SpaceX

The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has successfully tested SpaceX’s disc-shaped Starfall reentry capsule in an effort to determine the viability of point-to-point rocket cargo deliveries. Starfall carried AFRL-developed cargo pods that were recovered after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, containing essential survival kits that might be needed on real emergency missions.

Trump asked Musk on Wednesday to fully roll back the interruptions that neither has publicly taken responsibility for, The Wall Street Journal reports.

During today’s Q3 SpaceX earnings call, Musk also said the company should “probably” do a “longer presentation on the game plan” for the business.

After Ukraine said a Starshield slowdown had interrupted its military operations, Elon Musk claimed any limits “are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Then the president told reporters, “It wasn’t me... and I don’t think it was Elon.”

A Ukranian official tells Axios that Starshield — SpaceX’s government-focused internet service that runs on Starlink satellites — has been “restored to full capacity.” Sudden restrictions on Ukraine’s Starshield services disrupted the military’s drone operations, officials said on Wednesday.

Here’s a tidbit in SpaceXSI’s announcement post for Grok Voice 3.0 today:

The company’s unsecured debt due in 2032 is now trading below 80 cents on the dollar, Bloomberg reports. “Yikes” is right, Elon — if CoreWeave crumbles, other debt-laden neoclouds might be in trouble, too.

Despite not deploying any new space-internet satellites since early July because of issues at launch partners, Amazon says it’s on track “to launch initial service in 2026” with its existing 396 Leo satellites, having already missed its revised “mid-2026” target. “We’re still doing work to raise them into final position, and then you know there’s a lot of work on the ground to do,” says Amazon VP Chris Weber.

As reported by Reuters, Trump bought up to $1.6 million in Nvidia stock and sold up to $1 million in August. Trump also disclosed an investment of as much as $5 million in SpaceX debt, according to CNBC.

The airline said it will install Starlink across its entire mainland fleet of 1,300-plus aircraft, up from a previous commitment of 500 planes. Installations will begin in early 2027 and use Starlink’s Performance Aero Terminal, which can deliver speeds of up to 1 gigabits per second. Meanwhile, SpaceX founder Elon Musk is predicting Delta Air Lines’ CEO will lose his job over his decision to go with Amazon’s Leo satellite internet.

A satellite equipped with Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday. The mission is part of Google’s Project Suncatcher, an experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers in space.

It finally reached the milestone on Starship’s 14th test flight on Monday, after years of testing. This mission also carried the first 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit.

The Starship 14 mission includes two firsts for its next generation rocket: send the Starship spacecraft into Earth orbit, and insert a few dozen of SpaceX’s larger and more capable V3 satellites into the Starlink constellation for the first time. The 26 satellites will each add 1Tbps of capacity to the constellation, boosting total network capacity by about 3 percent on just this one flight.

Following backlash, YouTube posted on X that when the trailer was “submitted as an ad, it was temporarily restricted by our system. Following review the ad has been cleared to run.” Meta spokesperson Alex Dziedzan said, “This was an error,” and will now run the ads.

If you want to know where the power in tech currently lies, you only need to look at this photo of the head table at Donald Trump’s state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. I see Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su, Apple’s Tim Cook, and SpaceXaiTesla’s Elon Musk seated by the leaders of the world’s two superpowers. The CEOs and / or founders of Alphabet (Google), OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Qualcomm, Micron, Dell, and… Zoom, were also in attendance.

The mission will include two firsts if regulators approve the launch window and the weather holds: send Starship into orbit, and insert a few dozen of SpaceX’s larger and more capable V3 satellites into the Starlink constellation for the first time. The 26 satellites on Flight 14 will each add 1 Tbps of capacity to the constellation, boosting total network capacity by about 3 percent on just this one flight.

xAI’s original lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI alleged “anticompetitive conduct” over Apple and OpenAI’s deal to integrate ChatGPT into iOS. Monday’s dismissal filing, reported on by Reuters, specifies that X and SpaceXAI “do not seek to dismiss its claims against” OpenAI.

SpaceX approached the AI coding startup with an offer, though “the deal talks are not currently active,” according to a report from Bloomberg. The two companies are still reportedly discussing potential partnerships, which could involve Cognition using SpaceX’s computing capacity.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding tool Cursor on Friday. Cursor says it’s going to work on the company’s Grok AI chatbot, which added a new AI agent feature this week.

No specs or timeframe accompanied the photos, or even a justification for why you’d want satellite internet in a taxi that targets dense urban environments where cellphone signal is strong. The car certainly doesn’t need it to drive, but, as Electrek notes, it’s a nice recurring revenue stream for SpaceX, and further justification for the two companies to merge and make Richie Rich another $1 trillion richer.

An escape clause in Elon Musk’s $1 trillion Tesla pay package approved last year would eliminate daunting operational targets if SpaceX were to purchase Tesla, as many expect. Under the terms, an acquisition treats those performance goals as met. Depending on the acquisition price SpaceX sets for Tesla, which Musk can heavily influence, a merger could instantly award him hundreds of millions of Tesla shares and consolidate his voting control.

A roughly five-ton upper stage of a discarded Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the moon on Wednesday after floating in space since its launch last year. The impact, which SpaceX says was unintentional, was too faint for ground telescopes to see, but South Korea’s lunar orbiter has now shared images of the crater it created.

Srini Gopalan in response to SpaceX saying it plans to “acquire quite a few” of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon’s customers by turning Starlink dishes into tiny cellular base stations using the limited spectrum it acquired from EchoStar: