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Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily,
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your daily guide to the universe.
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It is Tuesday, the 3rd of March, 2026.
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And we are season five, episode 53.
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Anna, quite a line up today.
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We really do have something for everyone.
0:32
We've got an update to that major shakeup at NASA,
0:35
the kind that has the whole space community talking.
0:38
We've got a planet shaped like a lemon.
0:41
That's not a metaphor.
0:42
It is literally shaped like lemon.
0:44
There is a new approach to one of the biggest
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unsolved mysteries in all of physics.
0:49
A space probe has snapped its first close up
0:52
of an interstellar comet.
0:54
And we've got your global launch roundup,
0:56
including a big one from Japan making its third attempt.
1:00
And China is about to debut a new reusable rocket
1:03
that could shake up the commercial launch industry.
1:06
Avery, where do we start?
1:08
Let's start at the top with NASA,
1:10
and a decision that's rewriting the Artemis playbook.
1:13
So Avery, when NASA administrator Jared Isaacman stood up
1:17
at Kennedy Space Center just days ago
1:20
and said Artemis III will not be landing on the moon,
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it was a significant moment.
1:25
It really was to understand why a quick bit of context.
1:29
Artemis III was meant to be humanity's first crewed lunar
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landing since Apollo 17 back in 1972.
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That's over 50 years, a very long time to wait.
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And now it's not happening.
1:42
Instead, the mission now targeting a launch
1:44
sometime in mid-2027 has been completely redesigned.
1:49
It will stay in low-earth orbit and focus
1:51
on testing docking procedures between NASA's Orion capsule
1:55
and the commercial lunar landers.
1:57
And that's where it gets really interesting,
1:59
because those landers are SpaceX's Starship
2:02
and Blue Origins Blue Moon.
2:04
And NASA is now openly keeping both of them in the running
2:07
rather than committing exclusively to Starship.
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Isaacman was quite candid about why.
2:13
He compared the current Artemis cadence to Apollo
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and found it wanting.
2:17
Apollo was launching missions every four to five months.
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Artemis has been going every couple of years,
2:23
which means the agency loses what he called muscle memory
2:28
Engineers leave, procedures get rusty.
2:30
And Starship, despite 11 test flights,
2:33
has yet to reach Earth orbit.
2:35
It's still technically a suborbital vehicle.
2:38
And the list of milestones it needs to hit
2:40
before it could put astronauts on the moon,
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orbital refueling, rendezvous, and docking,
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an uncrewed lunar landing is still very long.
2:49
So the plan now is Artemis III in low-earth orbit
2:54
Then Artemis IV as the first real moon landing targeting
2:59
And NASA is even talking about two moon landing missions
3:02
in 2028 if they can get the launch cadence up ambitious.
3:06
Barry, and in the meantime, Artemis II,
3:09
the crude fly-by around the moon with no landing,
3:12
is still on track for an April launch
3:14
after being rolled back to the vehicle assembly building
3:17
for repairs to a helium flow issue.
3:20
A lot happening on the Artemis front,
3:22
we will absolutely keep you updated.
3:24
Now, let's go somewhere much, much further away.
3:28
750 light years, in fact.
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This one genuinely made me do a double take when I read it.
3:35
Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope
3:38
have found an exoplanet unlike anything ever studied,
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and they are baffled.
3:43
So let's set the scene.
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The planet is called PSR J2322-2650B.
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It's about the mass of Jupiter,
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and it orbits its star at a distance of just 1 million miles.
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For comparison, Earth orbits the sun at about 100 million miles.
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This planet is 100th of that distance away.
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One complete orbit, one full year for this planet,
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takes just 7.8 hours.
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And its star is not a normal star.
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It's a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star.
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The collapsed core of a long dead massive star,
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containing the mass of our entire sun,
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packed into something the size of a city.
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And the gravity from that pulsar is so extreme
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that it's literally stretching the planet.
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Instead of being roughly spherical like Earth or Jupiter,
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the gravitational tidal forces are pulling it into an elongated shape,
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like a lemon, or an American football, if you prefer.
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The lead researcher Michael Zhang from the University of Chicago
4:47
described it as the stretchiest planet
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we've confirmed the stretchiness of,
4:52
which is a sentence I never expected to hear in astronomy.
4:56
But the shape is almost the least weird thing about it.
4:59
When Webb turned its infrared instruments on this world,
5:02
the atmosphere came back completely wrong.
5:05
Instead of water, methane, carbon dioxide,
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the things you'd normally expect on a gas giant,
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it's almost entirely helium and carbon.
