Anna and Avery close out a three-week saga: SpaceX has recovered Starship's Ship 40 from the Indian Ocean after a soft splashdown, a difficult tow, and a moment where recovery odds looked as low as 18%. Plus: a dead star in the Helix Nebula previews our own Sun's five-billion-years-from-now fate, new evidence the Milky Way was built in part by an ancient galactic collision, and China's fast recovery from a rocket failure with back-to-back launches.
Full show notes:
Today's episode — S05E170, Tuesday August 18, 2026:
Main story: Starship's Ship 40 makes it home. SpaceX has completed recovery of Ship 40, the Starship Flight 13 upper stage that survived an unprecedented soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean on July 24. After drifting over 400km and a difficult multi-week tow through rough seas (prediction markets had given it ~18% odds as of mid-August), recovery vessels including the Normand Ranger brought the ship in to Western Australia this week. SpaceX had already secured the imagery it needed from the heat shield and engines regardless of outcome; Ship 41 and Flight 14 (targeting ~August 20) are already in the pipeline.
A dead star shows us our Sun's future. A Yale-led team studying the Helix Nebula's white dwarf found 22 bow-shock structures in its outer halo — the first direct observation of a dead star's ejected material dispersing back into the galaxy. It's a preview of what our own Sun will undergo in roughly 5 billion years. Published August 12 in Nature.
The collision that built the Milky Way. Hubble and Gaia data revealed a previously unknown ancient dwarf galaxy, "LKH," which merged with the Milky Way 11.8 billion years ago — predating the well-known Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger by 1.8 billion years. Published August 17 in Nature Astronomy.
China bounces back from a rocket failure. After an August 10 Long March 7A failure destroyed a communications satellite, China launched twice within 23 hours on August 16 — a Long March 12 from Wenchang and a Long March 2C from Taiyuan — demonstrating operational resilience across two rocket types and launch sites.
Tonight's sky: the waxing crescent Moon pairs with a brilliant Venus (magnitude -4.1) low in the western sky, about 45 minutes after sunset.
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