Verge Science is here to bring you the most up-to-date space news and analysis, whether it’s about the latest findings from NASA or comprehensive coverage of the next SpaceX rocket launch to the International Space Station. We’ll take you inside the discoveries of new exoplanets, space weather, space policy, and the booming commercial space industry.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding tool Cursor on Friday. Cursor says it’s going to work on the company’s Grok AI chatbot, which added a new AI agent feature this week.
[X (formerly Twitter)]
Virgin Galactic is running a poll to choose the name for an upcoming member of its fleet. Unfortunately, you’re limited to voting for a preselected group of four finalists: Horizon, Explorer, Ascend, and Apeiron. All appropriately boring names — no Rocket McRocketface here.
A person on Reddit says their friend’s phone added craters to the Sun during yesterday’s solar eclipse. The poster doesn’t say what phone this was captured on, but it’s definitely something we’ve seen before.
Today there will be a total solar eclipse viewable from “parts of Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal,” as well as a partial eclipse across some of the US and most of Canada, Europe, and northwestern Africa.
NASA has a livestream covering the event, and if you’re tempted to look for yourself, make sure you’re properly equipped.
The probe’s remaining science instruments will keep working for an extra year or more after NASA powered off certain devices in favor of lower-powered ones. NASA also plans to send the “Big Bang” update to the probe’s twin, Voyager 1, in the coming months.
Do not look directly at the sun during tomorrow’s total solar eclipse, the first in mainland Europe in nearly 30 years. Also, do not eat bleach, no matter the day.
Do, however, follow our advice on how to buy a pair of certified glasses, make a pinhole projector, and steps and gear needed to photograph the celestial event.
No specs or timeframe accompanied the photos, or even a justification for why you’d want satellite internet in a taxi that targets dense urban environments where cellphone signal is strong. The car certainly doesn’t need it to drive, but, as Electrek notes, it’s a nice recurring revenue stream for SpaceX, and further justification for the two companies to merge and make Richie Rich another $1 trillion richer.
An escape clause in Elon Musk’s $1 trillion Tesla pay package approved last year would eliminate daunting operational targets if SpaceX were to purchase Tesla, as many expect. Under the terms, an acquisition treats those performance goals as met. Depending on the acquisition price SpaceX sets for Tesla, which Musk can heavily influence, a merger could instantly award him hundreds of millions of Tesla shares and consolidate his voting control.
Astronomers warn that a recent FCC decision about mirror-equipped satellites could hinder their ability to observe the cosmos, as well as lead to permanent eye damage.
A roughly five-ton upper stage of a discarded Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the moon on Wednesday after floating in space since its launch last year. The impact, which SpaceX says was unintentional, was too faint for ground telescopes to see, but South Korea’s lunar orbiter has now shared images of the crater it created.
Srini Gopalan in response to SpaceX saying it plans to “acquire quite a few” of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon’s customers by turning Starlink dishes into tiny cellular base stations using the limited spectrum it acquired from EchoStar:
You’ve got to ask the question of ‘What is the gap in the market that they’re looking to serve? I always prefer starting these conversations back from the customer: Why would a customer buy a new cellular service? Where do they go? What’s their differentiation? It’s clearly not having a broad network.
[Financial Times]
The massive $16.8 billion chip facility, which is being built by Tesla and SpaceX with help from Intel, will be located in Grimes County, population 29,268. After securing over a billion dollars in tax breaks from two rural school districts, SpaceX says it will break ground later this year. The fab will supply AI chips to power Musk’s plans to build a “robot army” that includes self-driving cars and humanoid robots, as well as for the data centers he plans on launching into space.
A lot of staffers subscribe just because we enjoy his work (and when he gets his vacation ruined). But today’s newsletter is about the SpaceX lockup expiring — how it should work vs what we will find out tomorrow about how it will work — and how the noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have tanked the bets of noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness.
[Bloomberg]
Elon Musk’s exploding rockets are a front for the real moneymakers.
The original satellite internet company “for rural America” has filed for bankruptcy after running out of cash and hemorrhaging subscribers to SpaceX. The service will continue to operate during proceedings, but will pivot away from consumers to focus on businesses and governments. It follows EchoStar’s Dish filing for chapter 11 protection in June.
This report from The New York Times details how debris from rockets, satellites, and other space hardware falls to Earth each week — sometimes unpredictably — as the global space race heats up:
If objects are in free fall, even the best rocket scientists cannot accurately predict where they will land or whether they will fully incinerate. A one-minute error in predicting re-entry changes the landing zone by nearly 300 miles, according to the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research group.
