Roman Telescope Update, China’s Shenlong Mystery Deepens, and Quantum Breakthroughs in Space

[00:00:00] Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna. And I'm Avery. It's Wednesday, the 25th of June, 2026, and you are tuned in for Season 5, Episode 123. We have a varied and secretive show today. A beloved space telescope has finally arrived at its launch site. A secretive Chinese space plane is doing mysterious things in orbit.

[00:00:24] And we have a genuinely exciting quantum physics story from right up on the International Space Station. Plus, an update on a story we rang yesterday. SpaceX's brand new secret Starfall capsule is still up there in orbit, and we are watching and waiting for that Pacific splashdown. More on that shortly. But first, let's get straight into the headlines.

[00:00:46] Story 1. A further update on NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the agency's next great observatory. And it has arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the countdown to launch is well and truly on. This is a big moment. Roman touched down at Kennedy on the 21st of June, arriving via NASA's Pegasus Barge, after completing its full assembly and testing phase at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

[00:01:14] The telescope was sealed inside a specialized shipping container. NASA has nicknamed it the Chariot, keeping with the Roman theme, and made the journey by sea down the Atlantic coast to Florida. And now it's inside the payload hazardous servicing facility at Kennedy, where engineers will spend the next 70 days preparing it for liftoff. That work includes checking the solar panels, inspecting the thermal blankets,

[00:01:41] and crucially, loading the telescope's propellant tanks with around 290 gallons of hydrazine fuel. Now that fuel load is worth highlighting. NASA has sized it to support at least twice the planned five-year primary mission lifetime, meaning Roman could, in principle, operate well into the 1940s if the hardware holds up. The launch target is no earlier than Sunday the 30th of August on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A,

[00:02:10] the same pad used for the Apollo-Saturn 5 rockets. And this puts Roman eight full months ahead of its previous schedule. The team has really delivered. Once it reaches its destination at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, the same neighborhood as the James Webb Telescope, Roman will survey the cosmos in infrared light. Its 300-megapixel camera covers a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's per single exposure.

[00:02:35] That means it can map billions of galaxies, hunt for hundreds of thousands of new exoplanets, and probe dark matter and dark energy at a scale and speed no telescope has managed before. Webb goes deep. Roman goes wide. And together, they will give us a picture of the universe that neither could achieve alone. Keep your eye on the skies and on Kennedy Space Center as we head into August. Story two, and this one has a southern hemisphere connection.

[00:03:05] China's mysterious Shenlong reusable space plane, currently on its fourth mission in orbit, appears to have released an unknown object into space, and the first radar system to spot it was right here in our part of the world, the Kiwi Space Radar in New Zealand, operated by commercial space surveillance company Leo Labs. At 2.30 a.m. UTC on the 22nd of June, Leo Labs detected something in the vicinity of the Shenlong space plane that didn't match anything in their catalog.

[00:03:35] They followed it across their global radar network and confirmed with high confidence that it was released directly from the Chinese space plane. Now, this isn't entirely unprecedented. Shenlong has released objects on each of its three previous missions, though what those objects actually are, China has never officially confirmed. On its first mission, a deployed object appeared to transmit broadcast signals. On its second, it seemed to conduct close approach maneuvers near other objects in orbit.

[00:04:05] Each time, China's state media gives the same vague line. The program provides technical support for peaceful use of space. The Shenlong, its name means divine dragon, launched on its fourth mission back in February on a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. Analysts believe it's broadly similar in size and function to the United States Space Force's own X-37B space plane,

[00:04:33] which is also currently in orbit on its eighth mission. The key capability being demonstrated here, whether for peaceful or strategic purposes, is what's called rendezvous and proximity operations. That's the ability to maneuver close to other objects in space. It can be used for satellite servicing and refueling, but it can equally be used for inspection or interference. We'll continue to watch this one closely.

