Unbelievable stuff

Today, SpaceX will launch what might be its most ambitious test flight yet of the company's massive Starship megarocket, the largest launch vehicle ever built. A mission that, if successful, will return both its Super Heavy first-stage booster and Ship upper stage to Earth for back-to-back landings at their launch pad. It will become the first full recovery of an orbital rocket in history.

- SpaceX is targeting Starship Flight 15 NET Friday, November 13, 2026 at 4:45 p.m. CT (22:45 UTC), with a 75-minute window. This will be the FIRST attempt to catch both stages of Starship, with Ship 42 and Booster 22, carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites on a roughly 22.5-hour mission of about 14 orbits at around 275 km.

- Booster 22 will return to the tower for the first-ever catch of a V3 Super Heavy about 6.5 minutes after liftoff. If all goes well Ship 42 will come back to Starbase for the first-ever Ship catch around 3:17 p.m. CT on Saturday, which would make it the first fully recovered orbital rocket in history and a huge step toward rapid, full reuse.

Again - Flight 15 launch window opens at 5:45 P.M. EST/10:45 P.M. GMT.

LIVESTREAM: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-15 (Twitter Broadcast - https://x.com/i/broadcasts/2brajgZlOKRMka )

Alternative links for YT: NASASpaceflight, Everyday Astronaut

Update 1 - SpaceX will NOT attempt Super Heavy Booster 22 catch. It will land in the Gulf of Mexico...I guess onto the ship catch tomorrow (fingers crossed)

Update 2 - 'We've got a nominal orbit insertion, so Starship now in orbit around Earth for the second time ever," SpaceX's Dan Huot says. 'That's a really great moment.'

Update 3 - (T+ 21:33) - Good deorbit burn. Starship is on course to reenter Earth’s atmosphere ahead of a planned catch at Starbase in ~1 hour

Update 4 - SHIP 42 SUCCESSFULLY CAUGHT

I originally built Space Harbors just for me. I wanted a relaxing, fun way to learn about space. I found some success, so I figured others that need this learning approach may benefit from sharing.

Everything in the game is real. Every star, planet and spacecraft exists. You start with 343 star systems and can unlock 4,723 more from NASA's catalog of planet-hosting stars.

You can unlock everything for free just by playing: traveling and discovering planets, stars and spacecraft. The only paid part is the story modes, because those consume much more of my time to craft.

It's available on iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/space-harbors/id6829524455

If enough people are interested I'll do an Android version.

If you know astronomy better than I do and spot something wrong, please tell me.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid mission has released its first major batch of data. With this release, which captures, on an unprecedented scale, the light of more than a billion objects and covers an area of sky as big as 9500 full Moons, ESA’s "dark Universe detective" (as the telescope is also named) lays the foundation for the largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos.

The new data release, named DR1-Foundation, comprises around 13 months of observations, and marks the first major release of mission data since the space telescope’s launch in mid-2023. For the first time, it gives scientists the puzzle pieces they need to begin constructing a detailed 3D map of the cosmos – crucial to solve the many mysteries of the dark Universe (including dark energy, dark matter, and the cosmic web).

Today’s release is the first to demonstrate Euclid’s abilities as a sky surveyor. Its breadth, panoramic mosaics, and wide sky coverage in visible and near-infrared light support a wide range of new science. DR1-Foundation reveals unprecedented numbers of cosmic objects, and includes:

• Over 900 MILLION galaxies
• Around 15 000 strong gravitational lensing candidates
• Over 60 million quasar candidates, the brilliant cores of distant galaxies
• The spectra from more than 160 million sources
•  Euclid Wide Survey results from 1900 deg² of sky – a total of 1.7 million GB of data

“This is a change in scale from Euclid’s previous releases, which included a few days of observations over around 60 deg² of sky,” says Valeria Pettorino, ESA’s Euclid project scientist. “We’re now releasing more than a year of data covering a significantly larger area. This unlocks ground-breaking science.”

The mission's goal is to complete the largest-ever three-dimensional atlas of the cosmos, spanning more than a third of the sky, in 2031.

I feel like space stations get talked about a ton, as part of this grand idea of a "space economy", but the idea of having large infrastructure in orbit for manufacturing is barely talked about. That feels a little strange to me, it seems obvious to me that if / when manufacturing in space happens it isn't going to be via constantly launching and bringing back the machinery necessary for manufacturing, and also that if we want to talk about a space economy we should probably be talking about... making stuff in space.

