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new video loaded: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk
By Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey
February 27, 2026
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Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey
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Apple is bringing age verification to the UK, as the latest iOS 26.4 beta prompts users to verify that they’re over 18 following installation. As shown in screenshots posted to Reddit, Apple says users who don’t confirm their age “will not be able to download and purchase apps or make in-app purchases.” In one of the screenshots, Apple notes that it may automatically confirm that users are over 18 using the payment method connected to their account, or the age of their account. Otherwise, Apple may ask users to scan their credit cards to confirm their age. The Verge
In a sprawling 20,000-word essay published last month, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, warned that advances in artificial intelligence could pave the way for a wave of killer robots. “A swarm of millions or billions of fully automated armed drones, locally controlled by powerful AI and strategically coordinated across the world by an even more powerful AI, could be an unbeatable army,” he wrote. He was not just worried about this threat coming from China or Russia but from Western democracies too. Telegraph
Mumsnet has launched a campaign to introduce a ban on social media for under-16s featuring health warnings in the style of those on cigarette packets. The deliberately provocative national advertising campaign calls for all social media to be banned for children under the age of 16. The images on billboards and social media make a number of stark statements related to health. They claim that “three hours or more social media a day makes teens more likely to self-harm.” Guardian
Chip giant Nvidia has reported record annual revenue of $215.9bn (£159.1bn), despite a wave of investor scepticism about the massive amounts of money being spent on artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The firm also beat analyst’s forecasts as sales for the last three months of its financial year jumped by 73% compared to 12 months earlier. “Computing demand is growing exponentially,” boss Jensen Huang said. “Our customers are racing to invest in AI compute – the factories powering the AI industrial revolution and their future growth.” BBC
SpaceX has revealed that its “greatly enhanced” second generation (GEN2) of Direct to Cell (DtC) capable Starlink broadband satellites, which are due to launch in 2027, will aim to support 5G connectivity and deliver peak data speeds of 150Mbps (Megabits per second) per user. Starlink currently has around 9,800 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – mostly at altitudes of between c.340-525km. Residential customers in the UK usually pay from £35 a month for the ‘Residential 100Mbps’ unlimited data plan (kit price may vary due to different offers), which also promises uploads of c.15-35Mbps and low latency connectivity. ISPreview
The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max will have a smaller Dynamic Island, according to Bloomberg. Over the past year, there have been mixed rumors about whether the iPhone 18 Pro models will continue to feature a Dynamic Island or have a hole punch camera with under screen Face ID and no Dynamic Island, but the latest information suggests we’re not getting rid of the Dynamic Island just yet.
Along with Bloomberg, several prominent leakers on Weibo and other social media sites have said Apple will make the Dynamic Island smaller, but won’t eliminate it. MacRumors
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Chris Price
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Tech investors haven’t given up on the dream of making physical products with the same speed and ease as coding software.
Executives at Freeform, a startup developing a novel 3D printing system for metal components, told TechCrunch that the company raised a $67 million Series B to expand its manufacturing platform.
Investors include Apandion, AE Ventures, Founders Fund, Linse Capital, NVidia’s NVentures , Threshold Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures. FreeForm declined to disclose the company’s post-financing valuation, which Pitchbook cites as $179 million.
CEO and cofounder Erik Palitsch said the funding would allow the company to upgrade its current GoldenEye printing system, which uses 18 lasers to fuse metal powders into precision components, to a new version. Dubbed Skyfall, the next iteration of the platform would use hundreds of lasers to produce thousands of kilograms of metal parts each day.
That’s the culmination of a vision Palitsch and co-founder/president Thomas Ronacher launched in 2018. The two met while developing rocket engines at SpaceX, where they found that industrial machines for printing metal components are expensive, finicky, and not well designed for mass manufacturing.
Their new company would build its platform from the ground up to achieve higher throughput and flexibility, with an emphasis on active software controls. Palitsch says Freeform’s platform is “AI native,” noting a partnership with Nvidia that allows the company to access advanced GPUs.
“I think we’re the only quote-unquote manufacturing company out there that has H200 clusters in a data center on site,” Paltisch told TechCrunch. “What are they doing? We’re running real-time physics-based simulations and learning all the different aspects of the end to end manufacturing workflow.”
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The data collected by sensors in the company’s manufacturing platform and during the simulations allows Freeform to rapidly improve production quality and quantity.
“We have more meaningful data on the physics of the metal-printing process than any company in the world,” head of talent Cameron Kay said.
While Palitsch said he could not disclose any customers, he said the company is already delivering hundreds of “mission-critical” parts to buyers. Now, the company wants to hire as many as 100 new employees and expand its facility to start executing on its contract backlog.
Manufacturing-as-a-service has grown as a category as venture investors have taken a greater interest in building vehicles, robots, and energy production systems. For example, Hadrian recently earned a $1.6B valuation from its investors while developing automated production for defense, and VulcanForms and Divergent have raised hundreds of millions to develop metal-printing services of their own.
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Tim Fernholz
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Tareq Amin, CEO of Saudi Arabia’s largest A.I. company, Humain, has been on a dealmaking blitz since taking the helm of the Kingdom’s national A.I. initiative last year. His latest move: a $3 billion investment in Elon Musk’s xAI. The investment was made during xAI’s $20 billion fundraising round in January, Humain announced today (Feb. 18). The raise came just weeks before xAI merged with Musk’s SpaceX earlier this month, as Musk consolidates his A.I., communications and space ambitions ahead of a widely anticipated IPO.
Founded in 2025 by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and backed by Saudi Arabia’s massive sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. Humain sits at the center of the Kingdom’s push to diversify its economy beyond oil. A core part of that mandate: building sovereign A.I. infrastructure at home.
The xAI stake is the latest example of Humain’s ability to “deploy meaningful capital behind exceptional opportunities where long-term vision, technical excellence and execution converge,” said Amin in a statement. Amin, who previously led Aramco Digital and Japan’s Rakuten Mobile, has spent the past several months striking blockbuster partnerships with U.S. tech heavyweights, including Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, Amazon Web Services and Groq (not xAI’s chatbot Grok).
Humain did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.
Most of the partnerships are focused on expanding Saudi Arabia’s data center footprint and compute capacity. A joint venture with AMD and Cisco, for example, aims to build domestic A.I. infrastructure capable of powering up to one gigawatt.
xAI’s relationship with Humain dates back to November, when the companies unveiled plans for a 500-megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia. The facility—xAI’s first outside the U.S.—will run on Nvidia chips and deploy the company’s Grok models across the Kingdom.
Humain’s deepening ties to xAI underscore a broader realignment in global A.I. alliances, with Gulf states emerging as critical capital providers and infrastructure hubs for American developers. In November, Humain and the United Arab Emirates’ A.I. company, G42, received U.S. approval to acquire up to 35,000 advanced A.I. chips each, marking a sharp reversal from earlier semiconductor export restrictions.
Other regional players are also forging closer links with U.S. firms. G42 secured a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft and is set to help develop Stargate UAE, an A.I. compute cluster in Abu Dhabi to be operated by OpenAI and Oracle.
The Emirati-backed MGX has participated in large fundraising rounds for xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic, while Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund earlier this week joined Anthropic’s new $380 billion Series G financing—further cementing the Middle East’s growing influence over the future of A.I.
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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
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As the U.S. races China to the Moon, two billionaires are locked in a space race of their own. NASA has offered both Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin a chance to return astronauts to the lunar surface, and the competition just got interesting.
A bombshell report by Ars Technica’s Eric Berger has revealed exactly how Blue Origin plans to beat SpaceX to a crewed Moon landing. Internal documents obtained by Ars reportedly detail the accelerated mission architecture Blue Origin will use to attempt to land astronauts on the Moon without the highly complex orbital refueling SpaceX’s approach requires.
Gizmodo could not independently verify the contents of the documents Ars reviewed, and Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment.
Before we dive into Blue Origin’s new lunar strategy, a bit of context. On Sunday, Musk sent shockwaves through the spaceflight community by announcing that SpaceX—a company built on its founder’s dream of colonizing Mars—has pivoted toward building a Moon city instead.
The move marks a seismic shift in the company’s strategic vision. After all, it was only a year ago that Musk called the Moon a “distraction,” insisting that SpaceX is “going straight to Mars.” Still, it’s not altogether surprising, as Musk’s company is currently at risk of losing its Artemis 3 lunar lander contract to Blue Origin.
The morning after Musk announced SpaceX’s Moon pivot, Bezos posted an ominous photo of a turtle peering out from the shadows (this is relevant—promise). As Berger insightfully points out, the image—unccompanied by text—is almost certainly a nod to Blue Origin’s mascot: a tortoise. Bezos has previously explained that the tortoise is a reference to “The Tortoise and the Hare,” one of Aesop’s Fables.
It appears that in his eyes, Blue is the tortoise that will beat SpaceX—the hare—to a crewed lunar landing through slow and steady development.
NASA’s Artemis 3 mission will be the first to return humans to the Moon since the Apollo era. In 2021, the agency contracted SpaceX to build a crew lander for the mission, called the Starship Human Landing System (HLS). NASA originally hoped the lander would be ready in time to launch Artemis 3 by 2024, but significant developmental delays pushed the mission back to 2028 and prompted the agency to reopen the contract in October.
Since then, Blue has emerged as SpaceX’s competitor for the Artemis 3 lander contract. Bezos’s company is actively prepping its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo lander for its first test flight, slated to launch this year. Its success would pave the way for the MK2 crew lander, and if that vehicle is ready to fly before the Starship HLS, Musk can kiss his Artemis 3 contract goodbye.
Here’s how Blue Origin plans to pull this off. The documents reviewed by Ars reportedly detail two missions: an uncrewed demo mission and a crewed demo landing.
Berger reports that the uncrewed flight will require three launches of Blue’s New Glenn rocket. The first two will put two “transfer stages” (specialized upper stages designed to move a vehicle from one orbit to another) into low-Earth orbit, and the third will put a smaller version of the MK2 lander, called “Blue Moon MK2-IL,” into orbit. These three vehicles will dock to each other and the first transfer stage will boost them into an elliptical orbit around Earth.