[00:05:00] The radar network that first spotted this new object is based in Atearoa, New Zealand, a reminder of just how important Southern Hemisphere space infrastructure has become in monitoring what's happening in low Earth orbit above all of our heads. Story three today, and we're heading up to the International Space Station for a quantum physics story that genuinely made us stop and stare. NASA's Cold Atom Lab, a fridge-sized facility aboard the ISS,

[00:05:30] has just received its fourth and final hardware upgrade, and the results are remarkable. Let's set the scene. The Cold Atom Lab has been operating in orbit since 2018. Its job is to cool atoms down to temperatures just above absolute zero. We're talking below minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than anything that occurs naturally in space, and then study what happens to matter at those extremes.

[00:05:58] At those temperatures, atoms can merge into something called a Bose-Einstein condensate, a fifth state of matter, beyond your solids, liquids, gases, and plasma. In this state, instead of behaving like tiny billiard balls, atoms behave like waves. They can exist in two places simultaneously. They can pass through one another. The normal rules go out the window. Now, here's why doing this in space matters.

[00:06:26] On Earth, gravity pulls these quantum gas clouds downward almost immediately. You get a very short observation window. In the microgravity of low Earth orbit, those clouds can float and be observed for far longer. And with the new SM3X science module, installed by astronaut Jessica Mayer back in May, and activated this week, the lab can now create Bose-Einstein condensates that are five times larger than anything it has produced before.

[00:06:56] That's a significant leap. Larger condensates mean longer observation windows, finer measurements, and the ability to probe questions at the very frontier of physics, including the nature of dark matter and the long, unresolved tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity. And there's a policy angle here, too. On the 22nd of June, President Trump signed an executive order directing NASA to submit a five-year plan within 120 days

[00:07:25] for developing quantum sensing and networking for civilian space applications. The Cold Atom Lab sits right at the heart of that ambition. Scientists at JPL describe this as Quantum 2.0, the direct manipulation of large quantum states in space. It took a century for the first quantum revolution, which gave us lasers, MRI machines, and mobile phones to fully materialize. The second one is now being written,

[00:07:53] in orbit, in a fridge the size of a mini-fridge. Story 4 brings us an update on Boeing's Starliner program. And while there's commitment on the surface, the details are sobering. During a public meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel on June 23rd, NASA confirmed it is still working toward the Starliner-1 uncrewed cargo mission, but acknowledged the launch timeline remains under review and could be as far as a year away. Let's recap.

[00:08:22] Boeing's Starliner spacecraft completed its first crewed test flight back in June of 2024, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station. What was meant to be a brief, week-long mission became an eight-month stay because of persistent thruster failures and helium leaks that NASA and Boeing spent months trying to understand. Wilmore and Williams ultimately came home on a SpaceX Dragon.

[00:08:53] A post-mission investigation report released in February of this year classified that mission as a Type A mishap, NASA's most severe failure category, normally reserved for missions involving loss of vehicle or life. It cited hardware failures, qualification deficiencies, and leadership shortcomings at both NASA and Boeing. The core technical problem centers on what engineers call the doghouse,

[00:09:18] the structures that house Starliner's reaction control system thrusters. Heat generated by thruster firings causes the nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer to partially vaporize before combustion, creating gas bubbles and reducing thrust. Closing out those issues is what stands between now and the Starliner-1 flight. Panel member Kent Romminger, himself a former NASA astronaut,

[00:09:44] noted that 22 of the 28 implied anomalies from the crew flight tests have now been resolved. But the remaining six, including the overheating thruster issue, still need to be closed before flight can be approved. In May, NASA confirmed Starliner-1 will fly uncrewed as a resupply mission rather than a crew rotation. And the agency remains committed to the program. But as the panel made clear this week, there is no launch date, and there may not be one for some time yet.

