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Valor Equity Partners, the venture firm led by SpaceX board member Antonio Gracias, has transferred about 8.5% of its SpaceX stake—roughly $8.5 billion worth—directly to its limited partners rather than selling shares and returning cash. An SEC filing shows Valor retains more than 460 million shares after the distribution.
NASA says a precise SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch and flawless early course correction have left the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with enough propellant for at least 22 years of operations, more than double the mission's original five-year baseline plan. The $4.3 billion observatory launched August 30 from Kennedy Space Center and is now heading to its observation post to survey wide swaths of the sky with Hubble-level resolution.
SpaceX plans to launch its 14th Starship test flight as early as September 22 from Texas, pending regulatory approval, marking the first attempt to send the vehicle into orbit. The mission will carry 26 large V3 Starlink satellites to a 275 km orbit, with the upper stage aiming to complete six orbits over roughly 10 hours.
SpaceX announced its 14th Starship test flight for September 22, targeting a 75-minute launch window starting at 7:15 a.m. CT. For the first time, the mission will attempt to place Starship's upper stage into Earth orbit while deploying 26 third-generation Starlink satellites.
Executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and SpaceX loosely agreed over the weekend to slow AI development, backing a three-step proposal from Anthropic's Dario Amodei that calls for third-party auditors, domestic lab oversight and a global slowdown agreement. Critics argue the move looks less like genuine safety policy and more like an attempt by dominant firms to block competitors and open-source rivals while sidestepping binding legal rules.
A Binomial LLC engineer working on GPU texture interchange has published research fitting neural textures and physically based rendering material maps using evolution strategies (ES) instead of traditional backpropagation. The approach avoids gradient-based optimization typically used in neural texture compression and material fitting workflows.
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.