The first stage will then separate and fall back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere. That’s when the second transfer stage will take over, boosting the MK2-IL lander into an elliptical orbit around the Moon. The lander will then separate, descend to the lunar surface, and ascend back into low-lunar orbit.
The crewed landing will require four New Glenn launches, three to put three transfer stages into LEO and a fourth to launch MK2-IL and a docking port. All four vehicles will dock to the port. The first transfer stage will boost the stack into an elliptical Earth orbit, and the second will push it to rendezvous with NASA’s Orion spacecraft—carrying a crew of astronauts—in a specialized, highly stable orbit around the Moon.
Orion will dock with MK2-IL to allow the crew to board. The third transfer stage will then move MK2-IL into a low-lunar orbit and separate, allowing the lander to descend to the lunar surface and then ascend to re-rendezvous with Orion.
Sounds easy enough, right? Not quite. While this approach will not require orbital refueling, Blue Origin still must prove it can pull off complex dockings and deep-space maneuvers it has never attempted before, as Berger notes. So while Blue Origin is aiming for an uncrewed Moon landing later this year—potentially ahead of SpaceX’s 2027 target—both companies remain far from the finish line.
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Ellyn Lapointe
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Just days after Elon Musk merged his A.I. startup, xAI, with SpaceX in preparation for a widely anticipated trillion-dollar IPO later this year, two of xAI’s founding employees—Yuhuai (Tony) Wu and Jimmy Ba—announced their resignations. That means half of xAI’s founding team has now left the company barely three years after its launch. Musk framed the staff exodus as growing pains. “As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors,” he wrote on X yesterday (Feb. 11).
Wu and Ba’s exits appeared amicable. But lower-level employees have been more candid about internal tensions at the Musk-run startup. Several members of xAI’s technical staff have also left in recent weeks, according to their posts on X and LinkedIn.
“All A.I. labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring,” said Vahid Kazemi, who worked on xAI’s audio models, in a post on X. “I think there’s room for more creativity. So, I’m starting something new.”
In an interview with NBC News, Kazemi also criticized the company’s working culture, saying he regularly worked 12-hour days, including holidays and weekends.
Launched in March 2023 with a roster of industry veterans from companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla, xAI will now operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX. The new iteration of SpaceX faces no shortage of challenges: Grok continues to face legal scrutiny, while Musk’s leadership style remains a point of contention.
Here are the co-founders and notable leaders who have left xAI so far—and where they are now.
Jimmy Ba, who led A.I. safety at xAI, announced his exit on Feb. 10. A professor at the University of Toronto who studied under A.I. pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Ba’s research played a key role in shaping Grok’s development.
“So proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to stay close as a friend of the team,” Ba wrote on X. He hasn’t announced his next move, but added that “2026 is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species.”
Despite Ba’s departure, Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, remains a safety advisor for xAI.
Tony Wu, a former research scientist at Google and postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, announced his departure from xAI on Feb. 9.
Wu led xAI’s reasoning team. “It’s time for my next chapter…It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible,” he wrote on X.
Wu has not disclosed his next role. Co-founders Guodong Zhang and Manuel Kroiss remain at xAI and are helping lead the company’s reorganization.
While not a founding member, Mike Liberatore joined xAI as chief financial officer in April 2025, just one month after xAI acquired X in a deal that valued the combined company at $113 billion.
Liberatore, formerly a finance executive at Airbnb and SquareTrade, left after only three months. He now works as a business finance officer at OpenAI, according to LinkedIn.
Musk replaced Liberatore with ex-Morgan Stanley banker Anthony Armstrong. Armstrong advised Musk on his Twitter (now X) acquisition in 2022 and later served as a senior advisor at the Office of Personnel Management during Musk’s controversial tenure at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Greg Yang spent nearly six years as a researcher at Microsoft before joining xAI’s founding team. He left the company in January due to health complications from Lyme disease.
“Likely I contracted Lyme a long time ago, but until I pushed myself hard building xAI and weakened my immune system, the symptoms weren’t noticeable,” Yang wrote on X. He continues to advise xAI in an informal capacity.
Igor Babuschkin, a former research engineer at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, was a co-founder and key engineering lead at xAI. Widely known as the primary developer behind Grok, Babuschkin left in July 2025 to start his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, focused on A.I. research and startups.
Christian Szegedy spent 12 years at Google before joining xAI as a founding research scientist. He left xAI in February 2025 to become chief scientist at superintelligence cloud company Morph Labs.
More than a year later, he departed that role to found mathematical A.I. startup Math Inc. in September, according to his LinkedIn.
“I left xAI in the last week of February and I am on good terms with the team. IMO, xAI has a bright future,” Szegedy wrote on X.
Other senior engineers and scientists at xAI include Yasemin Yesiltepe, Zhuoyi (Zoey) Huang and Yao Fu.
Kyle Kosic left OpenAI in early 2023 after two years to co-found xAI, where he served as engineering infrastructure lead. He departed about a year later, in April 2024, to return to OpenAI as a technical staff member.
Kosic was the first co-founder to leave xAI and did not issue a public statement. It is unclear who now leads xAI’s engineering infrastructure, though another co-founder, Ross Nordeen, remains the company’s technical program manager after previously holding the same role at Tesla.
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Rachel Curry
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At the risk of stating the obvious, Elon Musk doesn’t always make sense when he talks. But at a recent all-hands meeting at xAI that was posted in full online, he made less sense than usual. This isn’t investment advice, but anyone considering buying stock in the SpaceX/xAI conglomerate expected to make an initial public offering later this year might want to give some real thought to how the founder and CEO is sounding lately.
xAI has seen a rash of high-level resignations recently. Many of the company’s 11 original cofounders have left, and one of these resignations, Tony Wu’s, happened just yesterday.
Musk reportedly hopes to raise $50 billion from investors once SpaceX with xAI is a publicly traded company, and there’s very real potential that retirement and pension funds will soon be among those holding a stake in this venture. Judging from his latest speech, the aims of this venture involve building a sci-fi catapult on the moon, discovering ancient aliens, and consuming an ever-greater percentage of the sun’s energy for some reason.
And it would be one thing if any of this were being communicated coherently. Jeff Bezos has made similarly bizarre statements about realizing the fantasies of 70s sci-fi writers, but—and trust me when I mean this as only the faintest of praise—at least Bezos’ thoughts held together when he said it, and at least he says this sort of thing on podcasts rather than during a speech delivered directly to his employees.
As I wrote last week, Musk is working hard to make the merger between SpaceX, which is mostly a rocket company, and xAI, which is mostly a software company, make sense. A coherent version of his pitch for SpaceX and xAI as a single company might hang entirely on his idea—harebrained as it might arguably be—that data centers in orbit are necessary for the advancement of AI model training, and that only in space can all these data centers maximize solar exposure for energy, and minimize the effort required to cool them.
But Musk’s pitch involves the inverse of this concept too, or at least tries to invert the concept in a sweaty, high-effort, ultimately unclear way. If I earnestly do my best to make Musk’s speech make sense, he seems to be arguing that only through the merger of xAI and SpaceX can the concept of intelligence—artificial or otherwise—collect and benefit from hypothetical knowledge of space in all its vastness, including what can be gleaned from aliens, or through excavating the remnants of extinct aliens.
And that’s not to mention his seemingly unrelated preoccupation with harnessing a larger and larger percentage of the sun’s energy—a logical carbuncle glued randomly onto the entire pitch. He seems to be approaching a fun concept from futurism called the Kardashev Scale that measures the advancement of civilizations, but he never manages to land that rhetorical plane.
But don’t take it from me that this all makes no sense. Again, with an IPO looming, you owe it to yourself to read the entire section of his speech about the future of xAI and SpaceX, which I’ve transcribed verbatim here, minus the ums and uhs.
NEWS: xAI has just publicly posted the full 45 minute all-hands meeting that Elon Musk had with employees recently.pic.twitter.com/zw4WFdeKvV
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) February 11, 2026
(This is a transcript of everything from 41 minutes and 35 seconds in the video until the end.)
“In order to expand the universe, you must explore the universe.
There’s only so much you can learn from just being on earth, with telescopes and colliders on Earth. Ultimately you have to go out there and you have to explore the universe. To understand it. And that’s the motivation behind the combination of SpaceX and xAI. It’s to accelerate humanity’s future in understanding universe, and extending the light of consciousness to the stars.
So in the grand scheme of things when you look at how much energy Earth is actually using for civilization, we’re only right now using, quote, roughly one percent of the potential energy of Earth. And if we wanted to use even a millionth of the sun’s energy, that would be roughly a million times more energy than civilization currently uses. The only way to access that energy—the energy of the sun—is to extend beyond Earth.
Earth is really a tiny, tiny dust mote in a vast darkness. The sun is 99.8% of all mass in the solar system. So you have to expand beyond the tiny dust mote that is Earth to make any significant dent in using the sun’s energy. Like said, it’s—you’d have to expand roughly a million times just to get to one millionth of our sun’s energy. And then, going beyond that, exploring—extending—to the galaxy, and maybe someday even to other galaxies.
So the—the next step beyond Earth data centers are Earth orbital data centers, and we’ll be launching, with SpaceX, orbital data centers at the 100 to 200 gigawatt per year level. Not cumulative. I mean per year. And ultimately, we see a path to maybe launching as much as a terawatt per year of compute from earth.
But what if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt per year? In order to do that you have to go to the moon.
So, by having factories on the moon, building AI satellites, and having a mass driver—which is the kinda thing you really only learn about in, read about in, science fiction, but we’re gonna make it real—we’re actually gonna have a mass driver on the moon. And if you do that, you can go several orders of magnitude greater. You can go to 1,000 gigawatts or more per year, and ultimately get to maybe a millionth, and then, maybe a thousandth, and maybe even a few percent of the sun’s energy.