[00:10:14] It's a long road back for a spacecraft that was meant to be a cornerstone of NASA's commercial crew program alongside SpaceX's Dragon. We'll keep you updated as this story develops. Story 5 is an update on yesterday's big launch story. SpaceX's brand new Starfall re-entry capsule, which lifted off on a falcon mine from Cape Canaveral yesterday morning, is still in low Earth orbit, and a Pacific Ocean splashdown is imminent.

[00:10:42] Just to recap for listeners who missed yesterday's episode, Starfall is a disc-shaped, uncrewed cargo return capsule, 3.1 meters across and only 75 centimeters tall, that SpaceX has been developing in remarkable secrecy. We only know as much as we do because the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration published an environmental assessment back in May. SpaceX itself has said very little. What we know is this.

[00:11:08] The capsule confirmed orbital deployment at approximately 10.01 in the morning Eastern time yesterday. It's capable of carrying up to 1,000 kilograms of cargo. That's about 2,200 pounds, making it roughly 30 times the cargo return capacity of current commercial rivals. SpaceX has not announced a re-entry date, which is very on-brand for this mission, giving they cut off their own webcast about 10 minutes after launch.

[00:11:34] But the FAA environmental approval covers two re-entry demonstrations, both targeting a recovery zone in the Pacific Ocean about 1,300 kilometers off the U.S. West Coast, with a recovery team standing by to retrieve the capsule by boat after splashdown. The bigger picture here is the markets Starfall is targeting. In-space manufacturing, growing pharmaceuticals, fiber optics, and exotic alloys in microgravity has been a theoretical commercial opportunity for decades.

[00:12:04] The barrier has always been getting finished products back to Earth, affordably. Starfall, backed by Falcon 9's reusability economics, could be the vehicle that finally cracks that open. It's also worth noting that SpaceX simultaneously launched a $20 billion public bond offering on the same day as a Starfall demo. The company is clearly signaling that low-Earth orbit manufacturing logistics is not a side project. It is a serious commercial business line.

[00:12:33] We'll bring you the splashdown news as soon as it comes in. Fingers crossed for a clean recovery. And for our final story today, we're traveling back in time, about 13 billion years to be precise, to visit a galaxy that's in the process of building itself. Astronomers led from Leiden University in the Netherlands have discovered a vast reservoir of cold molecular gas in a galaxy called Rebels 25.

[00:13:00] And this gas is the direct raw material for star formation. We're seeing it as it appeared when the universe was only about 700 million years old. That's roughly 5% of the universe's current age. Now, to understand why this matters, here's a quick primer. Stars don't just appear from nothing. They form when enormous clouds of cold molecular gas, primarily hydrogen, become dense enough to collapse under their own gravity.

[00:13:28] The more cold gas a galaxy has, the more fuel it has to make new stars. Finding it is finding the engine. What makes the Rebels 25 discovery particularly exciting is its scale and its timing. The researchers found not just a little cold gas, but a genuinely massive reservoir, far more than would have been expected in such a young galaxy. This tells us that even in the infant universe, some galaxies were accumulating the raw ingredients

[00:13:57] for star formation on a grand scale. The team used what's called redshift measurements to find and study Rebels 25, essentially measuring how much the universe's expansion has stretched the light from the galaxy to redder wavelengths over its long journey to us. Higher redshift means further away, and further away means further back in time. It's one of those stories that puts the scale of things into perspective. The light we're studying from Rebels 25

[00:14:27] left that galaxy about 13 billion years ago. The stars that formed from that cold gas reservoir, if any of them still exist, would be among the oldest in the universe. And somewhere in that distant galaxy, right now in its own reference frame, a star formation event is either happening or already long done. Cosmology never gets old. And on that beautifully mind-bending note, it's time to wrap up today's show.

[00:14:55] That's Astronomy Daily for Wednesday, the 25th of June, 2026. We're Season 5, Episode 123, and we are so glad you're here. You'll find today's show notes, source links, and our blog post over at astronomydaily.io. You can also follow us on social media. We're at astrodailypod across X, Instagram, TikTok, and Tumblr. If you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to leave us a review wherever you listen.

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