Vantor, respectively, after publicly traded Maxar was acquired by a private equity firm in 2023 for $6.4B and split into two separate companies ● Geespace raised $281M to accelerate the deployment of its IoT constellation ● Cosmoserve Space, a startup founded by an ISRO scientist, raised $3.17M in pre-seed funding to develop autonomous robotic spacecraft to mitigate space debris ● After decades of minimal communication while operating satellites in close proximity, the China National Space Agency contacted NASA about a potential on-orbit collision and took steps to maneuver their satellite ahead of time ● Firefly plans to acquire SciTech, a national security tech firm, for $855M ● ESA opened a new deep space antenna in Western Australia, the fourth of a new antenna design in their Estrack network that supports international missions from JAXA, ISRO, and others.
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 | The newest addition to ESA’s deep-space network (left) stands beside glinting solar panels and the first antenna in the network (right) at the New Norcia station in Western Australia, expanding the agency’s capacity to communicate with distant spacecraft. Credit: ESA |
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After 10 years of construction, China’s underground JUNO neutrino detector has started operations. A sphere 700 meters underground and 35 meters in diameter is filled with a scintillating liquid and surrounded by 43,212 photomultiplier tubes (plus ~2,400 more for celestial muon detection and vetoing). The experiment aims to study neutrino oscillations in neutrinos generated by two separate nuclear power plants located 52.5 km away, with the goal of understanding the normal mass ordering of the third neutrino eigenstate (paper). The photos are pretty awesome, and we assume Ethan Hunt will fight his way across its surface sometime soon. |  |
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