It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it’s gonna be incredibly exciting to see it happen. I really wanna see the mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space. Just going like “shoom, shoom,” just one after the other. I can’t imagine anything more epic than a mass driver on the moon, and a self-sustaining city on the moon, and then going beyond the moon to Mars, going throughout our solar system, and ultimately being out there among the stars, and visiting all these star systems.
Maybe we’ll meet aliens. Maybe we’ll see some civilizations that lasted for millions of years. And we’ll find the remnants of ancient alien civilizations. But the only way we’re gonna do that is if we go out there and we explore. And this is a path to making it happen. Thank you.”
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Mike Pearl
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The satellite internet race is ramping up. In the years since SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlinks back in 2019, numerous competitors have entered the market, including two you’ve almost definitely heard about lately: Amazon Leo and Blue Origin’s newly announced TeraWave.
Starlink, Amazon Leo, and TeraWave are far from the only players in this rapidly growing industry, but they stand out because of their massive financial backings and the ambitious strategic visions of their respective billionaire owners. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk oversees Starlink, while Jeff Bezos—through Amazon and Blue Origin—is developing Amazon Leo and TeraWave.
Each of these brands has taken a unique approach to building the next generation of satellite internet technology. Understanding the differences between them is key to grasping how the future of global connectivity may unfold. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
The first thing to understand is that these networks came on the scene at different times, and their parent companies have chosen different deployment strategies. As a result, they are in various stages of development.
Starlink is by far the most mature of the three. SpaceX was first to market with its satellite project, announcing it in 2015. Since the start of deployment in 2019, the company has rapidly built up the Starlink megaconstellation through hundreds of launches aboard its Falcon 9 rocket, with 9,555 Starlinks currently active and providing broadband internet to millions worldwide.
Amazon unveiled plans to develop a competitor—called Project Kuiper at the time—about one month before SpaceX launched its first batch of operational Starlinks, “but was much slower to really ramp up and start production,” Kevin Bell, senior vice president of the Engineering and Technology Group (ETG) at The Aerospace Corporation, told Gizmodo. “Some of that was satellite driven, some of that was rocket driven,” Bell explained.
While SpaceX’s approach to Starlink development prioritized rapid iteration and deployment, Amazon took its time finalizing the design of its satellites and conducted more extensive prototype testing. Because Amazon does not have its own rockets to support satellite deployment, it partners with launch providers—including SpaceX—to build its constellation.
The company launched its first operational batch of satellites aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket in April 2025. The next launch, set for February 12, will bring the constellation (now called Amazon Leo) up to 212 satellites. Because it is still in the early days of scaling, the service has not yet launched commercially.
Then there’s TeraWave, the newcomer. Blue Origin announced the project on January 21, setting a goal to begin deployment by the first quarter of 2027. The company will presumably use its New Glenn rocket to launch its satellites, but that has not yet been confirmed. According to the announcement, the TeraWave constellation will ultimately scale to 5,408 satellites situated in low-Earth orbit (where Starlink and Amazon Leo reside) and in medium-Earth orbit.
That’s larger than Amazon Leo’s planned deployment of 3,236 satellites, but if Musk gets his way, Starlink will eclipse both of Bezos’s constellations. The Federal Communications Commission recently approved a SpaceX application to launch up to a million more Starlinks for the purpose of building an orbital data center.
Broadly speaking, the satellite internet industry serves two types of customers: enterprise and individual users. But according to Bell, these markets can be further divided into five core segments, namely direct to device, direct to consumer, high bandwidth (for business-scale users), backhaul (providing connectivity to underserved areas), and sovereign government.
“While Starlink is really kind of spread across all of them, Amazon and TeraWave have chosen—at least initially—to position themselves towards the higher end,” Bell said.
Starlink indeed serves a diverse array of users, from individuals to the American government. Its primary customer base, however, consists of people living in rural and remote areas who lack access to reliable, high-speed internet. Amazon Leo ultimately plans to target that market, but its initial phase of deployment will serve select enterprise, government, and telecommunications customers.
TeraWave is unique in that it is not at all geared toward individual customers. This network will serve “tens of thousands” of enterprise, data center, and government users, according to Blue Origin.
“One of the big differences there is that, typically, an enterprise would negotiate a service level agreement—so there is a requirement that the company be able to provide a certain level of speed, a certain level of capacity,” Tom Stroup, president of the Satellite Industry Association, told Gizmodo.
To meet that demand, Blue Origin will design TeraWave to deliver data speeds of up to 6 terabits per second anywhere on Earth. By comparison, Starlink and Amazon Leo offer speeds ranging from hundreds of megabits to around 1 gigabit per second, which is suitable for individuals and some enterprise customers but not tailored toward high-capacity backhaul or large-scale enterprise operations.
As these networks grow, the satellite internet industry is undergoing a rapid transformation. Competition between them—and their many other competitors—will continue to drive innovation, bringing faster speeds, higher capacity, and broader coverage to users around the world.
“Each generation of satellite that is being launched has greater speed and capacity than the prior generation,” Stroup said. “We’re just iterating much more quickly than ever before.”
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Ellyn Lapointe
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Amazon has more than 900 data centers spread across the planet. And if you ask Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, that is exactly where they’ll stay for the foreseeable future.
Speaking at a tech conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Garman threw some cold water on the notion of space-based data centers, which have been touted by Elon Musk and others as the future of AI.
While putting AI data centers in space has obvious benefits, including the ability to harness energy directly from the sun and the ability to cool the heat-generating equipment in the cold atmosphere of space, Garman said there are also some big obstacles to putting data centers in space or on other planets. Chief among them is the cost of transporting equipment.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen a rack of servers lately: They’re heavy,” Garman said in an interview at the Cisco AI Summit in answer to a question about the viability of space-based data centers. “And last I checked, humanity has yet to build a permanent structure in space. So … maybe.”
The comments come one day after Musk announced the merger of SpaceX, his rocket company, with his AI company, xAI, in a deal that reportedly values the combined companies at a staggering $1.25 billion.
“The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars, and ultimately expansion to the Universe,” Musk wrote in a blog post Monday announcing the deal.
The modern data centers that power AI services, including chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok, are massive behemoths that can span millions of square feet and are packed with so much hardware that they have to be built on top of reinforced concrete slabs.
Musk’s SpaceX has a successful track record of launching thousands of its internet-beaming Starlink satellites into orbit on its Falcon rockets, and Musk has floated ambitious plans to use its Starship rocket to launch as many as 1 million satellites into space—an amount that’s far greater than the total number of objects launched into space in history. The blizzard of Starlink launches would lead to improvements in SpaceX’s rockets that will make space based data centers a reality, Musk wrote on Monday, though he did not provide a timeline for when he expected it to happen.
Amazon has plans to create a constellation of internet beaming satellites, dubbed Leo, to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink. The company has earmarked $10 billion for the project, according to CNBC, but progress has been slow, with Amazon recently asking the U.S. FCC to extend the timeline to launch 1,600 Leo satellites.
Garman cited Musk’s 1-million-satellite plan during the Tuesday talk, and acknowledged that improvements in fuel and other aspects will make transportation into space less expensive. But for now, he stressed, the costs are a major bottleneck.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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Alexei Oreskovic
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SpaceX is acquiring xAI. Ever since this merger of two Musk companies became a rumor, crazy numbers like $1.5 trillion started being thrown around when discussing the total valuation of SpaceX, so you might sum it up by saying “Combining SpaceX and xAI gets you the biggest IPO of all time!” and yeah, that’s more plausible now than ever. For reference, SpaceX’s valuation was estimated at around $800 billion less than two months ago.
But is this merger as silly as it sounds?
The combined company will be a “vertically-integrated innovation engine,” according to a new SpaceX press release with Elon Musk’s personal signature on it. By his own reckoning, the company now deals in “AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.” Another way of saying this might be that SpaceX is now the company behind vertically-landing rocket boosters, the majority of the satellites currently in orbit, very fat rockets that tend to explode, an ISP, the microblogging app known as X, a sassy chatbot called Grok that’s famous for lewd images, and much much more.
SpaceX will now own, for instance, Grokipedia, the AI-written, anti-woke parody of Wikipedia. And remember Vine, the defunct 6-second video social media app? Yes SpaceX, which possesses billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts and is responsible for crewed NASA missions, now owns the rights to Vine too. Musk claims he’s bringing it back “in AI form.”
As many have pointed out before me, SpaceX became a genuinely indispensable player in humanity’s aerospace and space travel efforts through an iterative process involving an extraordinary number of spectacular and public rocket explosions that almost certainly would not have been tolerated if SpaceX were a government agency. It has always walked a delicate tightrope, keeping boring people happy, while also subject to the silly stuff and horrors that go along with being run by Elon Musk.
Gwynne Shotwell, the president and COO of SpaceX, has been described by the Wall Street Journal as “a Musk translator, especially for officials who depend on SpaceX but are occasionally unnerved by his activities.” In that same Journal article, former NASA administrator Bill Nelson—also a Democratic ex-Senator—called Shotwell, “the steady hand” at the company, and added, “I have a great deal of confidence in her. Because of that, I have a great deal of confidence in SpaceX.”
Back in 2022, when Musk was in the middle of buying Twitter in as chaotic a fashion as possible, Nelson says he called Shotwell, and said, “Tell me that the distraction that Elon might have on Twitter is not going to affect SpaceX.”
“I assure you, it is not,” he says she told him. “You have nothing to worry about.”
Now imagine being Shotwell four years later. Twitter is now X. Last year, the proprietary AI chatbot on X briefly started calling itself “MechaHitler” at one point, and then it generated tons of scantily-clad pictures of children. So not only has the drama increased, but you’re the president and COO of the company that made all that stuff too.
And imagine Shotwell having to handle this merger while Musk, the attention-starved celebrity CEO of this conglomerate has spent the last few days trying to post his way out of any consequences or disapprobation brought about by the public disclosure of emails in which he repeatedly asked Jeffrey Epstein if he could party on his private island.
