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#759: The Commercial Space Program
Humanity has turned its focus back to the Moon, sending a fleet of spacecraft to the lunar surface. Some are run by the government, but there’s a whole new group of commercial landers bearing instruments to the lunar surface. Is this the future of lunar exploration? Space used to be a place occupied by government-funded and military missions, but today, we’re seeing the rise… and fall (somersault, crash, and explosion) of missions with commercial design and funding. Let’s talk about how this is good, bad, and maybe just too soon.
Show Notes- Commercial Lunar Exploration
- Rise of Private Missions
- NASA’s Role
- XPRIZE Legacy
- Lunar Mission Highlights
- Astrobotic’s Peregrine
- Intuitive Machines (Odysseus)
- iSpace & Firefly
- Other Efforts
- Science Goals & Outcomes
- Survivability
- Scientific Payload
- Technical & Financial Challenges
- Landing is Hard
- Costs Vary Widely
- Navigation Systems
- NASA & Future Outlook
- Shift in Contracts
- Private Innovation
Fraser Cain: Astronomy Episode 759 Commercial Lunar Landers. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain.
I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. My audio is… Yeah, we should explain.
Fraser Cain: You should do the explain of shame for why your audio sounds a little teeny this week.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So I’m normally using a little tiny lapel mic, except I wandered off with it. And I knew where it was this morning. And between my office upstairs and the studio downstairs, I stopped to make coffee and then got distracted by the dogs on the outside and somewhere in my kitchen, I sat down the little tiny black box of audio goodness.
And my kitchen is chaos incarnate of bikes and gardening stuff and cooking stuff and the stuff that gets dumped when you come in from the driveway. And so apparently, I will clean my kitchen just so I can find my microphone.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. So everybody who’s listening, start your engines. This is the first week of Pamela Can’t Find Her Microphone.
We’ll see what happens next week. So if you hear this and we continue the joke, then things have gotten very serious. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she starts getting creative and sort of repurposing other old gear to end what is now going to become a running joke week after week after week.
Dr. Pamela Gay: I may have to steal a preamp from my husband and pull out one of the good condenser mics that requires a preamp because that may be easier.
Fraser Cain: Let me know if you need some gear recommendations. I’m using the Focusrite and I really like it.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So we have a I think it’s M-Audio Red.
Fraser Cain: It’s that’s older.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, it’s older, but solid.
Fraser Cain: Yeah, I don’t think they’re even. Yeah, it’s solid. I don’t know if they’re even supporting it anymore.
So anyway, that’s that’s that’s something that the podcast listeners don’t need to hear. Let’s let’s move on. Humanity has turned its focus back to the moon, sending a fleet of spacecraft to the lunar surface.
Some are run by the government, but there’s a whole new group of commercial landers fearing instruments to the lunar surface. Is this the future of lunar exploration? We will talk about it a second, but it’s time for a break and we’re back.
All right. Let’s talk about commercial lunar landers, exploration, because there’s been a lot of activity already and and we’re going to get to that. But I’d like to just focus on on the history.
And I think we should put this in context of what happened with the with the commercial crew program that NASA has already done. Like NASA has has kind of really developed an an interesting way, an interesting partnership and working with commercial providers to supply the International Space Station. So let’s extend that to the moon.
Dr. Pamela Gay: I was actually going to go back earlier than that.
Fraser Cain: Oh, sure.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. You remember the days of Google and our XPRIZE?
Fraser Cain: Yep. Yep.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So so back in the early 2000s, we had the Ansari XPRIZE that is what got a scaled composite, lost it, launching their little badminton birdie of a spacecraft into space, flittering back down, taking off a few days later. They won the prize. Virgin Galactic bought themselves a space plane.
And now we have one of the commercial options for space tourism. Well, after the Ansari XPRIZE was won, we had the Google Lunar XPRIZE, which had the goal of having a team launch something to the moon entirely funded commercially, academically, donations, anything but government funding was illegitimate. It then had to travel across the surface of the moon.
It could rove, it could flit, it could hop, it could dance, it could burrow. No one tried to dance or burrow. But they had to move a distance across the surface of the moon and then send back video.
Now, unfortunately, by 2015, it was realized, one, we didn’t really have anything we could launch with that that was up to the task at that point in time. And none of the teams were quite ready to go. So Google was like, we’re calling it guys.
