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SpaceX tracker, launches, and the new space race.
📰 From the Desk
China'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