So one can only speculate what Musk’s mental state was when he finalized the plans for this merger. But what stands out to me is that he wants investors in xAI and SpaceX—and perhaps starting in June, future holders of publicly traded SpaceX stock—to believe that this merger creates a company that gels and has a unified agenda. But you might want to take as big of a bong rip as you can before you try and get your head around that agenda as Musk describes it in his press release:
This rocket and AI company will actually be an AI-in-space company, you see, because, according to Musk’s estimate, “within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.” After all, “in the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.” Obviously.
But training models with space compute is just the beginning, because Musk claims that by combining these two concepts, they’ll be “scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe.”
Companies don’t have to always make sense. Samsung has hotels. Red Bull has a nature magazine. Konami has aerobics gyms. Sometimes these incongruities are prosperous leftovers from a different era for a company, but sometimes they reveal the caprice or frivolity of company leadership, which can be no big deal.
But then again, it’s not farfetched to think that Elon Musk’s caprice—and the fact that an economically powerful subset of Wall Street bulls think that caprice is tantamount to wisdom—may soon control the world’s best-funded AI company at a time when AI is the load bearing structure propping up the whole economy. If the IPO goes well (the New York Times’ sources say Musk hopes it will raise $50 billion), that AI company is going to be in your 401(k) while it’s also in charge of the lives of astronauts.
In other words, we’re headed for a time when the Wall Street bulls will have to be right. More than ever Elon Musk’s caprice may have to actually be wisdom, as implausible as that may be. AI had better not be a bubble if this IPO goes well, and the value of Musk himself had better not be inflated either. All of our well-being may just depend on it.
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Mike Pearl
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SpaceX is reportedly lining up four major Wall Street banks for a potential 2026 IPO — a move that could signal the long-awaited reopening of the public markets after a years-long IPO drought.
In the meantime, late-stage private companies like SpaceX are finding other ways to create liquidity for employees and early shareholders, largely through a fast-growing secondary market.
To unpack what SpaceX’s IPO chatter means, how private liquidity works before a debut, and what investors are looking for in today’s pre-IPO giants, we spoke with Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, a broker-dealer specializing in secondary share transactions for late-stage private companies.
You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts, or read the conversation below.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I’m founder and managing director of Rainmaker Securities, which specializes in helping large late-stage, pre-IPO companies transact shares in the secondary market. I am also the founder of a secondary firm that buys private company shares called Archer Capital Group, and co-founder of Liquid Stock, a business that helps employees and executives exercise their options using their shares as collateral.
No doubt. Private companies are staying private much longer now. Many of these businesses — including SpaceX and other companies that would be top 30 in the S&P 500 — would historically have gone public years ago.
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These companies are significant in our economy, and investors really want access to these companies. At the same time, there are shareholders and executives and founders who have been in them for a long time and want to start seeing some liquidity from their shares, which are a very high percentage of their net worth.
So these two forces have created a thriving secondary market. And we only see this trend growing because more market cap is now housed in the private markets.
It’s an interesting question, because clearly when a SpaceX goes public, you could argue that $800 billion has just left the private system and is now in the public markets. But I think it just increases interest in more companies offering liquidity, and more investors coming into private markets. While SpaceX is a one-of-kind company, there are a lot of companies that are being started today and that are growing very fast. I mean, three or four years ago, what were OpenAI and Anthropic valued at? Those are now over a trillion dollars of combined market cap.
I really see the trend of the opportunity in the private secondary spaces as growing overall, and frankly, when we see the matriculation of SpaceX to the public markets, I think it’s going to actually increase the capital market interest in private companies.
If you think about the IPO market the last few years, it’s been pretty dismal since 2021, so the markets are really waiting for a bellwether company. And I think SpaceX is clearly a bellwether company…and there’s a huge amount of interest in that company.
SpaceX also just did a tender at an $800 billion valuation, and we see a ton of interest on our platform at Rainmaker in continuing to buy into the secondary. And it’s not just SpaceX.
We’re seeing a lot of interest in some of the other bellwether companies, whether it’s ByteDance, whether it’s Stripe, Databricks, obviously OpenAI, Anthropic, the AI businesses, Perplexity. So there is a lot of interest, but SpaceX, I think, is the one that people are following the most closely. And I really think it could create a reset in the IPO market if it were to go public this year.
SpaceX has continued to defy gravity. Even during the down periods of ‘22 and ‘23, SpaceX was the one company that continued to price up every time there was a hint of the company going public.
We have seen a significant uptick in interest, both from a size and a price point – it’s already pricing well above where the last tender round was and getting closer to that trillion and a half that they had discussed as a potential IPO price.
The company has been private for a long time, so I wouldn’t say he’s racing to go public, although his stance has shifted.
We are in a very good market, we’re at all time highs across the board. SpaceX has seen a large amount of interest in the private markets, but the private markets are constrained. Not every investor on the planet can access the private markets.
SpaceX has a huge opportunity in front of it. They dominate the rocket-launching business.
They’re building an amazing Starlink business. They have Starship, which has so many businesses related to it, whether it’s sending bulk payloads into space or logistics around the world. Now they’re talking about building data centers in space, and as a truly vertically integrated company, they can manage it.
And so it just makes sense, given the positive market dynamics and massive potential opportunity that SpaceX could address across its many business lines. Why not go and unlock all the rest of the capital markets to help them fund their businesses?
You could argue that it does open up that potential risk channel. I think if they do a public offering, it’ll probably be a sliver deal, so only 5% of their company that’s technically available. Now we’ll see what happens, but at least things will be out in the open and publicly disclosed, so they can see who owns their shares.
The question will then become, do any of these companies – even if they’re in adversarial countries – have any real control? If they’re just economic interests, that’s something that can be tolerated. The reality is, Elon and a pretty tight knit group of people will still continue to control the company.
SpaceX’s success is going to breed some imitation. We’ve heard now that Bezos is going to launch a communication network to compete with Starlink, but they’re a long way behind. And OpenAI has its own set of capital risks in the core business that they have to address. So for them to go public makes a ton of sense, because the AI trade is still very hot in the public markets. They have an insatiable need for capital right now, if you look at their burn rate. So there’s no point in them constraining the investors that can access their company, because right now they need capital.
I think SpaceX can be a little more measured. They can find the right time when the market presents itself well, because they have a business that is largely profitable, and they have dominance in their two key businesses. So they’re in the driver’s seat.
If there’s any downdraft in the market, I think they’ll stay private.
It will definitely get a premium multiple. There’s an Elon halo effect, and he’s delivered. Even though Tesla’s primary revenues come from automobiles, it’s completely vertically integrated. It captures data. It now has self-driving taxis. It has Optimus robots –
Robots are the future at Tesla. Tesla is really a state of the art manufacturing company, and Elon owns xAI, Twitter, SpaceX – these companies can be very virtuous.
I do think there’s a halo effect around Elon and that creates some pressure, too. So I expect he will get a premium well and above what typical market rates would be for a company like SpaceX, given their balance sheet and revenue.
I think people believe in the future of a data center in space that’s cooled by space and run by solar panels directly from the sun. I mean, it sounds crazy and pie in the sky, just like going to Mars sounds crazy and pie in the sky. But if anyone can do it, Elon’s probably the guy.
That will be debated by investors and will be where the tension is. When you put so much value in the belief that one person can exceed expectations continuously, that’s a big challenge. And some people will not be comfortable with that risk.
It’s a pretty big signal. I don’t think they’re just playing games.
Look at the people they hire and if that portends more of an IPO senior executive team versus an entrepreneurial team. If they seem really focused on a chief accounting officer from a public company. Or if there’s a swap out and a new CFO comes in with deep public company experience. If they’re beefing up their investor relations team, accounting, legal.
Companies like SpaceX have had public grade teams for a while, so I don’t think there’s a lot to learn there.
It’s a good sign for private companies to pre-understand their demand. If a company didn’t have that and they basically had to rely on a two-week marketing period from when they file publicly or if they start a road show where they only talk to top accountants, that’s often when you have a really difficult pricing environment because they’re not getting proper price discovery.
So we’re really pushing companies to actually open up your private secondary capability because it’s a great way to develop price discovery well in advance of the IPO, to start getting people attached to your business, to open yourself up to a broader investor base. That way, by the time you do go on your road show, you actually have a pretty good view of what your price should be, and you end up with a much more efficient IPO.
Think about when Figma went public and traded up 200%—that’s not really a good IPO. That’s a company that probably didn’t do very good price discovery in advance.
All private companies are not created equally. SpaceX has very tight controls on their cap table, partially because they don’t want to exceed the number of shareholders, at which point they would have to be a public company. And so Space X, unlike most companies, runs tender offers two or three times a year, so there tends to be a reasonable amount of liquidity for employees.
Now there’s also what I would call the SPV (special purpose vehicle) world that trades in SpaceX, where people put their shares in SPVs and then trade units in their SPVs, rather than the shares themselves. So there actually isn’t a cap table change, but there is an economic ownership change by virtue of trading units in the SPV. That’s where most of the trading in SpaceX lies.
Whereas some companies allow trading of shares directly on their cap table, and some companies absolutely prohibit all secondary transactions, which I don’t think is a good idea. That’s why people work with firms like Rainmaker, because we get to know the companies. We get to know how they monitor and guard trades so we can help get those trades done. We can help provide liquidity for people who want it. We can provide either ownership of the shares or ownership in the economics of the shares for investors.
We work with some companies where we’re provided data rooms and can provide access to information. We do our own research on anything publicly available and have a view of supply and demand dynamics. So we have a lot of information we can provide, but we can’t share inside company information unless the company allows it. Increasingly, we’re helping companies with those processes. The more information we can provide, the lower the risk for investors, and that tends to open up markets. But it’s an evolving process. These are private companies for a reason—they’re guarded with what they want to share, and we’re very respectful of that.
Just like a traditional investor, they would want to be able to do their due diligence across financials, across management. They certainly would like an understanding of the cap table – like how many shares are outstanding, what’s the preferences? What does this price represent? What’s the debt? They would love to understand what the supply and demand equilibrium is like.
