Space

Jeff Bezos’ Leo service had an FCC deadline of July 30th to launch half of its planned 3,232-satellite constellation. To date it’s only launched 331. The waiver comes with conditions meant to incentivize Amazon to move quickly, which would be a lot easier if Bezos’ semi-reusable New Glenn rocket hadn’t exploded and destroyed its only launchpad.

Per a regulatory filing, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029, as reported by TechCrunch.

There are over 330 Leo satellites already in orbit, but the 36 planned for the next Arianespace mission is still smaller than the 48 satellites Amazon was planning to launch on a Blue Origin rocket that exploded during testing last week. This batch of satellites will launch from a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on June 17th.

The S&P just found the backbone that Nasdaq discarded on the street alongside the rest of New York City’s trash. While others are bending the rules to accommodate SpaceX and other gargantuan IPOs, the S&P is standing firm. “No changes will be made” to accommodate these mega offerings.

NASA hasn’t heard from MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) since December 6th. A review board concluded that the spacecraft was in an unrecoverable state after emerging from the far side of Mars because it was rotating at an “unusually high rate,” which drained the batteries, cutting off power to MAVEN’s communications systems.

Grimes County, Texas, awarded the company a property tax exemption for its planned $55 billion Terafab semiconductor plant. Local residents seem to feel the same way about the project as many do about data centers, and this tax break won’t help. As local landowner Rhonda Nesloney put it in court:

CNBC reports details from a new filing ahead of SpaceX’s IPO on June 12th and notes a mention that xAI, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year, bought $269 million worth of Tesla megapack batteries in April.

That’s Dave Limp, Blue Origin CEO, commenting on New Glenn’s return to service after last week’s spectacular explosion that seriously damaged LC-36 — the rocket’s only launchpad. If the timeline holds it would be on the optimistic side of estimates and good news for NASA and Amazon who need the partially reusable, heavy-lift launch vehicle operational to meet their respective targets of returning to the Moon and competing with Starlink.

Blue Origin has warned that “debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks,” and says that people shouldn’t touch or approach it “for your safety.” If you do encounter any wreckage, you can report the location here:

Recently grounded after issues with its third mission, the New Glenn rocket intended to launch the NG-4 mission has suffered an “anomaly,” exploding at Cape Canaveral during a hotfire test just after 9PM ET.
Blue Origin said, “All personnel have been accounted for. We will provide updates as we learn more.”

Own a fancy telescope but can’t escape light pollution to make the most of it? There are businesses popping up like Starfront Observatories in Rockwood, Texas, that allow you to rent a spot and remotely snap some starry shots over a high-speed data connection.

The agency is looking to partner with filmmakers, musicians, writers, poets, and artists to help tell the story behind programs such as the Artemis Moon missions and the Space Reactor-1 Freedom mission to Mars. But get your proposals in ASAP, the window closes on Tuesday, June 30th.

After a scrubbed launch on Thursday, SpaceX’s first V3 Starship left Pad 2 at Starbase on Friday evening.

After being pushed back an hour, we were a few minutes away from the scheduled 7:30PM ET opening of a 90-minute window for the 12th Starship flight test, before it was scrubbed about ten minutes later, saying they will try again tomorrow.

President and COO Gwynne Shotwell took to X to comment on yesterday’s vague commitment by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to plug the long-standing gaps in rural US coverage, as frustrated residents adopt solutions from Starlink, Amazon, and AST SpaceMobile:

Last year, EchoStar agreed to offload 65Mhz of its spectrum to SpaceX for its direct-to-cell service, while AT&T snapped up 50Mhz of its spectrum to build out its 5G network. Now it’s official, with the FCC noting that SpaceX will be able to use its spectrum for “terrestrial, space-based, and hybrid network architectures.”

The Wall Street Journal has the story.

The Trump Administration has made another website, this time a dedicated Pentagon page with “new, never-before-seen files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).

Following its acquisition by Elon’s other company, xAI is now being referred to as SpaceXAI. Presumably this is only the start of the brand synergy to come.

In Wednesday’s annoucement of its compute partnership with Anthropic, the company formerly known as xAI referred to itself as “SpaceXAI.” It was the first time I had seen that name, and while I don’t think it’s a good one, it made some sense following SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI.

Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics (LAVA) is the tool NASA uses to model reentry, aerodynamics, and fluid dynamics for Mars landers and the SLS (Space Launch System) that launched Artemis II. And now it’s available for researchers and commercial aerospace companies, even those without a supercomputer:

That’s listed among SpaceX’s “substantial capital expenditures” in the S-1 registration filed ahead of its IPO, reports Reuters.

After Jeff Bezos lost one of AST’s giant space-based cell towers last weekend, the FCC has stepped up with some good news by approving its commercial license. AST can now operate a constellation of up to 248 satellites in low Earth orbit in order to deliver space-based cellular broadband to everyday smartphones. It was supposed to go live sometime later this year before the Blue Origin debacle.

Astronauts aboard the ISS are getting new custom HP laptops, an upgrade to an orbital compute setup that already includes HP workstations and printers. But is the company getting a little ahead of itself?