But a bunch of those teams kept going. And this was the origins of Bear Sheep from SpaceIL, of iSpace. And I can’t pronounce it correctly with the cute little bunny ears.
Hakato from Japan? Hakuto, I think. Astrobotic, a bunch of these teams that we have since seen become companies, got their origins with the Google Lunar XPRIZE.
Fraser Cain: Google Gurner?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Exactly. Exactly. And so these are teams that have been around for 20-ish years.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. And I think that lead then into what I was talking, sort of starting to prepare, which was that all of these companies had invested all this money and the XPRIZE had been canceled. And yet they had made all these investments and had working hardware and they’re ready to start trying for the moon, probably within months of when they canceled the prize.
And someone said, hey, let’s see if we can continue that process and turn these into, let’s give them jobs, right? And it worked out. I mean, theoretically has worked out very well.
Practically, we’re having some issues, but we’ll get to that.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So we saw various seed funds coming from governments. Israel was the first one to step up with Beresheet. We had the CLIPS program here in the United States, the Commercial Lunar CLIPS.
I forgot the letters.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Something service.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Launch service. Thank you. Commercial.
I can’t.
Fraser Cain: Commercial Partner Launch Service, I think. Anyway, CLIPS.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. We had the CLIPS program come out and it was the United States saying, all right, we want to go back to the moon and we want to change how we fund it. And the idea was.
Fraser Cain: Commercial Lunar Payload Service.
Dr. Pamela Gay: I knew there was a lunar in there.
Fraser Cain: Okay.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So the Commercial Lunar Payload Services was NASA saying, we want delivery of stuff to the moon to be as regular as sending something via FedEx. And we were starting to get there with low Earth orbit with the Falcon 9 launches where it was just sort of like, okay, we’re going to book a berth on a shared launch. Let’s go.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think it’s important.
I mean, I had mentioned that you had the commercial, like the deliveries of supplies to the International Space Station, the commercial cargo, you had several companies, not just SpaceX, others were also delivering stuff. You had the Cygnus, you had the Dream Chaser. You’ve got all these spacecraft that are delivering to the station.
And then as you said, you do a ride share. And so you’d have like maybe 40 CubeSats or three big satellites on a launch. And NASA would just be one of those satellites on that launch and then pair it up with a commercial company or whatever.
So you’re kind of moving towards this place where NASA no longer has to spend a lot of time thinking about how they’re going to deploy their experiments to the places that they want them to go.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And the argument was that just like with FedEx, when you pay to ship something, FedEx knows how much it should cost on average. And some packages are actually going to cost a whole lot more to ship because hardware failures, weather, and all these other things, changing gas prices in one location and not another.
Fraser Cain: The recipient lives in the middle of a forest far away from a main road.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Exactly, exactly.
Fraser Cain: I know I’m being subsidized by FedEx.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So all these different factors are just things that FedEx knows how to take care of and factor into the cost. The problem with trying to do this to go to the moon instead of to low Earth orbit is no one knows how much it actually costs on average to go to the moon. Because like this isn’t something that just gets done every day.
They don’t have the actuarial tables of 30 launches to look at and figure out, oh yeah, these parts go wrong this often. They don’t even have one launch.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. You have the Chinese. You have the Soviets back in the 70s and 80s.
You have early NASA and then estimates by the folks doing the commercial Lunar X-Prize or the Lunar X-Prize. So yeah, nobody knows what this costs. I’ve heard it said delivering, it’s $100 million per kilogram to deliver to the surface of the moon, right?
$10 million per kilogram. It’s expensive.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And so NASA is trying to move away from doing full cost plus fee to instead doing fixed cost to pay for contracts. And this means that we have all of these little commercial companies, and these are new guys. They are literally small companies with only like 500 employees in some cases.
And they’re trying to go to the moon, not getting paid enough to deliver the individual cargo missions. And they’re having to use venture capital. They’re having to use seed funds to hope that someday, present day investments will allow them to have future income.
It’s the standard model that we see with every venture tech company. It just may take them a bit longer and they may not all survive.
Fraser Cain: All right. So we’re going to talk about, I guess, how these contracts work and what the expectations are in a second, but it’s time for a break and we’re back. All right.
So this is the need that NASA addressed that they came up with a solution. Let’s come up with all these partners. They have signed all of these contracts to various providers.
And so how is this sort of structured?
