Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet

What now? How do we confirm or disprove life there?

Existing telescopes?

Or do we need to design one quick, for Starship to take up next year?

I wouldn't trust Starship with a pair of cheap binoculars at this point.

And challenge chemists to produce these compounds abiotically ?

The last one did seem unreasonably rushed, for some reason.

Let's just hope debugging the next one distracts you-know-who from slashing any more climate science funding.

From TFA, they’re going to continue observing it with JWST to gather more data. New telescopes dedicated to detecting life are being built now - they were basically right behind dark matter in scientific interest.

They will also start to simulate hycean planets to see if these chemicals behave the same way there as they do on Earth to determine if there is some non-biological reason why they could detect this stuff.

Starship test flights have to be rushed, because they can only test it in flight.

Before the last flight they static fired Ship 34 (the upper stage) for an unprecedented 60 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Z7fnikKB8

But the new theory is flight 7 and flight 8 failed because of harmonic resonance developing after tanks (which big mass dampens resonance) emptying to a certain percentage. And you can’t replicate that on ground with full thrust and clamped down, or else the ship would take off, you can only test it during flight.

The test flights are relatively unimportant though compared to building up infrastructure like the launch towers in Texas and Florida. The goal is supporting +50 launches per year, so while at the moment launches are multiple months apart this will change rapidly when the second (third, fourth..) launch tower is operational.

These compounds are easily produced in a lab or industrially (methanol + hydrogen sulfide + aluminum oxide as a catalyst). The only known natural source is photosynthesis, but the article mentions that vulcanism/etc is possible.

I think the point is that they still seem too rushed (perhaps reckless is a better term), since these are causing serious problems for planes in the area and generating very nasty pollution - what if debris hits an airliner? Nobody's saying they have to get Starship 100% right the next time, they are human. But I am very concerned that SpaceX simply has bad internal testing and design, maybe inadequate computer simulation or telemetry, who knows. But the concern is they'll improperly judge Starship as good-to-go once it launches successfully, having somewhat blindly applied a bunch of duct tape without properly understanding the cause of the failures.