Helmed by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, SpaceX has made a name for itself as a leading rocket launch provider. We bring you complete coverage of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launches and landings, as well as SpaceX’s more ambitious exploration goals. That includes flying people around the Moon in the company’s Dragon capsule and starting a human colony on Mars.
Reuters has a good summary of what’s going on. The Department of Justice initially sued SpaceX in 2023 over alleged hiring discrimination.
[reuters.com]
Elon Musk, the US’s would-be dictator, isn’t content with lying about the Boeing Starliner astronauts, who unexpectedly spent much longer in space than they planned after the Boeing craft had thruster failures. When Andreas Morgensen, a Danish astronaut, called the lies what they were, Musk replied with offensive name-calling.
According to Android Police, T-Mobile has added Google’s latest phones to its beta test of direct-to-cell satellite service powered by SpaceX’s Starlink. iPhones and a select few Samsung phones were already in the beta.
The Pixel 9 series also has Google’s own Satellite SOS, which is only designed for emergency messaging. T-Mobile’s beta adds full SMS support, with voice and data planned in the future — while Europe might get full satellite broadband this year.
[androidpolice.com]
Ars Technica explains why even as off-the-cuff maybe-trolling, Musk’s recent comments about the ISS crew put a strain on NASA. Here’s the crux:
The “stranded” astronauts on the space station probably could come home as early as next week. But if they were to do so, it would create a lot of headaches for NASA, its international partners, and probably even for Musk’s human spaceflight team at SpaceX.
According to Bloomberg and user reports, T-Mobile’s list of eligible devices for beta testing Starlink direct-to-cell connections now includes iPhones. While only a few Samsung Galaxy devices were supported at first, now iPhone owners with the most recent update can reportedly connect, as well as some people with Android 15 devices.
That gives those owners an alternative to Apple’s Globalstar-connected service while off the grid that works without pointing their phone at the sky first.
The Minor Planet Center (MPC), which tracks and reports minor planet discoveries, recently removed a new listing of a near-earth object after the amateur astronomer who found it realized it was just the Tesla Roadster that was stuck to a rocket that SpaceX launched in 2018, according to Astronomy Magazine.
Such misidentifications are common, the outlet writes, highlighting a growing issue of unregulated manmade stuff junking up space.
[Astronomy Magazine]
Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions.
SpaceX noted that for this seventh Starship flight test, “a significant number of tiles will be removed to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle.”
We don’t know if that had anything to do with the vehicle experiencing “a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” but the aftermath of its destruction was visible to at least a few tourists in Turks and Caicos.
Qantas airlines airline has delayed some flights to avoid the rockets’ splashdown in the Indian Ocean, reports The Guardian. Some at the last minute, says Ben Holland, head of Qantas’s operations center:
“While we try to make any changes to our schedule in advance, the timing of recent launches have moved around at late notice which has meant we’ve had to delay some flights just prior to departure.”
With Musk cozying up to President-elect Donald Trump, more countries, including South Africa, are considering loosening requirements to allow Starlink to operate, Bloomberg reports:
Until recently, many governments had explicit bans or other policies that kept Starlink from operating legally in their markets. In some cases like South Africa, rules requiring SpaceX to share equity with local partners got in the way...
Now many of the regulators and politicians who fought Starlink’s rise are removing those obstacles, cementing the company’s dominance and further extending Musk’s global influence.
Taipei wants to make its communications networks less vulnerable to Chinese attack. Starlink isn’t an option because of Musk’s business ties to China and his company’s refusal to relinquish control in a joint venture. And Eutelsat’s OneWeb constellation of low Earth satellites isn’t up to snuff, according to technology minister Wu Cheng-wen:
“We found that their bandwidth is too small for real applications,” the minister said about OneWeb. “So far as I know, the company is in financial problems at this moment, so they have a [delay] in developing the second generation satellites.
Bezos’ Kuiper is still just a promise but is expected to begin offering service from its constellation of low Earth orbit satellites next year.
The satellite internet company received a Pentagon contract that will give 2,500 Starlink terminals access to Starshield, its secure satellite service for governments, according to Bloomberg. With this contract, Ukraine will have a total of 3,000 terminals connected to Starshield.
The Starship vehicle successfully reignited a single Raptor engine while in space before splashing down in the Indian Ocean, writes SpaceX.
Unlike the 5th flight test, this one didn’t include a tower catch for the booster, as “automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt,” and it diverted to the Gulf of Mexico.
The launch is happening in Boca Chica, Texas and is scheduled for 5PM ET. SpaceX’s stream for the launch is live now.
9
Verge Score
Impossibly small, incredibly convenient.
Did you know SpaceX’s “latest generation broadband satellites” use AMD chips? The chipmaker just bragged about that in Q3 2024 earnings, and it’s news to me.
AMD’s product page says: “AMD Versal Adaptive SoCs combine application processors, real-time processors, and vector processors with traditional FPGA resources such as programmable logic fabric, DSP resources, and embedded memory.”
Okay, this one’s weird: Musk has posted a three-minute clip of a game, but the audio is someone telling him how “We were one second away from telling the rocket to abort” — and how the amazing ‘chopstick’ Super Heavy booster catch was close to being a scary crash.
While TechCrunch suggests he “inadvertently” broadcasted this, it’s not a broadcast. Someone clipped it this way.
The Maine Connectivity Authority announced that it will purchase Starlink hardware for around 9,000 homes and businesses in the state without internet. Eligible residents can start applying for subsidized Starlink equipment next month.
I’m working on a full review in a variety of scenarios but I’m shocked it works at all in the outer sleeve of this Peak Design backpack connected to a USB-C power bank. Once it gets satellite lock it holds on to it reasonably well for an average of 54Mbps down and 11Mbps up, despite the dish’s vertical alignment and 110-degree field of view.
I don’t know why you’d do this, but you can!
The “catch” marks SpaceX’s first successful touchdown of Starship’s booster back at its launch site in South Texas.
Starship launched about 25 minutes later than planned, at about 8:25AM ET, as SpaceX needed to clear its range of boats.