Dr. Pamela Gay: It is literally them saying, we have this instrument, we have this rover, we have this thing. We don’t care about anything else other than our thing. Fly our thing.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. On the moon.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: Put this thing on the moon.
Dr. Pamela Gay: That’s it. That’s, that’s it.
Fraser Cain: And we will pay you. Here’s some money. Take this rover, get it on the moon.
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. Simple until they actually try and do it.
Fraser Cain: Yes. All right. All right.
Okay. We will, I guess we’ve got to go into how’s it going? How’s it going so far?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, Firefly Aerospace landed Blue Ghost and everyone else has either not fired their engine soon enough, fired their engines too late, fallen over or fallen over while still firing their engines.
Fraser Cain: Okay. So let’s, let’s, let’s do a quick rundown of all of the, the CLPS programs so far. So who was, who was first out of the gate?
Dr. Pamela Gay: So the first one out of the gate for the CLPS program was Astrobotic with their Peregrine Lander. And, and NASA had really big hopes for this company. Again, this was one of the Google Lunar XPRIZE companies.
They were contracted that on their second landing, they were going to potentially take the Viper rover, which is a half billion dollar rover. And, and Peregrine failed due to reaction thruster leak that made the spacecraft uncontrollable. So it just fell apart in the Earth’s atmosphere 10 days after launch.
Fraser Cain: Right. They didn’t, it didn’t even get out of Earth orbit.
Dr. Pamela Gay: No, no. So needles to say NASA decided they are not launching Viper on Astrobotic’s second mission.
Fraser Cain: But they’re also not launching Viper at all.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right, right. So this actually probably murdered the Viper rover, which is fully tested, fully functional, ready to go, has an entire science team. Yeah.
Fraser Cain: Okay. All right. So that was Peregrine mission one from Astrobotic.
What came after that?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Intuitive Machines, just like six weeks later, this was NovaSea and Odysseus. This one fell over.
Fraser Cain: Right. And I like, it sounds like it, you know, everything was going well. They were live streaming the descent.
We’re all watching with beta breath. This is it. This was the chance to prove it.
There’s a lot of really interesting science experiments on Intuitive Machines one. And it seemed to like it landed and they lost contact, but then they were able to make this sort of feeble contact with it.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: And, and what had, and I think what had happened, it broke its leg.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So, so it’s unclear exactly how it broke its leg. It fell over, it ended up at an 18 degree angle.
There were other issues with this one. It turns out lunar laser ranging is hard, especially when you forget to turn your instrument on. They had put a software hard stop in their laser ranger telling it do not fire so that it wouldn’t go off and damage one of the human beings working on mission development.
They needed to recompile, or I don’t know if they were doing compiled code. They needed to redo their code before they launched. They did not.
[Speaker 5]Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay: There was another laser ranger on board that was on the NASA instrument. They tried to use that.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. I remember that. Yeah.
That was really interesting. They tried to patch over to this other system.
Dr. Pamela Gay: It didn’t quite get them there. Um, so it went down, it broke its leg. Um, it fell over, it didn’t get enough sunlight.
It also didn’t drop its camera, the Eagle camera that it was supposed to before it landed. So we didn’t actually get to see what happened for a hot minute. Um, there were a whole lot of things that went wrong with that one, except everything on board survived.
Fraser Cain: Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So we were getting back information saying I’m alive. Deploy me. I’m alive.
Deploy me. And nothing could be deployed because it was sideways.
Fraser Cain: So not nothing, not nothing. So it had a, um, uh, a radio antenna that was going to perform some experiments about whether it could detect the, the presence of, of life on earth, the, um, the, the antenna radio signals. And so it was able to deploy this antenna and it was able to detect the presence of, you know, radio communications coming from earth.
And it was also able to detect radio emissions coming from the Milky way. And, and so this was like a pathfinder for a future, something that would try and search for the 21 centimeter line for a future mission. So it was able to sort of like just barely pull that off.
And I think we got like one picture home before it succumbed to the lunar, to the lunar night, which is a theme. All right. We’re going to talk about the next one, which was a success, but it’s time for another break.
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Now back to your regularly scheduled listening.
Fraser Cain: And we’re back. All right. Let’s get, let’s have some good news.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so this one brought me so much joy because first of all, I got to go see it launch in person back in January. And, and so it, it launched on Falcon 9, iSpace and Firefly Aerospace did a ride share to the moon. Firefly took completely different orbital path.
