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Tesla announced via its official X account that the next Roadster will finally be unveiled on October 10, nearly a decade after the original 2017 prototype debut. The company's website now shows a countdown teasing possible SpaceX-derived thruster hardware, following earlier reports that the car could include flight-like capabilities.
Tesla posted a teaser on X reading "Go for launch" with a graphic pointing to an October 1 date for unveiling its next Roadster. The vehicle, first announced in 2017, has faced repeated delays, and reports indicate the original design has been scrapped for a completely new one set to debut at this event.
Researchers at Curtin University analyzed 76 million radio images over 29 days using a prototype SKA-Low station and detected 112,534 unauthorized emissions from 1,806 Starlink satellites within the exact frequency band needed to study cosmic dawn hydrogen signals. The leakage, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes not from intentional Starlink transmissions but from unplanned electronic interference radiating through satellite hardware, including periodic 13-kHz tones near 137 MHz.
United Launch Alliance remains one of the few major US rocket companies still focused almost entirely on launch services rather than branching into satellites, spacecraft, or other space businesses. Competitors like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Firefly Aerospace have all expanded beyond launch to capture higher-margin revenue streams, leaving ULA increasingly isolated in a low-margin segment of the industry. This has renewed speculation about whether ULA's parent companies, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, will eventually sell the venture.
A new four-hour documentary by Alex Gibney, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, includes interviews with Elon Musk's first wife Justine Musk, who says he referred to the mothers of his children as interchangeable "breeders." She also described incidents of gaslighting, including Musk misremembering who was holding their infant son when he died of SIDS, and recalled him calling himself "the alpha" at their wedding. Musk has publicly dismissed the film as a "hit piece."
Planet Labs, the San Francisco-based Earth-imaging company, maintains a public ephemerides feed that lists tracking data for its satellite fleet. A query of this data against catalog records shows 97 Planet Labs satellites currently active, spanning several constellations including the newly launched Pelican-11, which was deployed into low Earth orbit via SpaceX's Transporter 17 mission on July 7th.
Startup Besxar, founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, has arranged with SpaceX to fly small canisters called 'fabships' aboard Falcon 9 boosters to test manufacturing semiconductor precursor materials in the vacuum of space. The company's first two units flew on a July Starlink mission, surviving launch and exposing wafer samples to space despite a data system glitch in one canister. Besxar has raised roughly $14 million, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC, to pursue a dozen planned test flights.
SpaceX's Starship 40 flew a suborbital test from Starbase, Texas, to the Indian Ocean in about 65 minutes on July 24, deploying and later intentionally destroying 20 Starlink V3 satellites to validate the deployment system. Unlike prior test flights, this upper stage survived splashdown mostly intact, and SpaceX says retrieving and shipping it back to Texas will take several months.
European space startup The Exploration Company has secured $450 million in a Series C round, which it calls the largest ever raised by a European space company. The Germany-based firm, led by former Airbus and ArianeGroup executive Hélène Huby, plans to use the funds to develop a reusable heavy-lift launcher aimed at rivaling SpaceX. The company says it already has 10 missions booked and over $2 billion in contracts, including commitments from the European Space Agency and NASA.
Stoke Space Technologies has completed the first close of a $1 billion Series E funding round, led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital with participation from Y Combinator and other investors. The company says the capital will support scaling production and flight frequency of its current rocket while funding development of a larger, second-generation vehicle, bringing its total funding to $2.3 billion.
xAI's Grok Build is a terminal-based AI coding assistant that supports mouse clicks for navigation but requires an external editor like Visual Studio Code for direct code edits, unlike rivals such as Google's Antigravity that bundle a full IDE. Users can prompt it to explain a codebase, install dependencies, run a web app, or build one from scratch and get deployment guidance, then iterate with further prompts. Access depends on a Grok plan, with free users hitting token limits quickly and paid SuperGrok tiers ($30 to $300 monthly) offering higher weekly caps.
Several board members from Elon Musk's companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, are directing personal funding toward psychedelic research and a startup pursuing regulatory approval for MDMA-assisted therapy. The investments span both academic studies and commercial drug-development efforts aimed at treating conditions like PTSD.