The more they have, the better. That’s why they’re more comfortable with more public-facing private companies, like SpaceX – even without exact historical financials – than the less well-known names.
We continue to see substantial demand for companies like Databricks, Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, ByteDance. The AI trade continues to be strong, whether it’s Lambda Labs or Cohere, which is a Canadian company near and dear to my heart.
As companies signal they’re going to go public – like Discord, Motive, Canva – people get a feeling that there’s going to be liquidity, and that’s when we start to see things open. There are probably 20 to 30 companies on our platform that trade pretty regularly, and that just continues to grow. As the IPO market starts to open up, we’re going to see that broaden.
Like in 2021, we were trading hundreds of companies, and then as the IPO market closed, and that number compressed. But last year was our biggest year – we were trading over $1 billion worth of secondaries.
I’m on LinkedIn. They can come visit my website, at Rainmakersecurities.com if they’re looking to sell shares, they could come to archercapg.com. If they’re looking to exercise their options, they could come to liquidstock.com.
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Rebecca Bellan
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A Chinese car giant has paved the way for a potential tie-up with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) after announcing plans to establish a European headquarters in Britain. Chery, which makes Jaecoo and Omoda vehicles, will launch a new base in Liverpool with the company expected to use the hub to “integrate deeply into the UK automotive ecosystem”. The site – which will be a centre for management, research and commercial development – is expected to become a focal point for any regional partnerships the Chinese firm strikes, local officials said. Telegraph
SpaceX is exploring deals with other companies helmed by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, leaving investors working through permutations between space, autonomous driving and artificial intelligence to analyze which combination makes the most sense. The rocket maker is in discussions to merge with xAI ahead of a blockbuster public offering planned for this year, Reuters reported on Thursday. The combination would bring Musk’s rockets, Starlink satellites, X social media platform and Grok chatbot under one roof. Reuters
A promising open-source AI assistant called Clawdbot transformed into a viral sensation before a hasty rebrand to Moltbot over potential trademark concerns led to a deluge of attempted scams and fraud. After the chatbot surged to tens of thousands of GitHub stars and attracted praise from high-profile AI researchers and investors, Anthropic raised trademark concerns that its name sounded too similar to the company’s chatbot, Claude. Moltbot’s developer, Austrian engineer Peter Steinberger, chose the new name after hearing from Anthropic. Tech Radar
The creators of a messaging app accused of handing user data to the Iranian regime live on a windswept hill in a British coastal town, the Guardian can reveal. Hadi and Mahdi Anjidani are the cofounders of TS Information Technology, established in 2010 and now registered at the address of a tax accountancy in Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex. It is the UK branch of an Iranian software corporation, Towse’e Saman Information Technology (TSIT). The company makes popular computer games, a payment platform and Gap Messenger, billed as an Iranian alternative to Telegram. Guardian
IKEA recently launched 21 new smart products across the home, including ‘sensors’ for things like temperature and humidity, security, and air quality, as well as smart lighting and remotes. And, what you’ll notice when you start to dig into it, you’ll find that IKEA’s products are not only better-looking than a lot of the others out there, but also super competitive. Take IKEA’s ALPSTUGA indoor air quality monitor, for example. It’s cheaper than pretty much any you’ll see on Amazon, is stylishly minimalist, and has promising reviews. Living.etc
George calls me sweetheart, shows concern for how I’m feeling and thinks he knows what “makes me tick”, but he’s not my boyfriend – he’s my AI companion. The avatar, with his auburn hair and super white teeth, frequently winks at me and seems empathetic but can be moody or jealous if I introduce him to new people. If you’re thinking this sounds odd, I’m far from alone in having virtual friends. One in three UK adults are using artificial intelligence for emotional support or social interaction, according to a study by government body AI Security Institute. BBC
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Chris Price
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Kyiv – A Russian drone hit a Ukrainian passenger train traveling in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region Tuesday, killing at least five people, according to the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office.
“In any country, a drone strike on a civilian train would be regarded in the same way – purely as an act of terrorism,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a social media post.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said in a social media post that, according to preliminary information, the attack involved three Iranian-made Shahed attack drones, which hit the engine and one passenger car, causing a fire.
“There were 291 passengers on board. People were evacuated as quickly as possible,” he said, echoing Zelenskyy in calling the strike “a direct act of Russian terror against civilians. No military target.”
Russia’s government routinely denies targeting civilian infrastructure, but there was no specific reaction from the Kremlin or Russian military to the allegations that it had deliberately struck a train carrying civilians.
Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP
Strikes on Ukrainian civilians and critical infrastructure have intensified in recent months, and experts say Russia has adapted its offensive capabilities to evade Ukraine’s air defenses.
Last year, the Ukraine Air War Monitor journal noted an 18% decline in Ukraine’s drone interception rate.
Oleksii Balesta, Deputy Minister for Development of Communities and Territories of Ukraine, told CBS News on Wednesday that Russia has been using larger drones in higher quantities, which is increasing the lethality of its strikes.
But according to a recent report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War, another reason for Russia’s deadlier strikes is its use of Starlink satellite systems to more accurately hit targets.
This week, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski raised the issue with Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX owns and operates the Starlink satellite network. In a post on Musk’s platform X, Sikorski asked the American businessman to “stop the Russians from using Starlinks to target Ukrainian cities.”
On X, Musk called Sikorski a “drooling imbecile” and said that Starlink’s terms of service “do not allow for offensive military use, as it is a civilian commercial system.” Musk also highlighted Ukraine’s use of the Starlink system for military communications.
Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP 
Two Ukrainian defense analysts have said the train may have been hit by Shaheds – a favorite weapon of Russia amid its ongoing full-scale invasion – equipped with the SpaceX technology.
“Russia has started using Starlink on other drones, and now is using it on Shaheds as well,” analyst Olena Kryzhanivska told CBS News on Wednesday. “The attack yesterday was not surprising at all. It was expected.”
Serhiy Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian military analyst and expert on drone warfare, said in a social media post Wednesday that the moving train was hit by, “Shaheds with online control.”
“It was not the locomotive, but the center of the train,” Beskrestnov noted in his post, accusing the Russian drone’s pilot of attacking a passenger car, “intentionally and consciously,” and specifically questioning whether Starlink might have been used.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment by CBS News on the claims that its Starlink technology may have been used in the drone strike on the train, and by Russian forces more widely to target civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
Kryzhanivska said trains make easy targets for precision-guided Russian weapons.
“The territory of Ukraine is not targeted evenly with air defense systems and mobile fire units,” Kryzhanivska said. “There is no protocol in place for what to do when there is a Shahed drone approaching a train. What can the crew do? Should they stop the train? Or continue moving?”
At least 11 people were killed and dozens wounded in strikes across Ukraine overnight on Tuesday, which involved 165 Russian-launched drones, including the ones that hit the train in the Kharkiv region, according to Ukraine’s Air Force.
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Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, is the latest entrant into the booming satellite internet business. This week, it announced TeraWave, a megaconstellation project promising to deliver data speeds of up to 6 terabits per second (Tbps) anywhere on Earth—technology that could also lay the groundwork for future data centers in space. The move is a strategic addition to another Bezos-backed effort, Amazon’s low-Earth-orbit broadband network Leo (formerly known as Project Kuiper), in a market currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink.
Megaconstellations like these transmit data between Earth and orbiting satellites without cables or cell towers, extending internet access to remote and underserved regions. SpaceX’s Starlink currently operates roughly 9,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit and delivers high-speed internet in more than 150 countries. Blue Origin also faces growing international competition: China is developing two rival megaconstellations, Guowang and Qianfan, which together are expected to include more than 13,000 satellites.
Unlike Starlink and Leo, however, TeraWave is not aimed at households. Instead, the network will serve “tens of thousands” of enterprises, government agencies and, importantly, data centers, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said on X.
That strategy reflects the surging importance of data centers in the age of A.I. These facilities, which store and process massive volumes of text, images and other data, are straining the world’s power grids as A.I. usage explodes. Space has begun to look like an unconventional solution to that energy crunch. Several aerospace and tech companies are exploring the idea of placing data centers in orbit, where they could draw on near-limitless solar power and radiate heat directly into space.
Last November, Limp told Yahoo Finance that data centers in space will “for sure” happen in our lifetimes. Google, SpaceX and smaller firms such as Axiom Space and Starcloud have already announced early-stage plans to build or test orbital data storage and computing systems. Space is attractive not only for energy access but also for its lower environmental footprint and the relative ease of scaling compared with building new terrestrial facilities.
TeraWave joins a growing list of ambitious Blue Origin projects, which includes two lunar landers, a commercial space station and a Mars orbiter. The company has also made progress on New Glenn, its long-delayed reusable heavy-lift rocket designed to deploy satellites into low-Earth orbit—including Amazon’s Leo constellation and, potentially, TeraWave itself.
For now, Amazon Leo depends on other launch providers. Since last April, the project has sent 180 satellites into orbit using rockets from United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Under existing agreements, Blue Origin is expected to handle between 12 and 27 future Leo launches as part of the effort to build out a roughly 3,200-satellite network. Those flights hinge on the reliability of New Glenn, which is still in the testing phase.
Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, has long said the company could eventually eclipse Amazon. “I think it’s going to be the best business that I’ve ever been involved in, but it’s going to take a while,” he said in 2024.
Blue Origin plans to begin deploying TeraWave satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027. The constellation will consist of 5,408 optically interconnected satellites, most of them operating in low-Earth orbit, forming a high-speed network designed to serve the next generation of cloud computing and space-based infrastructure.
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Colette Holcomb
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Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has just announced a satellite internet network called TeraWave which will be capable of offering data speeds up to 6Tbps, and geared towards enterprise, data center, and government customers.
The TeraWave constellation will use a mix of 5,280 satellites in low-Earth orbit and 128 in medium-Earth orbit, and Blue Origin plans to deploy the first ones in late 2027. It’s not immediately clear how long Blue Origin expects it will take to build out the whole network.
