Is Pluto a planet? Currently, officially, no. But the Trump-appointed head of NASA wants to reinstate Pluto’s planetary privileges. Why? Let’s find out with space archaeologist Dr Alice Gorman aka Dr Space Junk and astrophysicist Rami Mandow.
In this episode we also talk about new ways to make black holes, glitches, drones, the explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn launch vehicle, and of course the SpaceX share float.
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Alice Gorman (born 1964) FSA is an Australian archaeologist, heritage consultant, and lecturer, who is best known for pioneering work in the field of space archaeology and her Space Age Archaeology blog.
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Astronomer, driving The Dish? to study pulsars in my PhD. Also, founded SpaceAustralia.com. Also, love a bit of astrophotography. Also, do everything with my little mate, Max. Also, Ultra-Gay. He/Him.
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[29 May 2026] On Thursday evening, Blue Origin attempted to test fire its massive New Glenn rocket at its Florida launch site, but something went very wrong after engine ignition. The super heavy lift rocket exploded in spectacular and disastrous fashion.
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[29 May 2026] "No It's Necessary" just exploded, in what is probably the biggest explosion ever seen on Florida's 'Space Coast'. But it's more than just a fireball and a destroyed rocket, this will have many knock on effects.
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[1 June 2026] On Thursday, May 28th, 2026, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket experienced an anomaly during static fire testing at LC-36, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket and pad were destroyed. [Raw footage from all the angles.]
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The N1 (from ??????-???????? Raketa-nositel', "Carrier Rocket"; Cyrillic: ?1) was a super heavy-lift launch vehicle of the Soviet space program intended for crewed travel to the Moon and beyond. All four launch attempts between 1969 and 1972 failed... N1 5L – second launch, partially painted gray; first night launch, launch failure demolished pad 110 East.
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New Glenn is a family of launch vehicles developed and operated by the American company Blue Origin. The rocket has two configurations, one inactive after a 2026 explosion that damaged the rocket's launch pad, and one under development, both using a two stage partially reusable design with a seven-meter (23 ft) diameter.
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[24 October 2024] What does a "space hotel" look like? Have a tour of the China Space Station, which is operating in low Earth orbit at an altitude of 400 kilometers, with the Shenzhou-18 crew.
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Space Exploration Technologies Corp FORM S-1, "Building the Infrastructure of the Future".
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[23 May 2026] This week, SpaceX filed the prospectus for what is expected to be the largest IPO in history. The document is extraordinary — part financial disclosure, part science fiction, and part governance structure that a corporate law professor has described as offering shareholders "no votes, no sales, and no suits." We look at the numbers, the products that don't yet exist, the AI business that SpaceX's own engineers won't use, the related-party transactions, the compensation package tied to a Mars colony the company admits is "improbable," and the one rocket that everything depends on. Everything I am about to tell you comes directly from the filing.
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[3 June 2026] SpaceX plans to raise $75 billion in its initial public offering by selling 555.6 million shares at a target price of $135 per share, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. Julian Satterthwaite reports.
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The Kardashev scale (Russian: ????? ?????????, romanized: shkala Kardashyova) is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, and was named after him.
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"By talking about the Space Mars architecture, I want to make Mars seem possible-make it seem as though it is something that we can do in our lifetime. There really is a way that anyone could go if they wanted to."
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[28 September 2016] SpaceX Founder, CEO, and Lead Designer Elon Musk will discuss the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The technical presentation will focus on potential architectures for sustaining humans on the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.
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[27 May 2026] The paper, released as a preprint, found that there is a presence of multiple sub-populations of merging black holes that can potentially arise from different formation pathways
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In astronomy, a glitch is a sudden small increase of around 1 part in 1 million in the rotational frequency of a pulsar, which usually decreases steadily due to braking provided by the emission of radiation and high-energy particles
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Some reference books, including Random House's American Slang, state that the term comes from the German word glitschen 'to slip' as well as the Yiddish word glitshn 'to slide, to skid' and glitsh, meaning "slippery place". Glitch was used from the 1940s by radio announcers to refer to an on-air mistake. During the following decade, the term became used by television engineers to indicate technical problems.
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Water Rats is an Australian police procedural crime drama television series created by John Hugginson and Tony Morphett for the Nine Network. The series was based on the work of Sydney Water Police who fight crime around Sydney Harbour and surrounding locales. The show was set on and around Goat Island in Sydney Harbour.
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[26 May 2026] Event organisers blame ‘unforeseen technical difficulties’ for the drone malfunction, with four performances cancelled.
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Pluto (minor-planet number 134340) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun.
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Jared Taylor Isaacman (born February 11, 1983) is an American billionaire entrepreneur, pilot, and commercial astronaut who has served as the 15th administrator of NASA since December 2025. He is the founder of Shift4 Payments, a payment processor, and the founder of Draken International, which provides adversary training to the U.S., British, and other NATO air forces. As of May 2025, his estimated net worth was US$1.4 billion.
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[3 May 2026] In April 2026, as the success of the Artemis II mission to the Moon caught the imagination of the world, NASA chief Jared Isaacman re-opened old wounds by stating that he supported making Pluto a planet again.
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[29 April 2026] "We are doing some papers right now on, I think, a position that we would love to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this discussion."
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Clyde William Tombaugh (/?t?mba?/; February 4, 1906 – January 17, 1997) was an American astronomer and telescope maker, best known for discovering Pluto in 1930, marking the first detection of what would eventually be recognized as the Kuiper belt.
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New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. It was launched in 2006, becoming the first spacecraft to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015. A secondary mission contained a flyby and study of one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in the decade to follow, where it flew past 486958 Arrokoth in 2019. It was the first space probe to ever take high-resolution photographs of Pluto, in 2015.
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[6 December 2015] Pictures taken during historic flyby of dwarf planet show details of mountains, craters and ice fields on its surface.
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[1 April 2026] In this episode we talk about the Artemis II mission but also flag some of the problems, including the various laws and treaties relating to the Moon. Also, cooking in space, drugged-up spiders, the recent total eclipse of the Moon, tightrope walking, and cockroaches.
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The definition of a planet adopted by the IAU says a planet must do three things: 1. It must orbit a star (in our cosmic neighborhood, the Sun). 2. It must be big enough to have enough gravity to force it into a spherical shape. 3. It must be big enough that its gravity has cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit around the Sun.
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Series Credits
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