[The New York Times]
“Fake news,” is how he responded to a Wall Street Journal report on the possible sale of Tesla’s business in its second-largest market:
Now, some Tesla executives have been told to prepare for a separation of the China business ahead of a potential merger, a person familiar with those talks said. And Tesla advisers have discussed possible options for a separation, including a spinoff, sale or closure, another person said.
Musk responded similarly to reports of mass layoffs at Twitter, canceling the $25,000 Model 2 ... you get the idea.
The orders will cover 18 Falcon 9 missions that are expected to be finished by the end of next year. SpaceX has already gotten more than $7 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2026, according to Reuters.
Katalyst says the Link spacecraft it launched on July 3rd to push the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory back up to a higher orbit has been in a “multi-axis spin” over the last 72 hours, resulting in sporadic communications. Having identified the cause, Katalyst is working to recover the mission and believes Link still has “a viable path to rendezvous with Swift.”
Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell service continues to evolve beyond basic SMS/messaging to provide light data connectivity in cellular dead zones. Telstra customers in Australia with compatible phones can now use it for apps like Apple Weather, Google Maps, AllTrails, and WhatsApp. T-Mobile users in the US have had similar app support since October.
The FCC application was submitted on Saturday. The low-Earth orbit satellites would communicate directly with unmodified mobile phones and IoT devices, and operate in concert with Amazon’s burgeoning Leo constellation (which requires a dish for connectivity) and the Globalstar system used by iPhones that Amazon is acquiring.
[Advanced Television]
After last week’s launch attempt misfired and a scheduled attempt Thursday was postponed due to weather, the 13th flight test launched just before 7PM ET on Friday. 20 V3 Starlink satellites were deployed, but it appears there was an issue relighting the Super Heavy booster’s engines for an attempted propulsive landing and splashdown.
Today’s test was important for former trillionaire Elon Musk, with shares of Tesla and SpaceX declining by 18 and 7 percent this week, respectively.
Update: Updated to note that the vehicle has launched.
Musk and Co have about 18 months to get its long delayed Super Heavy rocket into operation now that the company has stopped building some Falcon 9 components and quit taking future rideshare reservations beyond 2028, according to Bloomberg’s sources. That makes the success of tonight’s 13th test flight — scheduled to go no earlier than 6:45pm ET — all the more important, and not just to suffering stockholders.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman tells Reuters that the agency is “still very much planning” for a 2027 timeline, despite Blue Origin’s launchpad explosion in May. Blue Origin is supposed to launch a test version of its lunar lander for the mission later this year as it rebuilds its launchpad.
The craft used Mars to get a gravity-assisted boost on the way to its namesake asteroid. The mission isn’t expected to intercept the asteroid until 2029, but in the meantime we’ve got this great view of Mars to enjoy.
On July 16th, 2024, a meteor deposited two pounds of space rock in a Hillsborough, New Jersey, man’s bedroom. Scientists have now analyzed it and found amino acids and salts left behind by the evaporation of water ice, offering further insight into how organic matter may have arrived on primitive Earth.
The Pentagon may make a deal where it would pay for billions of dollars of compute from SpaceX, according to The Wall Street Journal.
SpaceX already provides compute to Google and Anthropic, and the company wants to do more in cloud computing, the WSJ says.
[The Wall Street Journal]
SPCX sunk another three percent in extended trading after last night’s aborted Starship launch, falling further beneath its IPO price of $135. The record-setting IPO made Elon Musk the world’s first (paper) trillionaire. Today he’s worth $838.1 billion. Concerning.
The thirteenth, and first post-IPO, flight test of SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle was supposed to occur Thursday night, but when the countdown hit zero just before 7PM ET, “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” writes Elon Musk.
AST SpaceMobile was targeting the end of 2026 to begin service, but its low-Earth orbit constellation won’t reach its target of 45 BlueBird satellites until “early 2027.” This is partly due to Blue Origin’s failure to properly deploy one of AST’s giant cell towers, but also a reduction in launch capacity now that the New Glenn rocket is sidelined by a subsequent launch pad explosion.
The Japanese space agency flight tested its RV-X prototype for the first time, with the reusable rocket rising 36 feet and moving 52 feet horizontally before touching back down, as reported by the Associated Press. China also successfully launched and recovered its reusable rocket last week in a bid to compete with SpaceX.
