This Week in Space (Audio)

In this week's episode we turned to Chelsea Gohd, former writer for NASA/JPL and now with Space.com, to talk about the recent large data dump from the Artemis II mission. What was included? Why is this new data important? What observations were made, and what discoveries might result from them? What kind of annotations and notes did the astronauts include that make these obse...

From the earliest works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to the best of contemporary space science fiction, Tariq and I dive deep into our favorite space si-fi across the ages! And our challenge to you for some of the most obscure titles we know.

Headlines:

Think you're having a hot summer? Try living on 55 Cancri-e, a super-Earth with daytime temperatures above 4000 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of these super-Earths orbit frighteningly close to their host stars and have long since had their atmospheres scraped away, leaving them baked, parched rocks. But some, like 55 Cancri, still have dense envelopes of air. How is that possible,...

This week it's Rod and Tariq working through the most important space headlines. The big story: Starship could launch test flight 14 as early as Monday the 28th. We've seen lots of tests, but this is the first attempt at an orbital flight, the success of which is necessary for the lunar landing system and eventual retirement of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon. Also: Vast starts ...

In the 1980s, as the US space shuttle was just starting operations, the UK embarked on an ambitious project called HOTOL—short for Horizontal Take Off and Landing, a radical, air-breathing spaceplane design. Poilitical and funding shifts in the UK ultimately derailed the project, despite the promising technologies it pioneered. The idea was later restarted as Skylon, with key...