A welcome win for SpaceX
After three failed launches and a spacecraft explosion, Starship 10 launched successfully.
The spacecraft deployed mock Starlink satellites, tested heat shields and a control system for new fins, all the while making it through a fiery atmospheric re-entry. This follows some worrying malfunctions according to Anthony Colangelo, host of the podcast Main Engine Cutoff and cohost of Off Nominal.
“They have been a company that fails a lot in public but fixes a lot in public, and they got stuck in a way that we hadn't seen them get stuck before. So, when you couple that with the fact that there has been, you know, hiring and retention issues down in the Starbase area,” Colangelo said. “It just felt like, you know, is this a different era of SpaceX, or are they going to be able to get through it? Now, we know they're getting through that.”
SpaceX has lofty goals that it hopes this “trial-and-error model” will help them achieve. The company prides itself on iterative design – failing but learning from those mistakes.
But big tests still remain. SpaceX still needs to put Starship into orbit. And it needs to prove it can refuel the spacecraft in space.
In the past, spaceships launched with all the fuel needed to get to their destination and back. Starship is built to go farther and launch with less fuel, choosing instead to transfer cryogenic fuel in space.
“You've got a lot of fuel that you need to launch everything from the ground into orbit, then you've got a bunch of payloads in orbit with no fuel left. And so, an idea is to go up and launch more fuel, refill that booster, or refill that ship, and send it off to wherever it needs to go,” Colangelo said. “So, this infrastructure really changes the way that you organize these missions.”
Despite this year’s setbacks, Starship engineers have continued to work to improve the vehicle. They plan to start launches of Starship V2 in early 2026 -- a taller and more powerful iteration of the rocket and vehicle. Still, there’s a long way to go for the spacecraft to reach the Moon and Mars.
"With this ship, they haven't been to orbit. They haven't caught the ship. They haven't really figured out the reusable heat shield in the way that they need to in its final form. I think they're going to really focus on getting through those things first,” Colangelo said.
A new object circles Neptune
A newly found object is moving to the rhythm of Neptune’s drum. The object known as 2020 VN40 was found through a survey by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope led by the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.
The object is 140 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. To identify something that far like 2020 VN40, scientists take one image after the other and look for small amounts of light and movement. This repeats over weeks, months and years and helps scientists find the distance between the object and us.
It takes 2020 VN40 around 1,600 years to complete a revolution around the sun -- 10 times that of Neptune. According to Rosemary Pike, an astronomer at the Minor Planet Center and lead researcher from the Center for Astrophysics, its orbit, or resonance, with Neptune is one of the farthest discovered.
It’s also titled 33 degrees, leading to unique interactions with Neptune that haven’t been observed until now.
"It's been particularly interesting because the type of orbital resonance that it has is something that we haven't really seen before in the solar system. So usually, the objects always come to their closest approach, far away from the planet that they're resonant with. And because of the inclination that this object has, the large tilt, it can actually come into closest approach aligned with Neptune which is very unusual. [It could] affect the way that we plan surveys in the future,” Pike said.
The survey found over 140 objects. If there are more that resemble 2020 VN40, it could open a new door to our solar system’s past.
"Say for example, we found a lot more of these, and there were more than we expected, that would imply that sometime in the past, there was some giant planet scattering that preferentially scattered stuff that preferentially populated this region of space. If, alternatively, we find way less things in respects, then there must have been some sort of clearing event that happened at some point in the past,” Pike said. “So, where these objects are found, and how many objects there are, give us clues about how the soul the outer solar system and the giant planets formed and then evolved over time.”
