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SpaceX tracker, launches, and the new space race.
📰 From the Desk
Blue Origin Took Outside Money, and Bezos Said the Word IPO
After raising $10 billion in its first round with outside investors, Blue Origin now has a public-market path on the table. New Glenn still has to fly again first.
Flux Desk · 2026-10-10 · 5 min readStarship Finally Reached Orbit, Then Came Home Seven Hours Early
Flight 14 put Ship 41 into orbit and released 26 working Starlink V3 satellites on September 28, then cut a ten-hour mission to three after a vacuum engine quit on the way up.
Flux Desk · 2026-10-09 · 5 min readNASA Bets $1.2 Billion on the Universe Webb Can't See
NASA picked PRIMA, a cryogenic far-infrared telescope, as the first mission in its new Probe class, six months after the only rival concept was ruled out on cost and schedule.
Flux Desk · 2026-09-25 · 5 min readGoogle's Project Suncatcher Puts AI Compute in Orbit for the First Time
Alphabet is moving AI infrastructure beyond the atmosphere. A prototype satellite launch — announced September 24, 2026 — marks the first real-world test of whether space can carry serious compute workloads.
Flux Desk · 2026-09-24 · 3 min readImpulse Space Adds $308M and Its Series D Passes $800M
The space-tug company just extended a single round to $808 million — and its Helios upper stage is the first upper-stage prime ever awarded a slot in National Security Space Launch.
Flux Desk · 2026-09-20 · 5 min readSpaceX Dropped the Catch From Starship's First Orbital Flight
Flight 14 slips to September 28 and loses its most spectacular objective — neither Ship nor Booster will be caught. Both splash down. What's left is the part that actually matters.
Flux Desk · 2026-09-20 · 5 min readSpaceX Flew Its 700th Falcon. NASA Still Has No Second Ride.
The Falcon family hit 700 launches three days after NASA's own watchdog pointed out that both of the agency's space station cargo vehicles, and its only certified crew vehicle, depend on SpaceX.
Flux Desk · 2026-09-14 · 5 min readSpaceX Dropped the Hardest Part of Flight 14
The ship catch is off. Starship 41 now targets orbit, roughly 20 Starlink V3 satellites, a controlled deorbit burn, and an Indian Ocean splashdown — with an FCC filing pointing at September 15.
Flux Desk · 2026-09-08 · 5 min readStarcloud Raises $250M to Put AI Compute in Orbit
Backed by Nvidia and Cisco, the hardware startup is betting that the next frontier for AI infrastructure isn't on the ground. A $2.3 billion valuation says investors agree.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-22 · 3 min readChina's Most Ambitious Moon Mission Is a Robot That Jumps
Chang'e 7 launches August 24 on a Long March 5 with an orbiter, a lander, a rover — and a hopper designed to leap into permanently shadowed craters and drill for water ice.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-21 · 5 min readLandSpace Landed the Booster Eight Months After It Exploded
ZhuQue-3 flew from Dongfeng on August 19 and set its first stage down on legs in Gansu about eight minutes later — the first orbital-class booster recovery by a Chinese commercial company, on the vehicle's second flight.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-21 · 5 min readInfleqtion's Best Customer Is a Government Agency
Record quarterly revenue of $12.6 million, up 116%, with roughly 92% from U.S. sources and the growth driven by a NASA gravity-sensing contract — the clearest picture yet of who actually pays for quantum today.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-16 · 5 min readAstra Was Worth $11 Million. Now It Wants $1 Billion.
Two years after being taken private for $11.25 million following four failures in six launches, Chris Kemp is raising $250 million at a billion-dollar valuation on Rocket 4 and a satellite propulsion business.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-15 · 5 min readThe Sky Survey Finally Got the Other Half of the Sky
SDSS-V's Data Release 20 adds more than 3.3 million optical spectra across 500,000 galaxies and 1.5 million stars — and includes the survey's first optical spectra ever taken from the Southern Hemisphere.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-15 · 5 min readNaver Just Bought Into a Data Center That Floats
Panthalassa's platforms generate their own power from ocean waves, cool with seawater, and send results home over Starlink — and Korea's biggest internet company just invested.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-14 · 5 min readSomebody Finally Built a Satellite to Watch Satellites
Astranis unveiled Perceptor, a maneuverable inspector spacecraft for geostationary orbit — built on a bus that is already flying up there, which is the part nobody else can claim.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-14 · 5 min readSpaceX Is About to Try Catching the Half That Comes Back From Orbit
Flight 14 stacks three firsts in one launch: orbital insertion, operational Starlink V3 deployment, and a tower catch of the Ship itself.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-14 · 5 min readThey Made Quantum Entanglement Out of Sunlight
A Fresnel lens, a millimeter of crystal, and 94% fidelity. Ottawa and Max Planck just removed the laser from the most important trick in quantum optics.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-12 · 5 min read
One Valve on One Engine Grounded Two American Rockets
Blue Origin traced the New Glenn explosion to a main oxygen valve on a single BE-4 — the same engine that flies on ULA's Vulcan, which has its own separate reason for sitting still.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-09 · 5 min read
SpaceX Is Stacking Three Firsts Onto One Starship Flight
Flight 14 goes for orbit, an operational Starlink V3 drop, and the first catch of a returning ship — three unproven maneuvers on one vehicle, late this month.
