This Week In Space podcast: Episode 162 — Lunar Landing Day

What time is SpaceX's Starship Flight 9 launch on May 27? | This Week In Space: Episode 162 - Lunar Landing Day | New moon of May 2025 leaves the night sky dark Created for ceo.studentlike.spuniv@blogger.com | Web Version May 27, 2025 CONNECT WITH SPACE.COM       Something amazing every day. SIGN UP ⋅   WEBSITE   The Launchpad (SpaceX) What time is SpaceX's Starship Flight 9 launch on May 27? Starship Flight 9 is scheduled to launch no earlier than Tuesday, May 27, at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT) from SpaceX's Starbase test site near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. Like its name suggests, this will be the ninth test flight of the giant SpaceX rocket, but it is the first to attempt to reuse the giant Super Heavy booster, the first stage of Starship. Read More (This Week in Space) This Week In Space: Episode 162 - Lunar Landing Day On Episode 162 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik discuss the effort to make July 20 a national holiday called "Lunar Landing Day." \ If you're lucky enough to have witnessed the landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, you know what a momentous occasion that was. If you're younger than a Boomer, you've read and heard about that amazing day, but it might not have the impact it did for those who witnessed it. Bob Slater, M.D., is out to change that with his campaign to make July 20 a national holiday and we think it's a fine idea — and so do the moonwalkers, Mission Control folks, and lots of others. It'll be good for STEM, good for national pride, and just good all around. Join us to learn more and about how you can help make this great idea a reality! Read More Skywatching (Chris Vaughan/Starry Night) New moon of May 2025 leaves the night sky dark The new moon of May occurs on May 27. Two days later the moon will make a close pass to Jupiter in the evening sky, and the summer constellations will be rising. Read More Science & Astronomy (koto_feja via Getty Images) New theory could finally make 'quantum gravity' a reality Physicists have developed a novel approach to solving one of the most persistent problems in theoretical physics: uniting gravity with the quantum world. At the heart of a recent paper is a rethinking of how gravity behaves at a fundamental level. While the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces are all described using quantum field theory -- a mathematical framework that incorporates uncertainty and wave-particle duality -- gravity remains the outlier. General relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, is a purely classical theory that describes gravity as the warping of space-time geometry by mass and energy. But attempts to blend quantum theory with general relativity often run into fatal mathematical inconsistencies, such as infinite probabilities. Read More SpaceX (Stefanie Waldek, used with permission) SpaceX reveals why its Starship Flight 8 exploded Flight 8 launched March 6 from SpaceX's Starbase manufacturing and test facility on the southern tip of Texas. The mission largely mirrored that of Flight 7, during which the both vehicles' first stage Super Heavy boosters successfully rocketed back to Starbase to be caught by the launch tower's "Mechazilla" chopstick-like arms. Ship, however, for both Flight 7 and Flight 8, did not fare as well as its Super Heavy counterpart. (Starship Flight 9 is scheduled to launch on May 27.) Flight 7 and Flight 8 each ended in dramatic explosions over the Atlantic Ocean that could be seen from Florida, the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, raining fiery Starship debris into the drink below. Flight 7's Ship encountered a propellant leak and fire in the spacecraft's "attic," leading to its explosion and loss. Side-by-side, Flight 8 followed a very similar trajectory, but instead of a fire in the attic, Starship's last flight suffered a "flash" in what could be comparatively called its "basement," which brought about its blazing demise. Read More Technology (Virgin Galactic)) Virgin Galactic on track to start launching customers again Virgin Galactic's spaceflight drought will last just about two years, if all goes according to plan. The suborbital space tourism company last went to the final frontier in June 2024, on the final flight of its VSS Unity space plane. Virgin retired Unity to focus on developing its new, more efficient "Delta class" vehicles - and the first of those advanced, six-passenger ships remains on track to debut next year, according to the company. Read More Search for Life (NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted) Scientists question possible signs of life on K2-18b Results have sparked intense debate among astronomers. While recognizing this finding would be a groundbreaking achievement and a major testament to the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) capabilities if true, many scientists remain skeptical, questioning both the reliability of the detected DMS signature as well as whether DMS itself is a dependable sign of life in the first place. As such, many independent teams have been conducting follow-up studies about the original claims - and a newly published one only adds to the debate, suggesting the Cambridge scientists' DMS detection wasn't significant enough to warrant the publicity it received. Read More   Sign Up  |    Update Profile  |    Unsubscribe Privacy Policy  |    Cookies Policy  |    Terms and Conditions CONTACT US: FEEDBACK  |    ADVERTISE Future US LLC © Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10036