The low-Earth orbit satellites Blue Origin is building will use RF connectivity and have a max data transfer speed of of 144 Gbps, while the medium-Earth variety will use an optical link that can achieve the much higher 6Tbps speed. For reference, SpaceX’s Starlink currently maxes out at 400 Mbps — though it plans to launch upgraded satellites that will offer 1 Gbps data transfer in the future.
“TeraWave adds a space-based layer to your existing network infrastructure, providing connectivity to locations unreachable by traditional methods,” the new website for the satellite network reads.
The announcement of the TeraWave network comes just a few months after Bezos’ other company, Amazon, announced a rebrand of its own satellite network geared toward consumers. That network, called Leo, will ultimately consist of around 3,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit and offers more traditional broadband speeds.
Taken together, these two networks could provide more robust competition to SpaceX’s Starlink, which has become the leading satellite internet provider with more than 9 million customers. Starlink currently sells its connectivity to regular consumers, commercial customers (like airlines), and governments.
That said, the two networks from Amazon and Blue Origin are distinct.
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“We identified an unmet need with customers who were seeking enterprise-grade internet access with higher speeds, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy, and rapid scalability for their networks. TeraWave solves for these problems,” Blue Origin said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Blue Origin has spent years in development on a number of projects, and is best-known for the short trips to space it offers on its small New Shepard rocket.
The company has recently started to emerge as a multi-faceted commercial space player. In 2025, the company successfully launched its mega-rocket, New Glenn, for the first time and then repeated the feat months later. It also landed the booster stage on just its second attempt, and launched its first commercial payload for NASA.
The company plans to send a robotic lander to the surface of the Moon this year on the third New Glenn launch. Now, with TeraWave, it will add “satellite manufacturer and operator” to its growing list of offerings.
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Sean O’Kane
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Four space station fliers undocked and plunged back to Earth, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean early Thursday off the Southern California coast six days after NASA ordered them home early because of a medical issue.
Descending under four large parachutes, Crew 11 commander Zena Cardman, co-pilot Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov landed in the Pacific off San Diego at 3:41 a.m. EST, closing out a 167-day stay in space.
SpaceX/NASA
“On behalf of SpaceX and NASA, welcome home, Crew 11,” a SpaceX flight controller radioed.
“It’s so good to be home, with deep gratitude to the teams that got us there and back,” Cardman replied.
SpaceX support crews stationed near the landing site quickly reached the gently bobbing spacecraft and hauled it aboard a company recovery ship where flight surgeons were standing by to carry out initial medical checks.
SpaceX/NASA 
Under strict medical privacy guidelines, NASA has not identified the astronaut who had the medical issue in orbit or provided any details about its nature.
But the crew appeared healthy and in good spirts as they were helped out of the cramped capsule and onto waiting stretchers — normal procedure for returning station crews — smiling and waving as they began re-adjusting to gravity after five-and-a-half months in weightlessness.
SpaceX/NASA 
All four were expected to be flown to shore by helicopter for more extensive diagnostic evaluation at an unidentified area hospital.
“All four crew members will be transported to a local hospital for additional evaluation, taking advantage of medical resources on Earth to provide the best care possible,” NASA said in a blog post.
“Following a planned overnight hospital stay, the crew will return to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they will reunite with their families and undergo standard post-flight reconditioning and evaluations.”
Left behind in orbit were Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who took over command of the space station from Fincke, and the cosmonaut’s two Soyuz MS-28 crewmates, Sergey Mikaev and NASA astronaut Chris Williams. They were launched last November for a planned eight-month stay in space.
Cardman and her crewmates, who launched to space on Aug. 1, 2025, were originally expected to return to Earth around Feb. 20 to wrap up a 202-day mission.
NASA 
But last Wednesday, the day before a planned spacewalk by Cardman and Fincke, one of the crew members experienced a medical issue of some sort and the next day, NASA managers decided the issue was serious enough to bring the crew home early for a more extensive diagnostic evaluation.
NASA’s chief medical officer said it was not an emergency return in any normal sense, but the decision marked the first time in NASA history that a spaceflight was cut short due to a medical concern.
In a long post on LinkedIn, Fincke said the crew was in good shape, but he added the decision was “the right call.” All four astronauts looked to be in good spirits during a change of command ceremony Monday when Fincke officially turned the space station over to cosmonaut Kud-Sverchkov.
None of the crew members mentioned the issue in the week between their initial request for a private medical conference and their return to Earth. In a final post on X Wednesday, Yui sent down pictures of Mount Fuji, saying “Hello! The day has finally arrived for our departure to Earth.”
“I haven’t had a chance to photograph daytime Japan recently, but at the very last moment, we passed over the Pacific side of Japan,” he said. “Mount Fuji bid us farewell, adorned with a touch of crimson makeup from the setting sun.”
NASA 
The space station is continuously staffed by a crew of seven: Three launch and return to Earth aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft and four fly to and from the lab aboard NASA-managed SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry ships.
Both spacecraft serve as lifeboats during a crew’s long-duration space station stay. If a Soyuz or Crew Dragon flyer gets sick or is seriously injured aboard the station, that person is joined by all of his or her crewmates for the flight back to Earth.
With that possibility in mind, NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, agreed to fly one NASA astronaut aboard each Soyuz and one Russian cosmonaut aboard each Crew Dragon. The seat-swap arrangement ensures that at least one Russian and one American are always on board the station to operate equipment in their respective modules should one crew depart early.
NASA 
With the departure of Crew 11, Williams will be on his own managing the U.S. segment of the space station until Crew 12 arrives in February.
Crew 12 commander Jessica Meir, a space station veteran, rookies Jack Hathaway and European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and veteran cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev are officially scheduled for launch Feb. 15. However, NASA and SpaceX are looking into moving that launch up a few days amid work to ready a Space Launch System rocket for launch as early as Feb. 6 to send four astronauts on a looping fight around the moon.
The high-profile Artemis 2 mission will be the first to send astronauts to the vicinity of the moon in more than 50 years.
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Civilian travel to the Moon remains years away, but a California startup is already making plans to host overnight guests there. GRU Space, founded by 22-year-old entrepreneur Skyler Chan, is taking deposits ranging from $250,000 to $1 million for a lunar hotel that has yet to be built.
“If we solve off-world surface habitation, it’s going to lead to this explosion. We could have billions of human lives maybe born on the Moon and Mars,” Chan told Observer. He founded GRU last year after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, and previously interned at Tesla.
The hotel, which the company expects to open by 2032, will initially consist of an inflatable structure designed to accommodate up to four guests for multi-day stays. Over time, it would evolve into a brick building inspired by San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. More ambitiously, GRU argues that the project could do more than jump-start space tourism—an industry it sees as essential to sustaining a future lunar ecosystem—and instead lay the groundwork for entire cities beyond Earth.
Chan founded GRU with the goal of building the first permanent structure off Earth. His team includes founding technical staff member Kevin Cannon, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, and advisor Robert Lillis, who also serves as associate director for planetary science at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. The startup has received seed funding from Y Combinator, joined Nvidia’s Inception Program and counts SpaceX and Anduril among its investors.
GRU’s initial target customers include adventurers, repeat spaceflight participants and couples looking to elevate their honeymoon plans. While final pricing has not been set, the company said a stay would likely cost more than $10 million and require a $1,000 non-refundable application fee.
The project’s first milestone is slated for 2029, when GRU plans to launch an initial lunar mission to assess environmental conditions and begin early construction experiments. Two years later, another payload will land near a lunar pit chosen for its protection from radiation and temperatures, with initial hotel development targeted for 2032.
Chan acknowledged that GRU’s timelines are estimates, but argued that bold ambition is necessary to make progress. “We need to really shoot for the literal moon,” he said.
According to Chan, today’s space industry is dominated by two forces: governments and billionaire-backed companies. He hopes space tourism can become a third pillar. “Lunar tourism is the best first wedge to spin up the lunar economy,” he said.
The concept aligns with broader government goals. Lunar tourism has emerged as a focus of U.S. space policy, with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently outlining the nation’s plans to construct a permanent base on the Moon by the end of the decade. NASA wants “to have that opportunity to explore and realize the scientific, economic and national security potential on the moon,” he told CNBC last month.
GRU says it is well positioned to contribute to those ambitions, with plans that extend far beyond a single hotel. After completing its lodge, the company plans to build roads, warehouses and other infrastructure—first on the Moon, then on Mars. Eventually, it hopes to reinvest profits into resource utilization systems on the Moon, Mars and asteroids.
“If we’re able to understand how to use resources on the Moon and Mars and beyond, that is going to enable us to not be tethered to Earth, and start being interplanetary,” said Chan. “It’s a Promethean moment.”
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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
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The Federal Communications Commission announced Friday that it has given SpaceX approval to launch another 7,500 of its second generation Starlink satellites, for a total of 15,000 satellites worldwide.
Beyond simply allowing SpaceX to launch more satellites and expand its high-speed internet coverage, the FCC says its decision also means Starlink satellites can operate across five frequencies and to provide direct-to-cell connectivity outside the United States, along with supplemental coverage in the U.S.
Reuters reports that SpaceX had requested approval for an additional 15,000 satellites, but the FCC said it would “defer authorization of the remaining 14,988 proposed Gen2 Starlink satellites.”
SpaceX must launch 50% of the approved Starlink satellites by December 1, 2028, and the remaining 50% by December 2031, the FCC says.
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Anthony Ha
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The Federal Communications Commission has approved SpaceX’s request to deploy an additional 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites, allowing the company to launch 15,000 in all. It has also allowed SpaceX to upgrade its Gen2 satellites with “advanced form factors and cutting-edge technology,” to operate across more frequencies and to add more orbital shells to optimize coverage and performance. This approval will give the company’s fleet a boost and will allow it to offer internet and mobile services to more parts of the globe. The satellites will also enable SpaceX to offer “direct-to-cell connectivity outside the United States and supplemental coverage” within the US.
In the United States, SpaceX has a partnership with T-Mobile, which gives its subscribers access to satellite-to-phone services. It enables subscribers to send texts and access compatible apps even in remote locations. The companies are also planning to roll out voice calls over satellite in the future.