So it went pretty much straight there. It did really good computer vision work as it was landing to figure out where it was, where it was going, how to keep its orientation upright. It was nice and squat with widely placed legs.
It had great cameras so that you could see what was happening during landing and it landed successfully and deployed the things and stuff. And it even observed an eclipse from the moon, which is just amazing.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. It was incredible. It did a little drilling.
It tried some, it tested out an electrostatic coating that would try to remove regolith from its surfaces and that worked well. So there was like a bunch of little experiments, as you said, and then it too succumbed to the lunar night.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And that’s fair. It was designed to do that.
Fraser Cain: Right. It’s, you know, we’re not building things with chunks of decaying plutonium in them anymore. This is fine.
Okay.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So I have one more point. I have one more bit of trivia I need to share. Okay.
So the blue ghost is a kind of firefly. So Firefly Aerospace launched the blue ghost, which is a kind of firefly.
Fraser Cain: Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And I just find that adorable and everyone needs to know that.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. All right. Now, now bring me back down.
Give me some bad news.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so I, I have to admit, I went into last week’s landing of ice space with this, if it works, I’m going to argue that I have to see every launch of these landers. Cause they only work if I see them. So, so I’m like, especially sad about ice space because it was a Google lunar XPRIZE team.
I’ve been cheering for them since the early two thousands. And I was there when they launched and I wanted to have two.
Fraser Cain: The first one or the second one?
Dr. Pamela Gay: The, the most recent, well, I, I have been cheering them on since the beginning, but the, the first one also failed.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. The first one failed. Yeah.
Who could it are that mission one, it failed about a year ago. And so they recently launched, you watched it launch. We, we were all ready and excited to watch that land, but actually there was the, the intuitive machines before we talk about what happened with ice space, we should talk about what happened with intuitive machines to the Athena.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: That’s the bad news that I was hoping to hear about.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Oh man. So, so what didn’t go wrong with that mission?
Fraser Cain: Well, I mean it, so from what I recall, it landed and it had a problem with this range finder as well. And it ended up landing really unluckily into a little crater and then it tipped over.
Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s actually unclear what order that happened in there. There was, if you watch during the landing, it was wild because they were getting back data that their engines were still firing and their orientation. If you watch the guys who were holding the model, I’m going to use this as my model.
So this is an upright lander and they walked over to the screen with their model of the lander and they’re trying to figure out what’s going on and you see them do this.
Fraser Cain: Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And then just walk away.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. And so, and so you’re thinking like people think that it might have been firing while it was on the ground.
Dr. Pamela Gay: It had already fallen over and it was still firing its engines.
Fraser Cain: Wow. Okay.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and so it, it ended up sideways in the dark.
Fraser Cain: Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: It didn’t last very long yet. Again, everything on board said, hi, we’re happy.
Fraser Cain: Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Including a little Rover.
Fraser Cain: We got one picture.
Dr. Pamela Gay: We got one picture that annoys me because you’re looking up at the earth between the Rover’s legs. Yeah. And it’s just like, that’s not what you should be seeing.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s what we see because that’s reality.
All right.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and everything that flew with it to the moon also failed. The entire launch of things toward the moon failed. And there was also Astroforge.
Astroforge also failed. Sorry.
Fraser Cain: Astroforge failed. Yeah. So, so like, so what are we at now?
We are, we are, so Bear Sheep failed. Um, Hakuto-R mission one failed.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Selene fell over, kind of worked.
Fraser Cain: Odysseus failed. Athena failed. Peregrine failed.
Uh, I’m running out of fingers.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Nova-C failed.
Fraser Cain: Which?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Nova-C, that was the intuitive machine.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. That’s intuitive machines.
That’s her, Athena. And so, um, we’ve got a success from Blue Ghost. And then the, the most recent, the one that happened last week from when we’re recording this was iSpace’s Hakuto-R mission two.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.
Fraser Cain: How’d that go?
Dr. Pamela Gay: It turns out lunar laser ranging is harder than people give it credit for.
Fraser Cain: Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, we still haven’t got the full reports. People who were looking at the telemetry during landing, uh, noted that they were going really fast when their altimeter said they were really close to the surface. And they were about a minute closer to the surface than they thought they were.
Yeah. So Scott Manley did a lot of work on this. Uh, just like figuring out what happened from publicly available data.
And it looks like, uh, they didn’t slow down early enough. Um, they got close to the surface ahead of when they were planning and they just landed hard.
