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.
The Wall Street Journal put a number on Musk’s reported donation to a political action committee backing Donald Trump’s campaign and on the formation of America PAC. He’s not on the most recent list of contributors, but both Winklevoss twins, current SpaceX / former Tesla board director Antonio Gracias, and early PayPal exec Ken Howery are.
The contract granted by NASA — worth up to $843 million — will see SpaceX develop a vehicle to safely deorbit the space station “in a controlled manner after the end of its operational life in 2030.”
NASA says the station will remain in use until then, and expects both the station and deorbit vehicle to break apart upon re-entry to avoid risk to populated areas.
Closing a loop that began with this 2016 launch, NASA is about to send the fourth and final satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) – R Series into space as part of a system for much better real-time weather forecasting.
SpaceX’s Starship is attempting re-entry over the Indian Ocean, and with the signal going in and out, a live video stream showed some damage and burning on a fin.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has granted SpaceX the license it needed for the fourth flight test of its massive Starship rocket this week.
After the previous launch achieved Starship’s first reentry from space, SpaceX says its next objectives will be executing a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico with the Super Heavy booster, and a controlled entry of Starship.
What happens when remote villages get Starlink and all the good and bad that comes with unfettered internet access? The New York Times traveled deep into the Amazon rainforest to find out:
Modern society has dealt with these issues over decades as the internet continued its relentless march. The Marubo and other Indigenous tribes, who have resisted modernity for generations, are now confronting the internet’s potential and peril all at once, while debating what it will mean for their identity and culture.
The contrast and familiarity of the NYT’s photography is striking, seeing people hunched over their brightly lit rectangles hoping for just one more hit of dopamine.
Wait, you’re telling me that consumer tech can be foiled by a determined and well-funded military?
The new outages appeared to be the first time the Russians have caused widespread disruptions of Starlink. If they continue to succeed, it could mark a tactical shift in the conflict, highlighting Ukraine’s vulnerability and dependence on the service provided by Mr. Musk’s company.
Time for Musk to deploy the Starshield! Or, did he?
The video call works, barely, and that’s before fighting other LTE-compatible phones for access to the T-Mo service first announced in 2022.
But when the choice is no coverage versus this, well, I’d call that a win. And it’ll only be available for texting later this year in the US, with data coming in 2025 as SpaceX launches more D2C Starlink satellites.
NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is already running over budget and behind schedule. But it may also be our best chance of finding extraterrestrial life.
Tesla paid X $280,000 for advertising and other services, according to the company’s proxy statement. X paid Tesla $1.02 million for unspecified work. SpaceX paid Tesla $2.9 million for “certain commercial, licensing and support agreements.” Tesla paid SpaceX $800,000 for use of its corporate jet. And Tesla paid the Boring Company $1.2 million.
No one paid Neuralink anything.
The accounting is “more of an art than a science,” anonymous sources tell Bloomberg. But on an operational and ongoing basis? No, not profitable, according to those sources.
Previously, The Wall Street Journal reported Starlink fell short of expectations in 2022. Hm!
While airlines are paying aviation excise taxes that go towards the necessary air traffic controls during takeoff, commercial space companies like SpaceX — which require similar airspace safety measures around launches — are exempt.
Now, the Biden Administration is proposing these companies start paying their share of the government resources being used. Former F.A.A.-licensed aircraft dispatcher William J. McGee told the New York Times:
“This is a question of fundamental fairness. It would be the equivalent of having a toll system on a highway and waving through certain users and not others”
SpaceX already filed one lawsuit claiming the agency’s actions o (on a complaint about workers who say they were fired illegally for criticizing Elon Musk) are unconstitutional and now there’s this complaint issued Wednesday night.
SpaceX is accused of using severance agreements with ”unlawful confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses, and an unlawful limit on participation in other claims against SpaceX,” among other issues. The parties can either settle (seems unlikely), or there will be a hearing on October 29th.
Two diplomats (presumably Jim Jones, Juelz Santana, and Freekey Zekey were not all available) tell Politico that with the Ariane 6 delayed and Russia’s Soyuz unavailable, the European Space Agency (ESA) is using SpaceX to launch satellites for its Galileo global navigation system and have set up a special security deal to make it happen.
Separately, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said it will start selling the lasers Starlink satellites use for in-space communication to other companies.
Leaked documents viewed by TechCrunch say SpaceX can prevent former or current employees from selling shares during a tender offer if they engaged in “an act of dishonesty against the company” or violated policies.
Since SpaceX is a private company, this could prevent employees from selling their shares until SpaceX goes public — which may not even happen. SpaceX also reserves the right to buy back vested shares six months after an employee leaves the company, TechCrunch reports.
The Starship was reported “lost” before it could splash down after reentry as planned. but for a better look at the takeoff, the folks at NASASpaceflight put together a few different camera angles from this morning’s events.
Before the SpaceX broadcast ended, SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said, “the team has made the call that the ship has been lost, so no splashdown today.”
There’s no word on the status of Starship as the live video feed from the vehicle has ended for the moment, but you can see part of the reentry process in this clip posted by SpaceX.
As Starship reenters Earth’s atmosphere, the external cameras are capturing the heat and plasma field generated.
We’ve skipped over one planned element of this test flight, as the Starship 28 prototype continues on its way toward a planned splashdown.
SpaceX finished another test for this Starship flight and ended internal views from the flight. As the live broadcast continues, it has gone in and out as the vehicle continues to barrel roll in space on its way to a planned splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The next milestone for this flight test is a planned in-space relight of the Raptor engines, which is scheduled for 40:46 into the flight, or a about 18 minutes from now.
On the stream, we watched the return of the Super Heavy booster rocket after separation, which seemed to have partial success on some of its planned maneuvers as it came back to Earth. The commentators noted it “feel a little short,” of the plan, but didn’t go into detail.
The vehicle took off successfully and is now heading toward the “Hot-staging (Starship Raptor ignition and stage separation).”
As we wait to see if the Starship will launch, SpaceX posted this clip showing what the splashdown could be like.
If everything works out as planned, the Starship will attempt an in-space relight of its Raptor engines and eventually splash down in the Indian Ocean, as shown in this animation.
After the first two Starship tests went up in flames, SpaceX says it’s now attempting “a number of ambitious objectives” for today’s targeted 9:25AM ET launch, including:
The successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