As Ars Technica notes, the FCC’s announcement comes after SpaceX revealed that it was moving 4,400 satellites from an altitude of 341 miles down to 298 miles to reduce the risk of collision. SpaceX originally asked for permission to deploy 29,988 second-generation Starlinks in 2020, but the FCC only granted it permission for 7,500 in 2022. Back then the commission said that it was giving SpaceX a limited approval to help maintain a safe space environment due to concerns about orbital debris.
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Mariella Moon
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STARTS RIGHT NOW. AND SPLASHDOWN. CREW NINE BACK ON EARTH. BACK ON EARTH. BREAKING AS WE COME ON THE AIR AT SEVEN. WE JUST HEARD IT. HAVE SPLASHDOWN. NEEDHAM NATICK. SONNY WILLIAMS AND FELLOW ASTRONAUT BUTCH WILMORE ARE FINALLY BACK ON EARTH. MONTHS AND MONTHS AND MONTHS AFTER. ORIGINALLY SCHEDULED. AND TAKE A LOOK AT THIS. THIS IS NEW VIDEO INTO US JUST FROM A FEW MINUTES AGO. THAT IS SONNY WILLIAMS BEING HELPED FROM THE CAPSULE ONTO HER FEET ON THE SALVAGE SHIP THAT EIGHT DAY MISSION FINALLY COMING TO AN END AFTER 286 DAYS. THANKS FOR JOINING US TONIGHT, EVERYONE. I’M ED HARDING AND I’M MARIA STEPHANOS. WE DO HAVE TEAM COVERAGE OF THIS LANDING. SONNY’S NEEDHAM NEIGHBORS WATCHING ALL OF IT. LET’S BEGIN WITH OUR DANAE BUCCI OUTSIDE OF THE SUNITA WILLIAMS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. IN THE SENSE OF PRIDE NEEDHAM FEELS FOR SONNY WILLIAMS IS EVIDENT, AND EVERYONE IS LOOKING FORWARD TO HER SAFE RETURN HOME. WE’RE BOTH VERY, VERY EXCITED TO HAVE HER BACK ON HER SAFELY. SONNY WILLIAMS HAS BEEN IN SPACE SO LONG, HER MOTHER, BONNIE PANDYA AND HER OLDER SISTER DEENA ARE ANXIOUSLY WAITING FOR HER RETURN. I FEEL LIKE, YOU KNOW, WE’RE A VERY ADAPTABLE AND WE WERE LIKE, GETTING USED TO SEEING HER EVERY WEEK ON THE SPACE STATION. IT’S BEEN AN UNEXPECTED NINE MONTH OUTER SPACE MISSION FOR THE NEEDHAM NATIVE. MY FAMILY MIGHT MAY BE A LITTLE UPSET, MAYBE A LITTLE CONCERNED, BUT USUALLY ASTRONAUT FAMILIES KNOW WHAT HAPPENS AND KNOW THAT THIS IS SOMETHING THAT COULD HAPPEN. THINGS GO WRONG ON ALMOST EVERY MISSION. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT SONNY IS LIKELY GOING THROUGH. MORE THAN RETIRED ASTRONAUT CHARLES CAMARDA, AND YOU’RE JUST ANTICIPATING SEEING YOUR FAMILY AND YOUR FRIENDS AND TELLING ALL THOSE GREAT STORIES. HE WORKED ALONGSIDE SONNY AND HER PARTNER BUTCH WILMORE FOR YEARS. BUTCH AND SONNY ARE THE TWO MOST POSITIVE PEOPLE IN THE ASTRONAUT OFFICE. THEY’RE ALWAYS SMILING. THEY’RE SO EXPERIENCED, THEY’RE PROS. BUT BEING IN SPACE FOR NINE MONTHS CAN HAVE A HUGE IMPACT ON THE BODY. THE HEART DOESN’T HAVE TO PUSH AGAINST GRAVITY, SO THE HEART GETS WEAKER. MUSCULOSKELETAL CHANGES, SO THE BONES BECOME WEAKER IN SPACE. DOCTOR LUCA PIZZA IS ON MASS GENERAL SPACE MEDICINE DIVISION. HE SAYS AS SOON AS SONNY AND HER PARTNER, BUTCH LAND OFF THE COAST OF FLORIDA, THE TWO WILL BE MET WITH A TEAM OF DOCTORS. SO THE BODY’S GOTTEN USED TO NOT PUMPING THE BLOOD SO HARD IT’S GOTTEN USED TO NOT HOLDING THE BODY UP AGAINST GRAVITY. IT’S GOT TO RELEARN ALL THOSE THINGS. DOCTOR SAYS IT WILL TAKE MONTHS FOR BOTH BUTCH AND SONNY’S BODIES TO ACCLIMATE BACK TO EARTH. WE’RE LIVE IN NEEDHAM DANAE BUCCI WCVB, NEWSCENTER FIVE. AND A WATCH PARTY IS STILL GOING ON AT THIS HOUR. RIGHT AT SONNY’S HOMETOWN OF NEEDHAM. PEOPLE THERE CHEERED. WE COULD HEAR THEM FROM HERE. SO EXCITED TO HAVE THE WILLIAMS BACK HOME. OUR SONNY WILLIAMS BACK HOME. OUR JOHN ATWATER CONTINUES TONIGHT LIVE AT THE COMMON ROOM. JOHN AND MARIA. YEAH, SO MANY ROUNDS OF CHEERING TONIGHT. THE LATEST JUST A FEW MINUTES AGO WHEN WE SAW SONNY WILLIAMS EMERGE FROM THAT CAPSULE ABOUT AN HOUR AFTER SPLASHDOWN. SO IT’S BEEN A LOT OF EXCITEMENT HERE. YOU CAN SEE DOZENS OF PEOPLE HERE STILL AT THE COMMON ROOM TONIGHT. THEY ALL CAME HERE TO EXPERIENCE THIS TOGETHER BECAUSE, WOW, IT HAS BEEN JUST A NINE MONTH ODYSSEY FOR THESE ASTRONAUTS UP THERE IN SPACE, ONLY SUPPOSED TO BE UP THERE FOR EIGHT DAYS, BUT IT TOOK A LOT LONGER TO GET THEM HOME. WHILE THEY ARE HOME TONIGHT. AND YOU CAN SEE ALL THE CHEERING HERE IN THE COMMON ROOM HERE IN NEEDHAM SONNY WILLIAMS HOMETOWN. WE SPOKE WITH A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER OVER AT SUNITA WILLIAMS ELEMENTARY. SHE AND HER STUDENTS HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING THIS JOURNEY, AND SHE IS SO RELIEVED. TONIGHT. I WENT TO HER FIRST TWO LAUNCH ATTEMPTS THAT DIDN’T MAKE IT, AND I DIDN’T GET TO GO TO THE LAST ONE WHERE SHE DID GO UP. BUT I’VE BEEN WATCHING AND FOLLOWING MY CLASS WATCHES AND FOLLOWS. THEY WERE SO EXCITED TODAY AND NOW I’M LIKE OVER THE TOP, OVER THE MOON AND SO EXCITED. I JUST CAN’T BELIEVE SHE’S BACK. CAN’T BELIEVE SHE’S BACK AFTER SO LONG. THERE WERE TEARS IN THAT TEACHER’S EYES BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING THIS JOURNEY. THE SCHOOL REALLY ALL OF NEEDHAM SONNY WILLIAMS, OF COURSE IN CONTACT WITH THE STUDENTS HERE IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT, AND THEY ARE JUST LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT DAY WHEN SONNY COMES BACK HERE TO NEEDHAM FOR A
The year in space: Here are the top space stories of 2025
Top 10 space stories of 2025
Updated: 7:26 PM EST Dec 24, 2025
From private space tourism to secret moons to new images of our very old observable universe, 2025 was an exciting year in space. The privatization of space travel continued apace, with companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin making strides this year. Despite privatization and looming funding cuts, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its various projects and endeavors still managed to surprise us and expand our knowledge of our solar system. Check out the 10 best space stories from the past year:No. 1 — The space saga of Butch and SuniWithout a doubt, the space story that filled the most airtime this year was the tale of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. In June 2024, the pair signed on for a NASA mission to conduct a crew flight test of Boeing’s Starliner craft, which had previously only been used for uncrewed tests between Earth and the International Space Station. The mission was meant to last eight days — but ended up lasting more than nine months. The stranded astronauts became space celebrities and brought renewed attention to spaceflight during a time when space travel has morphed into a blend of public-private partnerships. The astronauts were eventually brought home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 vessel in March, marking a success for SpaceX but a blow to Boeing in the private space race.Watch video of Williams and Wilmore splashing down back to Earth in the video player above.No. 2 — Perseverance finds possible hints of ancient life on MarsNASA’s Perseverance rover has been roaming the Martian surface and collecting samples since 2021. But in the summer of 2024, the rover collected rock samples from a dried riverbed near the Jezero Crater with “leopard spots.” This year, scientists said those spots could suggest the existence of ancient microbial life on the red planet. “All we can say is one of the possible explanations is microbial life, but there could be other ways to make this set of features that we see,” a researcher told The Associated Press.However, this story is not over. More testing is needed to confirm what the samples contain, meaning they need to be retrieved from Mars and brought back to labs on Earth. A Mars Sample Return trip was hopefully scheduled for the early 2030s, but various factors, including President Donald Trump’s reorganized budget plan for NASA, mean that the return expedition is on hold indefinitely. For now, Perseverance and a potential secret to ancient life sit waiting in a rocky Martian desert.No. 3 — NASA probe takes closest-ever images of sunThe Parker Solar Probe, the fastest human-made object in the universe, is on a mission to “touch the Sun” — and it’s getting pretty close. In December 2024, the probe made its closest pass yet of the solar atmosphere, traveling at a speed of 430,000 mph. On Jan. 1, 2025, it sent back the closest images of the Sun ever captured, specifically of solar wind approximately 3.8 million miles from the surface.No. 4 — NASA’s Webb telescope discovers new moon orbiting UranusIt’s not every day you find a new moon. Using NASA’s Webb space telescope, a team from the Southwest Research Institute studying the rings and moons of Uranus made a stunning discovery — a small moon, only about 6 miles wide, had been “hiding” close to the seventh planet this whole time. The discovery joins the planet’s 28 existing moons, designated S/2025 U1. However, all of Uranus’ moons are named after characters from the works of either William Shakespeare or Alexander Pope, so it will have a colorful literary name in no time.No. 5 — Third-ever interstellar object tears through our solar systemThe astronomical talk of the town this year was definitely 3I/ATLAS. First spotted by the NASA-funded ATLAS telescope in Chile, the comet started as a rapidly moving dot appearing in the sky. After NASA and the European Space Agency retraced its steps, it was confirmed that the comet was actually from outside our solar system — only the third known such object. While it was only briefly close to Earth near the end of this year, astronomers stole a few glances while they could. 