Fraser Cain: Yep.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, nothing survived.
Fraser Cain: I haven’t seen, like, we always get pictures from Lunar Surveyor after the attempts and I haven’t seen…
Dr. Pamela Gay: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. And I haven’t seen any pictures from this yet, but I’m sure there’ll be out soon.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. And it, it’s one of these things where the question I keep getting asked is why did they have so much less trouble? It seemed like 70 some odd years ago.
And, and one of the things that is really being brought home by all of this is these teams are by and large trying to have smart spacecraft. Decades ago, before we were born, they were relying on kinematic equations and dead reckoning and thinking they knew where the surface was and doing the, okay, we fire for this long at this time. We then fire for this long at this time.
And it was like freshman physics level equations with graduate school level orbital mechanics. It was just time position engine. And what they’re doing now is they’re trying to say, okay, so we can see that we’re in this place.
We are now going to react to being in this place. And that means you’re subject to any of your environmental detection stuff gets out of sync either with time or fails, and you no longer know where you’re located. You’re not dead reckoning.
And it’s a lot harder to do something based on knowing where you are versus calculating where you are. This is why autonomous cars struggle so much.
Fraser Cain: Yep.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So we’re, we’re, we need to solve autonomous cars before we solve autonomous landings.
Fraser Cain: And I mean, we’re only covering the commercial lunar landers. So we talked about, we talked about bear sheet, which fail, we talked about the, the ice base ones that failed. We talked about intuitive machines and pair and osteobotic and, um, Astro forge.
Um, so we haven’t talked about the, the government ones. They’re working there. Well, are they most?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Okay. Chandrian has become rock solid. Sean has become rock solid, right?
Fraser Cain: So this was the first Chandra and failed the second shot. Yeah. The first hundred and failed the second Chandra and succeeded.
Um, the Chinese had been successful so far. Um, the, the Russian return didn’t work so well. There was a Japanese failure.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. That was Celine. It, it lasted a little while.
It was like, it, it got data. It also fell over.
Fraser Cain: Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Falling over is really easy to do. It turns out.
Fraser Cain: Okay. Yeah. So, uh, but you know, I mean, this is, this is how this works.
And I think the plan is very compelling that you will, you will have a future of, of lunar exploration where again, you just say, I need this and I need it on the moon and, and, and some provider will go, no problem. Uh, we’ll see you on the moon. And that like, that sounds great.
That, that sounds like what it should be. But, and, and I think what’s really important is to get across these things are cheap, that we are looking at tens of millions of dollars to deploy in, you know, a lot of these are, are much less than, than a hundred million dollars. This is a fraction of the price that other government run programs have done in the past.
Dr. Pamela Gay: The entire mission will cost that much. The amount of money NASA is spending is tiny bucks.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Even less. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you think about how much NASA is spending now to get something deployed to the moon.
It’s a, it’s, they’re only paying a part of that price. So, so this is really worth, like, I know it sounds like this is all not working, but blue ghost showed us that it’s not impossible. And so hopefully we will see more.
And so there’s like a bunch more coming and we will sort of stay tuned and maybe we’ll do, you know, two or three years from now, we’ll come back around and do another video and we’ll go like, yeah, everything’s working great. Or the galactic ghoul eats lunar spacecraft for breakfast.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and the big thing that I know I, for one, I’m really looking forward to is blue origin is on their next launch. Their very first launch of their big old rocket was able to send a spacecraft healthy around the moon for their second launch, their very first launch of their big old rocket was able to send a spacecraft healthy around the moon for their second launch. They’re looking to launch their Mark 1 robotic lander and this is NASA’s other contracted company for getting humans on the moon.
Mark 1 is not going to be human certified, it’s a cargo vessel. But if they can get New Glenn working consistently, and they’re one for one so far, and they can get their Mark 1 lander working, suddenly we have another path to getting humans on the moon that isn’t beholden to whether or starship is ever made to function and stop polluting beaches.
Fraser Cain: Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
So you’ve got what’s going to happen. I mean, potentially it’s going to be the exact same thing. I want this astronaut and I want him on the moon.
And, and, you know, some provider will go, no problem. You know, we gotcha. Here’s what it’s going to cost, but we’re not there yet.
But I, but I, I’m a big fan of this method just because it, it’s in the exact same way that NASA might say, I want this scientist and I want them in France. Right. And they go like, okay, they buy a plane ticket, they get on an airplane and they go to France.