Flux Desk · 2026-08-06 · 5 min read
Starship Came Back Intact, and the Heat Shield Finally Held
Flight 13 deployed 20 Starlink V3s, relit an engine in space, and floated after splashdown — eight days after the same vehicle aborted at ignition.
Flux Desk · 2026-07-26 · 5 min read
A Two-Armed Robot Launched to Repair Satellites Built to Be Unfixable
Northrop's Mission Robotic Vehicle carries the first dexterous servicing arms to geosynchronous orbit — and the trick that makes it work is a bolt pattern every satellite already has.
Flux Desk · 2026-07-23 · 5 min read
India's First Private Rocket Reached Orbit on Its First Try
Skyroot's Vikram-1 hit 450 kilometers on its debut, making India the third country where a private company has reached orbit — and the first to do it without a failure first.
Flux Desk · 2026-07-20 · 5 min read
Four Engines Didn't Light, and Starship's Schedule Got Tighter
Flight 13 aborted at ignition with the first production Starlink V3 satellites aboard — and NASA needs this vehicle flight-proven by 2027.
Flux Desk · 2026-07-19 · 5 min read
Perseverance Drives Itself: NASA's Rover Completes Its First AI-Planned Mars Traverse
For the first time, Perseverance navigated Mars using routes designed entirely by onboard AI — a quiet but consequential shift in how humanity operates machines at planetary distances.
Flux Desk · 2026-07-14 · 4 min read
SpaceX Acquires Cursor for $60B to Fix Its Struggling AI Division
Using freshly minted post-IPO equity, SpaceX is betting a $60 billion all-stock deal on an AI coding assistant to close the gap between its aerospace ambitions and its internal software reality.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-29 · 3 min read
SpaceX's Starfall Capsule Is a Bet on Cargo That Falls
A 3-meter reentry capsule flew its debut on June 23 — and the FAA paperwork reveals the real ambition: point-to-point cargo through space and a manufacturing platform meant to outlive the ISS.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-28 · 5 min read
SpaceX Just Rented Its Supercomputer to an Open-Source Lab
A $6.3B compute deal with Reflection AI turns Colossus into a commercial cloud — and the market's 10% selloff says the platform pivot isn't free.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-22 · 5 min read
The Phone in Your Pocket Just Got a Bigger Antenna in Orbit
AST SpaceMobile's first Block 2 BlueBirds unfurl the largest commercial phased arrays ever flown — and turn the direct-to-cell race into a contest of physics, not just satellites.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-20 · 5 min read
SpaceX Is About to Price the Biggest IPO in History
At a $1.75 trillion valuation and up to $75 billion raised, SpaceX's June listing dwarfs Saudi Aramco's record — and asks public markets to price a rocket company on a satellite-internet bet that loses money everywhere but orbit.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-09 · 6 min read
Low Orbit Is the New Land Grab
Starlink already owns most of the sky. Amazon's Kuiper is finally launching, direct-to-cell is rewiring the phone in your pocket, and the economics of putting thousands of satellites overhead have become a geopolitical contest no government fully controls.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-04 · 6 min read
The Year Starship Has to Land Itself
SpaceX's biggest rocket is past the proof-of-concept era and into the part that actually matters: catching boosters, refurbishing ships, and turning a sci-fi cost curve into a launch-market fact.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-04 · 7 min read
Mars Without a Plan: How America Lost the Sample Race and China Didn't
NASA's Mars Sample Return is dead, SpaceX pushed its timeline back by a decade, and Beijing is quietly building the spacecraft that will actually bring Martian dirt home.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-03 · 5 min read
NASA Reached the Moon, Then Cut Its Own Budget by 25%
Artemis II flew past the Moon for the first crewed lunar approach since Apollo 17 — and weeks later the White House proposed gutting the agency that did it. The contradiction is the whole story.
Flux Desk · 2026-05-29 · 5 min read
The Year Orbit Became a Conveyor Belt
SpaceX is chasing 145 Falcon 9 flights while Blue Origin re-flies a booster and Rocket Lab readies Neutron — cadence, not spectacle, is now the metric that matters.
Flux Desk · 2026-05-28 · 5 min read
The Tug Boats of Orbit Just Got a $4.3 Billion Bet
While the rest of tech chases autonomous agents and humanoid robots, the hottest new-space startups are quietly winning by building the unglamorous plumbing of orbit — and hiring humans to do it.
Flux Desk · 2026-05-24 · 5 min read
The Sky Learned to Think Before It Sends
Earth observation's 2026 inflection is not sharper pixels — it's satellites that decide what matters in orbit and beam down answers, not images.
Flux Desk · 2026-05-19 · 5 min read