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Carbon compounds called C2 and C3 specifically,
5:20
And because the pressure inside the planet is enormous,
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scientists think that carbon could actually be crystallizing
5:27
in the deep interior, forming diamonds.
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The surface temperature is around 3700 degrees Fahrenheit,
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by the way, which is four times hotter than Venus.
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So it's a lemon-shaped diamond cord 3,700-degree mystery world,
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orbiting a zombie star every eight hours.
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And nobody can explain how it formed.
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Zhang said the carbon composition rules out every known formation mechanism.
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It's part of what's called a black widow system,
5:55
where the pulsar is slowly evaporating its companion.
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But even that doesn't fully explain what Webb is seeing.
6:03
The team is seriously entertaining the idea
6:05
that this might be an entirely new class of cosmic object,
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not quite a planet, not quite a stellar remnant,
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something in-between with no name yet.
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Only Webb could have found this.
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The pulsar emits mostly gamma rays,
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which are invisible to infrared instruments,
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so Webb could study the planet without the star drowning it out,
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a pristine spectrum.
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The researchers called it a perfect observational setup,
6:32
from the inexplicable to the cosmological, what's next?
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So the Hubble tension.
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If you've been listening to astronomy daily for any length of time,
6:40
you've heard us mention this.
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But let's quickly recap why it matters so much.
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The Hubble constant is a measure of how fast the universe is expanding.
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Different methods of measuring it produce different answers.
6:53
Not wildly different.
6:54
We're talking about a 10% gap,
6:56
but in cosmology, that gap is enormous.
6:59
If the universe's expansion rate isn't consistent,
7:03
something in our fundamental model of physics is wrong.
7:06
And now, a team from the University of Illinois
7:09
and the University of Chicago thinks they may have found a new tool
7:12
that could finally help resolve it.
7:14
They call it the stochastic siren method.
7:17
And it works like this.
7:19
Every time two black holes spiral together
7:22
and collide somewhere in the universe,
7:24
which is happening constantly across billions of galaxies,
7:27
they release gravitational waves,
7:30
ripples in the fabric of space time itself.
7:33
Most of these events are too distant and too faint for us to detect individually.
7:38
But together, all those undetected collisions create a background hum,
7:42
a constant low-level gravitational wave signal
7:45
washing through everything all the time.
7:48
And the team realized that by looking for,
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or in this case, not finding,
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that background signal in existing data
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from the LIGO, Virgo, and Cogra detectors,
7:58
they could actually constrain the Hubble constant.
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Even the non-detection is informative.
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If certain expansion rates were correct,
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you'd expect to see a background signal by now.
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So those slower expansion scenarios can be ruled out.
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Combined with existing measurements
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from individual black hole mergers,
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the team produced a new, more precise estimate of the expansion rate.
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One that sets right in the contested zone
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where the Hubble tension actually bites.
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The research is published in physical review letters.
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Daniel Holtz from UChicago put it well,
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saying it's not every day you come up
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with an entirely new tool for cosmology.
8:38
And as gravitational wave detectors
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become more sensitive over the next decade,
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this method will only get sharper.
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The gravitational wave background itself
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is expected to be directly detected within about six years.
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When that happens, this technique becomes even more powerful.
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We might actually be within reach
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of solving one of the deepest puzzles and physics.
9:02
From the vast and theoretical to the relatively local,
9:06
we had a visitor in our solar system
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and we've got a new photo.
9:11
So 3i slash Atlas has been quite the recurring character
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on the show and with good reason.
9:17
This is only the third confirmed interstellar object
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ever detected passing through our solar system.
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And it's by far the most studied
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because we had more warning than with the previous two.
9:27
And now Esa's juice spacecraft,
9:30
the Jupiter icy moons explorer,
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currently en route to Jupiter has captured
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its first detailed image of the comet.
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And what it's showing is a bright glowing coma
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surrounding the nucleus with a sweeping tail already developing.
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Juice was actually well positioned
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to get an early look at this object,
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which makes it a brilliant opportunistic observation.
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The spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter's moons,
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but its cameras are perfectly capable of turning on to a bright comet.
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What makes 3i Atlas so scientifically exciting
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is what it can tell us about chemistry beyond our solar system.
10:08
Interstellar objects carry the fingerprints of wherever they formed.
10:12
Previous NASA observations already revealed the coma
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and a flare-up as it was heading outward.
10:18
And the composition data has been trickling in.
10:21
And now we have juice's optical imagery to add to that picture.
10:26
Every instrument, every telescope, every spacecraft
10:29
that can contribute data is doing so.
10:32
This is coordinated solar system science at its best.
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3i Atlas is now heading back out into the solar system.
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So the window for observations is narrowing.
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But the data already collected
10:44
will be keeping researchers busy for years.
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Now, let's check in on what's flying this week.
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It is a busy week at launch sites around the globe.
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Five missions on the schedule,
10:56
and there are some real standout moments to watch for.
10:59
The International Highlight is Japan.
11:01
Space 1, a commercial startup backed by Canon Electronics
11:07
is attempting its third launch of the Cairo's rocket
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from Spaceport Key on the Key Peninsula.
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The window opens Wednesday, the 4th of March.
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Now, the first two Cairo's flights did not go well.
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Flight 1 in March 2024 was terminated
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by the autonomous flight termination system
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due to first-stage underperformance.
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Flight 2 in December 2024 was lost because a sensor failure
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caused loss of control during the first-stage burn.
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Third time lucky, hopefully,
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this flight is targeting sun-synchronous orbit
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and is carrying five small payloads from a range of customers,
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including satellites from Taiwan,
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and a micro-satellite from a Japanese high school,
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lovely to see that kind of diversity.
11:52
On the SpaceX side,
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there are four Falcon 9 missions this week,
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launching from both Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg.
11:59
The standout is a Vandenberg launch on Wednesday
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where Booster B1071 will be flying for its 30-second mission.
12:07
And that landing will mark SpaceX's 600th Falcon Booster recovery attempt.
12:14
The numbers just keep getting bigger and more mind-boggling.
12:18
A booster that's flown 32 times is extraordinary by any standard.
12:23
This week's Falcon 9 missions will also push SpaceX
12:26
to its 30th launch of 2026 overall.
12:30
The cadence is relentless.
12:32
And we're watching the Cairo's launch particularly closely.
12:35
Japan's commercial launch sector has been growing
12:38
and the successful Cairo's flight
12:40
would be a significant milestone for the country's private space industry.
12:45
Now, speaking of new rockets.
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And we closed today's episode with a look further ahead
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to the end of March when China's commercial space sector
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is about to make a significant move.
12:57
D.A.S. Space, a commercial offshoot of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
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is preparing to debut its new Connecticut II rocket.
13:06
Launch is targeted for late March from the Geoquan Satellite launch center
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out in the Gobey Desert.
13:12
The Connecticut II is a 53-meter tall rocket
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powered by three YF 102 engines running on kerosene and liquid oxygen,
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a similar propellant combination to SpaceX's Falcon 9.
13:26
And like Falcon 9, it's designed to be reusable.
13:30
It can carry up to 12,000 kilograms to low-Earth orbit,
13:34
or around 7800 kilograms to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit.
13:39
That's a meaningful capability.
13:41
It puts it in a similar class to Falcon 9 in terms of payload.
13:45
For its debut mission, it's carrying the Qingjiao-1,
13:49
a prototype cargo spacecraft designed to eventually resupply China's Tiangong Space Station.
13:55
Think of it as China's equivalent of testing a dragon capsule,
13:59
a first step toward a regular, affordable resupply system.
14:03
Space has ambitious plans.
14:05
They're aiming for at least four Connecticut II launches in 2026 alone,
14:10
including missions to deploy satellites into mega-consolations,
14:14
directly competing with Starlink in the global broadband market.
14:18
It's worth noting that CAS Space's smaller solid fuel rocket,
14:23
the Connecticut I, has already flown 11 successful missions
14:27
and has eight more planned for this year.
14:29
So this is not a first-time player.
14:31
They have operational experience.
14:33
The broader picture is that the global commercial launch industry
14:37
is genuinely becoming competitive in a way it never was before.
14:41
Basics still leads, but you now have serious players from China,
14:45
Japan, Europe, and beyond, all developing capable, affordable rockets.
14:50
It's a fascinating time to be watching this space.
14:53
Unabsolutely intended.
14:55
And on that note, it's time to wrap up Episode 53.
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Yes, that is a wrap on Astronomy Daily, Season 5, Episode 53.
15:07
What a week it's shaping up to be.
15:09
From NASA's lunar reset to lemon planets,
15:12
to cosmic background hums,
15:14
to a brand new reusable rocket on the launch pad.
15:17
If you've enjoyed today's episode,
15:19
we would love it if you leave us a review wherever you listen.
15:22
It really does make a difference in helping new listeners find the show.
15:26
You can find full show notes,
15:28
blog posts, and more over at astronomydaily.io
15:32
and follow us on social media at AstroDailyPod for daily space updates.
15:37
Until next time, keep looking up.
15:39
The universe has no shortage of surprises.
15:42
Clear skies, everyone. Goodbye.
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