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Starship's big catch and Hubble's deep look

Starship's booster being caught after launch.
Screenshot from AP's Starship launch video.
Starship's booster being caught after launch.

The speedy cadence of Starship and SpaceX's future plans

SpaceX pulled off a complex mid-air maneuver on Oct. 13, not just by launching, but catching its Super Heavy rocket booster with the large mechanical “arms” of the launch tower at Starbase in south Texas.

The goal of the fifth test flight of Starship aimed to demonstrate reusability of the first stage of the rocket. Eric Berger, author and senior space editor at Ars Technica, said that from an engineering standpoint, the precision from the flight algorithms and execution of the catch is astounding.

“That was remarkable, because we'd never really seen anything like that before, where a rocket just has really this very precise hovering and right where it needs to be for the launch tower to essentially grab it from midair,” Berger said. “They've taken a big first step toward reusing that that stage, and we'll see where they go from here.”

Despite being an interesting spectacle, the rocket catch is as practical as it is exciting, Berger said. By catching the rocket on the launchpad, rather than using landing legs attached to first stage, it allows for more payload. Having the direct landing at the launchpad also reduces offloading and refurbishing time.

“In this case, they're literally taking Starship, they're catching it as it comes back from space, and an hour or two later, they're setting back on the launch mount where it took off from,” Berger said. "So if they can get to the point where only a moderate or minimal amount of refurbishment is needed to that rocket, you have completely removed all of that transportation and processing of the vehicle that you've had from either the landing site of the drone ship.”

SpaceX engineers were able to take the lessons learned from more than 300 launches of its Falcon 9 rockets to develop a reusable and operational Starship orbital rocket, Berger said.

While reusable upper stages aren’t necessary for future Artemis missions, Berger said the focus of SpaceX is to reuse and refurbish the upper stages as quickly as possible.

In the days leading up to launch and landing, Berger said challenges between SpaceX’s ‘rapid cadence of launches’ and the FAA’s ability to regulate iterative programs such as Starship caused friction between the two organizations. While the FAA acknowledges these problems, Berger said fast acting congressional support is necessary to meet the needs of SpaceX's goals.

While Starship is making strides for NASA's Artemis missions, the government side of the program is facing delays and it’s becoming less likely for humans to circle the moon next year. Berger said issues surrounding heat shields on Orion, schedule margin issues with ground support and setbacks in stacking the rocket signal that the launch will occur late 2025 or early 2026.

Cosmic phenomena from Hubble

From explosive cosmic phenomena in our Milky Way to jello-like hurricanes on Jupiter, the Hubble Space Telescope is actively capturing new and exciting scientific discoveries.

The observatory, located in low Earth orbit, develops scientific understanding of cosmic history of our own and neighboring galaxies, answering questions about planetary and galaxy chemistry.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the binary star system R Aquarii.
NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble)
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the binary star system R Aquarii.

Jennifer Wiseman, senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope, said Hubble had detected a globular cluster, or the cosmic fossil NGC 2005, located in a nearby galaxy called the Magellanic Cloud. She said the composition of the stars within the cluster differ from the surrounding stars in the galaxy, hinting towards the Magellanic Cloud being the result of an adolescent galaxy merger.

“Our Sun and other stars like it have not been around as long as our whole Milky Way galaxy has been around,” Wiseman said. "However, these globular clusters of stars tend to contain stars that are just about as old as the galaxy itself. So these stars can be 10, 12 billion years old, and so when we look at them, we're learning something about the chemistry of the galaxy when it was very young.”

 Hubble has been observing its fair share of the outer planets, such as the oscillation of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, Uranus and Mars through partnerships with other missions and spacecrafts.

Wiseman said that Hubble helped to provide proof of concept for future information comparisons through the New Horizons spacecraft. As the spacecraft studied objects beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, Wiseman said Hubble’s high-resolution images of Uranus to provide context for blurry observations from New Horizons.

Hubble also collaborated with MAVEN, the mission to Mars, to measure and study the elements on Mars to better understand what happened to the planet’s water and atmosphere.

The telescope has also been keeping an eye on deep space, Wiseman said, uncovering faint flickers of light from distant galaxies. She said these flashing episodes, caused by objects falling into large black holes within the galaxies, tell scientists more about the galaxies than originally thought.

“They're finding more of these flickering episodes than were expected,” Wiseman said. “So, it means that we're finding, with Hubble, more black holes in the early universe than had previously been known or reported, and it's just another indication that galaxies in the universe got going pretty quickly.”

Recently, Hubble had detected a faraway galaxy called M87 with a large and active black hole, which Wiseman said raised questions about its jets and detections of stellar novi, or star explosions. She said these pencil beam-like exhaust jets may be adding fuel to nearby binary stars, uncovering potential answers about this distant realm.

“If this super massive black hole jet is nearby, it may be stirring up a lot more gas and pushing a lot more material onto that companion star, which accelerates this Nova explosion phenomenon,” Wiseman said.

Marian is a multimedia journalist at Central Florida Public Media working as a reporter and producer for the 'Are We There Yet?' space podcast.
Brendan Byrne is Central Florida Public Media's Assistant News Director, managing the day-to-day operations of the newsroom, editing daily news stories, and managing the organization's internship program. Byrne also hosts Central Florida Public Media's weekly radio show and podcast "Are We There Yet?" which explores human space exploration, and the weekly news roundup podcast "The Wrap."
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