I know there are start ups dedicated towards researching this field, why are they not getting shit tons of funding to build larger scale infrastructure that stays in orbit instead of one off satellites? I know that sounds like a silly bet, but to me it sounds way safer than investing in the hypothetical idea that companies would be willing to send commercial astronauts to space stations to do research for... some hypothetical thing

EDIT:

TO BE CLEAR, THIS IS NOT ABOUT SPACE MINING OR COLONIZATION, THIS IS ABOUT SENDING RAW MATERIALS TO SPACE TO MANUFACTURE THINGS IN 0 GRAVITY, SOMETHING THAT DOES HAVE A DECENT AMOUNT OF RESEARCH

EDIT 2:

THIS IS ALSO NOT ABOUT REPLACING SEA BASED SHIPPING, THAT IS ALSO VERY DIFFERENT. IT IS JUST ABOUT SENDING STUFF TO SPACE TO BUILD NEW THINGS WITH, THEN BRINGING IT BACK DOWN, IN ORDER TO UTILIZE THE LACK OF GRAVITY. NOTHING TO DO WITH SHIPPING.

I added up how long each one kept sending data from the surface of Venus, way less than expected:

• Venera 7 (1970): 23 min
• Venera 8 (1972): 50 min
• Venera 9 (1975): 53 min
• Venera 10 (1975): 65 min
• Pioneer Venus Day Probe (1978): 67 min
• Venera 11 (1978): 95 min
• Venera 12 (1978): 110 min
• Venera 13 (1982): 127 min
• Venera 14 (1982): 57 min
• Vega 1 (1985): 56 min
• Vega 2 (1985): 57 min

So about 12 hours 40 minutes for the whole planet, and nothing has landed there since 1985.

Venera 9, 10, 11 and 12 only went quiet because the craft relaying their signal flew out of range, Venera 13 was built to last 32 minutes, and Lavochkin, who built it, says a command from Earth ended reception. Pioneer had no parachute and wasn't expected to survive hitting the ground, it kept transmitting for over an hour anyway lol

Some vary by source tho, Venera 8 is 50 min or 63 depending on where you look and I couldn't really find why, if anyone knows I'd love to hear it

I made a timer for each one on my Venus globe (plus a lot more Venus-related stuff), here's Venera 13: https://azmth.space/venus?site=venera-13

With NASA facing historic budgetary threats, many missions are facing delays or termination, and the agency has turned to cheaper science projects.

The most visible implementation is the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, started in 2018, which buys rides for NASA instruments aboard commercially built lunar landers.

In the last year, the agency has begun a run of rapid, low-cost, agency directed science missions chosen without competition, including the SkyFall helicopters and Aeolus instruments bound for Mars, and the PROMISE rover to the Moon.

An untested premise behind these choices is that smaller and cheaper missions can substitute for the science of larger ones at a reduced cost.

To see if this is so, The Planetary Society released a major dataset that tracks peer-reviewed publications and their citation rates associated with 143 NASA science missions across every major division launched since 1980.

The results suggest that low-cost missions cannot replace the science of larger ones, though mid-cost missions can perform exceptionally well.

We made the entire dataset free to access, so anyone can explore it.

Find it at: https://dashboards.planetary.org/science-mission-impact/

Senior NASA officials held a lengthy news conference last weekend, laying out a series of lunar contract awards, new contract opportunities, and mission decisions. They followed one after the other: landers, nuclear-powered rovers, scouting drones, power generation, storage, and communication satellites.

It never seemed to end.

“Hopefully, we’re keeping industry on their toes trying to catch up to all the solicitations we’re doing,” said Carlos García-Galán, manager of the Moon Base Program, more than 90 minutes into the news conference. “This is what it takes to do the Moon Base in the timeline we have set forth.”

The rapid-fire announcement of awards tells us a few things about NASA’s efforts to return to the Moon and establish a durable settlement there during the next decade.

First, the agency is serious about this effort—the Artemis Moon Base program represents the most credible effort to establish a permanent outpost on another world in NASA’s history. Second, NASA is reaching out to all corners of the US commercial space industry, casting an extraordinarily wide net to reach companies that have yet to fly any hardware into orbit. Third, NASA is getting creative about how it’s buying these services, and this may matter most of all.

Taken from an Iphone 17 pro, 30s of night mode on a clear night, slightly high in the sky.

Reminder that the United States Congress had passed a NASA budget back in January that did not support the Mars Sample Return program, and NASA officials were sending signals that the MSR program was effectively dead.

Well, seems like something might have changed quite recently (something "blue"?)...

"NASA planning to reopen inquiry to return samples collected by Mars Perseverance rover, Mars Explo Program Office Chief Tiffany Morgan says at MEPAG. One-year study begins Jan ‘27"