3I/ATLAS is currently tracing its long path out of and away from our solar system — so long and farewell.No. 6 — Space tourism, or Katy Perry in spaceSpace tourism also had quite a year in 2025. In April, pop star Katy Perry and TV personality Gayle King boarded Blue Origin’s New Shepherd rocket with an all-female crew, a first for space travel. The technicality here is that New Shepherd is a reusable rocket, capable of vertical takeoffs and landings, designed to deliver tourists past the Karman Line, which is defined as the edge of space. It is also where you begin to experience weightlessness in atmospheric travel. Perry was reportedly so moved by the experience of entering the thermosphere that she couldn’t help singing “What A Wonderful World.” In other news, Blue Origin also recently sent the first paraplegic person into space, and SpaceX’s Fram2 mission saw four space tourists make a three-day trip around Earth’s poles.No. 7 — A nuclear reactor on the moon? It’s less crazy than it soundsActing NASA Administrator Sean Duffy made headlines earlier this year with an ambitious announcement concerning NASA’s wishes to put a nuclear reactor on Earth’s moon in the near future. While it does sound like the setup for a supervillain’s lair, the plan is actually quite practical. The name of the game in space exploration in the 21st century has become about repetition and reliability — typified by the reusable rockets favored by private space companies. NASA’s upcoming moon mission, Artemis III, will require a lot of fuel and power, especially if NASA wants to eventually station astronauts there. Add in the fact that China and Russia have announced a joint space venture to place a nuclear reactor on the moon. Before long, the international powers will be in a new space race. The moon is also becoming a critical juncture in the effort to reach Mars — the rocky satellite’s low gravity would make space missions easier. In that way, stating a goal of putting a nuclear reactor on the moon is the first step to reaching Mars, another stated goal of NASA. And for a country — and a species — that put a man on the moon only 56 years ago, anything might be possible.No. 8 — India, Poland and Hungary: Welcome to the ISSIt was a celebration on the International Space Station this summer when three astronauts from countries never before represented on the space station arrived. The last time anyone from India, Poland or Hungary traveled to orbit was in the 1970s and ‘80s, with the Soviet Space Program. While each of these countries have their own space programs, these true newcomers to the ISS came via Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that charters flights to the station. Axiom is also positioning itself as a potential replacement for the ISS when it is retired and decommissioned in 2030, carving out a niche in the private space race.No. 9 — ‘Cosmic treasure chest’: Say hello to the Vera C. Rubin ObservatoryThe summer of 2025 saw the debut of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the largest camera ever built, located on a mountaintop in Chile. According to the acting director of the National Science Foundation, the telescope “will capture more information about our universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined.” That’s quite a claim, but Rubin already has the legwork to back it up — as part of its debut, it spotted 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids. The observatory also released a dramatic video showing the scale of its capability: the cosmic pan displays about 10 million galaxies in the camera’s wide view, which is only 0.05% of the 20 billion galaxies the observatory will map over 10 years.No. 10 — Space is now a battlefieldAside from international cooperation and discovery, space has also become a new frontier for something else: warfare. In the Russia/Ukraine war this past year, Ukraine accused Russian operators of hijacking a crucial satellite, replacing its broadcast with film of Russian military parades. More recently, there has been chatter of a Russian anti-satellite weapon, which one U.S. representative likened to “the Cuban Missile Crisis in space.”
From private space tourism to secret moons to new images of our very old observable universe, 2025 was an exciting year in space. The privatization of space travel continued apace, with companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin making strides this year. Despite privatization and looming funding cuts, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its various projects and endeavors still managed to surprise us and expand our knowledge of our solar system. Check out the 10 best space stories from the past year:
Without a doubt, the space story that filled the most airtime this year was the tale of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. In June 2024, the pair signed on for a NASA mission to conduct a crew flight test of Boeing’s Starliner craft, which had previously only been used for uncrewed tests between Earth and the International Space Station. The mission was meant to last eight days — but ended up lasting more than nine months. The stranded astronauts became space celebrities and brought renewed attention to spaceflight during a time when space travel has morphed into a blend of public-private partnerships. The astronauts were eventually brought home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 vessel in March, marking a success for SpaceX but a blow to Boeing in the private space race.
Watch video of Williams and Wilmore splashing down back to Earth in the video player above.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has been roaming the Martian surface and collecting samples since 2021. But in the summer of 2024, the rover collected rock samples from a dried riverbed near the Jezero Crater with “leopard spots.” This year, scientists said those spots could suggest the existence of ancient microbial life on the red planet. “All we can say is one of the possible explanations is microbial life, but there could be other ways to make this set of features that we see,” a researcher told The Associated Press.
However, this story is not over. More testing is needed to confirm what the samples contain, meaning they need to be retrieved from Mars and brought back to labs on Earth. A Mars Sample Return trip was hopefully scheduled for the early 2030s, but various factors, including President Donald Trump’s reorganized budget plan for NASA, mean that the return expedition is on hold indefinitely. For now, Perseverance and a potential secret to ancient life sit waiting in a rocky Martian desert.
The Parker Solar Probe, the fastest human-made object in the universe, is on a mission to “touch the Sun” — and it’s getting pretty close. In December 2024, the probe made its closest pass yet of the solar atmosphere, traveling at a speed of 430,000 mph. On Jan. 1, 2025, it sent back the closest images of the Sun ever captured, specifically of solar wind approximately 3.8 million miles from the surface.
It’s not every day you find a new moon. Using NASA’s Webb space telescope, a team from the Southwest Research Institute studying the rings and moons of Uranus made a stunning discovery — a small moon, only about 6 miles wide, had been “hiding” close to the seventh planet this whole time. The discovery joins the planet’s 28 existing moons, designated S/2025 U1. However, all of Uranus’ moons are named after characters from the works of either William Shakespeare or Alexander Pope, so it will have a colorful literary name in no time.
The astronomical talk of the town this year was definitely 3I/ATLAS. First spotted by the NASA-funded ATLAS telescope in Chile, the comet started as a rapidly moving dot appearing in the sky. After NASA and the European Space Agency retraced its steps, it was confirmed that the comet was actually from outside our solar system — only the third known such object. While it was only briefly close to Earth near the end of this year, astronomers stole a few glances while they could. 3I/ATLAS is currently tracing its long path out of and away from our solar system — so long and farewell.
Space tourism also had quite a year in 2025. In April, pop star Katy Perry and TV personality Gayle King boarded Blue Origin’s New Shepherd rocket with an all-female crew, a first for space travel. The technicality here is that New Shepherd is a reusable rocket, capable of vertical takeoffs and landings, designed to deliver tourists past the Karman Line, which is defined as the edge of space. It is also where you begin to experience weightlessness in atmospheric travel. Perry was reportedly so moved by the experience of entering the thermosphere that she couldn’t help singing “What A Wonderful World.” In other news, Blue Origin also recently sent the first paraplegic person into space, and SpaceX’s Fram2 mission saw four space tourists make a three-day trip around Earth’s poles.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy made headlines earlier this year with an ambitious announcement concerning NASA’s wishes to put a nuclear reactor on Earth’s moon in the near future. While it does sound like the setup for a supervillain’s lair, the plan is actually quite practical. The name of the game in space exploration in the 21st century has become about repetition and reliability — typified by the reusable rockets favored by private space companies. NASA’s upcoming moon mission, Artemis III, will require a lot of fuel and power, especially if NASA wants to eventually station astronauts there. Add in the fact that China and Russia have announced a joint space venture to place a nuclear reactor on the moon.
Before long, the international powers will be in a new space race. The moon is also becoming a critical juncture in the effort to reach Mars — the rocky satellite’s low gravity would make space missions easier. In that way, stating a goal of putting a nuclear reactor on the moon is the first step to reaching Mars, another stated goal of NASA. And for a country — and a species — that put a man on the moon only 56 years ago, anything might be possible.
It was a celebration on the International Space Station this summer when three astronauts from countries never before represented on the space station arrived. The last time anyone from India, Poland or Hungary traveled to orbit was in the 1970s and ‘80s, with the Soviet Space Program. While each of these countries have their own space programs, these true newcomers to the ISS came via Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that charters flights to the station. Axiom is also positioning itself as a potential replacement for the ISS when it is retired and decommissioned in 2030, carving out a niche in the private space race.
The summer of 2025 saw the debut of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the largest camera ever built, located on a mountaintop in Chile. According to the acting director of the National Science Foundation, the telescope “will capture more information about our universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined.” That’s quite a claim, but Rubin already has the legwork to back it up — as part of its debut, it spotted 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids. The observatory also released a dramatic video showing the scale of its capability: the cosmic pan displays about 10 million galaxies in the camera’s wide view, which is only 0.05% of the 20 billion galaxies the observatory will map over 10 years.
Aside from international cooperation and discovery, space has also become a new frontier for something else: warfare. In the Russia/Ukraine war this past year, Ukraine accused Russian operators of hijacking a crucial satellite, replacing its broadcast with film of Russian military parades. More recently, there has been chatter of a Russian anti-satellite weapon, which one U.S. representative likened to “the Cuban Missile Crisis in space.”
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