They don’t, you know, NASA doesn’t build a new aircraft to, to solve the problem. You know, I really want NASA taking on risk. I want NASA to do stuff that everybody’s just too cowardly and afraid to try to do.
That’s, that’s my, that’s my favorite version of NASA, the thrilling space agency that is out there, uh, trying crazy ideas and proving, de-risking them so that, that either other space agencies or they, or commercial providers or whatever can actually, you know, bring us that science fiction future that we have been promised.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So I, I like the way you dream. This is not a topic for this week. We’re in fact going to take it on in a few weeks.
We’re waiting to see if the U S is capable of passing budgets. Um, like currently we’re looking at like essentially nothing, nothing. I’m just going to go with nothing.
Um, so, so the fact that commercial companies like blue are blue origin are out there saying we see a commercial reason to develop this technology may be what keeps space going in the United States as we defund our country.
Fraser Cain: Right. Uh, well, we’ll keep you posted on, on what happens to NASA’s budget.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Hopefully we’ll know an answer before we go to summer hiatus.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Otherwise we’ll report on after.
Dr. Pamela Gay: We’re going to at least talk about it. Yeah.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Or we’ll come back after summer hiatus and give you an update on the budget. All right.
We will see all of you, uh, next week. Thanks, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Thank you. And thank you to everyone out there who’s supporting us through Patreon. I, I have to say at my institution, my humans working on producing this show and everything we do over at Cosmo quest are the only ones that are mortified instead of terrified by the U S budget, because you are what pays a portion of their salary and your donations and sponsorships matter more than ever before.
Um, this week I would like to thank a pronounceable name. You’re welcome. Dr. Alex Cohen, Andrew Pleistra, Arctic Fox, Bore Andro Levsvold, Benjamin Carrier, Bob Crell, uh, Brian Kegel, Bury Gowan, Claudia Mastriani, Daniel Donaldson, David Bogaty, David Trobe, Don Mundus, Elliot Walker, Father Prax, Frank Stewart, Jeff McDonald, Gold, Gregory Singleton, James Roger, uh, Jason Kwong, Jeff Wilson, uh, Jimmy Drake, Joe Holstein, uh, Jonathan H Starver, just me and the cat, Katie and Ulyssa, uh, Kimberly Reich, uh, Larry Zott, uh, Lou Zealand, Mark Schneider, Matthew Horstman, Michael Hartman, Michael Regan, Nala, Olga, Paul Esposito, Philip Grant, Rondo, uh, Robert Cordova, Ruben McCarthy, Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Briggs, Seggy Kembler, Steve Rutley, TC Starboy, The Lonely Sandperson, Tim Garish, Tashar Nakini, Will Hamilton. Thank you all so very much.
Fraser Cain: Thanks everyone. And we will see you next week.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Astronomy Cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it, share it and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, astronomycast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at patreon.com slash astronomycast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up.
This has been Astronomy Cast.
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'The models were right!' Astronomers locate universe's 'missing' matter in the largest cosmic structures
SpaceX's Starship explodes in Texas during preparations for 10th test flight
“The models were right”: astronomers find ‘missing’ matter
Astronomers have discovered a huge filament of hot gas bridging four galaxy clusters. At 10 times as massive as our galaxy, the thread could contain some of the Universe’s ‘missing’ matter, addressing a decades-long mystery.
Rapamycin seems to boost longevity as effectively as eating less
Rapamycin seems to boost longevity as effectively as eating less
Could natural hydrogen from underground help the UK get to net zero?
Could natural hydrogen from underground help the UK get to net zero?
Webb Sees the Galaxies that Cleared Out the Cosmic Fog
The early universe was shrouded in darkness. Just hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, a thick fog of hydrogen gas choked the cosmos, blocking light from traveling far. At some point, this gas became ionized, stripped of its electrons. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have identified the culprit: low-mass starburst galaxies emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet light. In just one patch of sky. They discovered 83 of these galactic powerhouses in one part of the sky at a time when the Universe was only 800 million years old.
Telescopes in Chile Capture Images of the Earliest Galaxies in the Universe
An international team of astronomers using the [*Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor*](https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/class/) (CLASS) [reported the first-ever measurement](https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/06/11/telescopes-look-at-cosmic-dawn/) announced the first-ever detection of radiation from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) interacting with the first stars in the Universe.
