NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on 30 August aboard a SpaceX rocket, sending it roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth to begin observing the Universe. The telescope's 2.4-metre mirror, originally built for surveillance purposes and handed to NASA in 2012, was re-engineered for astronomy and paired with a 300-megapixel infrared camera capable of imaging patches of sky about 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope can capture in one shot.
nature.com
· 2026-09-02
A small nonprofit founded by Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, and Adi Oltean has detailed plans for a low-cost interstellar probe called Fermi Explorer, aiming to launch within three years for a journey to Alpha Centauri that would take roughly 80,000 years to complete. The team, which released an 81-page plan document, is funding the effort through crowdfunding donations and branded merchandise sales rather than government or corporate backing.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-01
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, about eight months earlier than planned. The spacecraft separated successfully and is now heading toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, roughly 1 million miles away, where it will settle into a stable orbit alongside Earth over the next three months.
cnet.com
· 2026-08-31
NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, bound for a location four times farther than the Moon. The observatory carries a 300-megapixel camera built with a repurposed spy satellite mirror and offers a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's. It is only the second NASA-led astrophysics flagship mission launched this century, after Webb in 2021, and notably arrived at the pad ahead of its own deadline.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-08-31
OpenAI announced it will stop supplying its AI models to Cursor, the coding tool acquired by Elon Musk's SpaceX, citing concerns the company won't abide by its usage terms based on past disputes with Musk's businesses. Cursor co-founder Michael Truell said talks are underway to resolve the issue, while Anthropic said it would boost compute support for its Claude models within Cursor. Musk dismissed the move on X, calling Altman and Brockman 'untrustworthy' and repeating claims they 'stole an open source nonprofit.'
slashdot.org
· 2026-08-31
Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX is constructing a foundry in Bastrop, Texas, dedicated to casting turbine blades and vanes, a notoriously difficult manufacturing bottleneck in gas turbine production. Musk said the in-house casting operation could cut up to 18 months off the timeline for bringing new natural gas turbines online, supplementing solar power as SpaceX and Tesla scale up 100GW/year of solar capacity.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-08-30
Elon Musk announced on X that SpaceX will begin manufacturing turbine blades and vanes internally to increase production of natural gas turbine generators used to power AI data centers. The move addresses a supply bottleneck as data center operators increasingly rely on portable gas turbines to bypass slow grid connections, with blade casting alone typically taking 60 to 90 weeks per batch. Musk said SpaceX and Tesla are also each targeting 100GW/year of solar capacity, but gas turbines remain necessary to bridge power needs in the near term.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-08-30
Nvidia's latest SEC 13F disclosure reveals it holds $63.44 billion across just eight public equity positions, with Intel and SpaceX making up roughly 80% of the total value. Notably, seven of the eight holdings saw no new activity last quarter, yet the portfolio's value more than tripled, rising from about $18.4 billion to over $63 billion largely due to price appreciation.
techspot.com
· 2026-08-30
SpaceX is set to launch NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket, with a launch window opening at 7:26 a.m. EDT. The telescope will settle nearly 1 million miles from Earth, using a 300-megapixel infrared camera and a coronagraph to map dark matter and search for Earth-like exoplanets, with all data made publicly available.
science.slashdot.org
· 2026-08-30
NASA's $4.3-billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched successfully atop a SpaceX rocket from Kennedy Space Center, carrying the largest infrared digital camera ever built along with a large mirror originally built for a spy satellite. The observatory, named after NASA's first chief astronomer, is now headed to its operational orbit to study dark energy, map millions of Milky Way stars, and search for exoplanets.
nature.com
· 2026-08-30
Growing numbers of satellites and debris in low-Earth orbit are prompting SpaceX and other operators to repeatedly reposition spacecraft to avoid collisions. The increasing density of objects, ranging from active satellites to defunct hardware and fragments, is straining existing traffic-management practices.
wsj.com
· 2026-08-30
OpenAI said it will stop supplying its AI models to coding startup Cursor, effective Nov. 12, 2026, after SpaceX completed a $60 billion acquisition of Cursor earlier this month. Cursor CEO Michael Truell said OpenAI models handle about 5% of Cursor's user traffic and that talks are underway to resolve the dispute.
cnbc.com
· 2026-08-29
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