In its current iteration, SpaceX is largely a data company seeking to provide enormous amounts of compute for artificial intelligence. During an earnings call on Tuesday afternoon, company officials spent much of their time discussing ambitious plans to roll out up to 10 GW of compute in 2027—on the ground.

Gone are the days of aspirational talk about sending humans to Mars and settling the red planet. Now it is almost all about artificial intelligence and the data needed to support its expansion. However, the company's long-term ambitions to provide data services from space, initially with the Starlink Internet constellation and eventually through the "Starmind" data center constellation, still rely on an actual rocket.

That would be the Starship vehicle, and during the earnings call, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, provided new performance targets for the vehicle.

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In its current iteration, SpaceX is largely a data company seeking to provide enormous amounts of compute for artificial intelligence. During an earnings call on Tuesday afternoon, company officials spent much of their time discussing ambitious plans to roll out up to 10 GW of compute in 2027—on the ground.

Gone are the days of aspirational talk about sending humans to Mars and settling the red planet. Now it is almost all about artificial intelligence and the data needed to support its expansion. However, the company's long-term ambitions to provide data services from space, initially with the Starlink Internet constellation and eventually through the "Starmind" data center constellation, still rely on an actual rocket.

That would be the Starship vehicle, and during the earnings call, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, provided new performance targets for the vehicle.

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Elon Musk said Tuesday that he would like to see the consolidation of his business empire by formally merging his two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla.

"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said of a potential merger. He was speaking during a question-and-answer period as part of SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call. Musk said, ultimately, it not his decision. "But at the end of the day the shareholders have to be supportive of this."

Musk's talk of a merger comes after a busy year in which SpaceX already acquired Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, in February. In June, SpaceX went public with the largest initial public offering on record.

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Elon Musk said Tuesday that he would like to see the consolidation of his business empire by formally merging his two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla.

"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said of a potential merger. He was speaking during a question-and-answer period as part of SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call. Musk said, ultimately, it not his decision. "But at the end of the day the shareholders have to be supportive of this."

Musk's talk of a merger comes after a busy year in which SpaceX already acquired Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, in February. In June, SpaceX went public with the largest initial public offering on record.

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It has been 13 years since the debut of a new medium-lift rocket in the United States, the Antares vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation.

The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess. The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon. Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.

The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States. Nearly a decade and a half later there is a new generation of medium-lift vehicles coming online, and they are starkly different from Antares, which had not just Russian engines but a core stage manufactured in Ukraine.

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Blue Origin announced a major expansion of its already considerable Florida launch facilities on Friday morning with the intent of eventually flying more than 100 rockets a year from there.

The company said it would add two launch pads for the New Glenn rocket, in addition to two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.

The company also plans to procure two additional landing ships to catch and return the first stage of the New Glenn rocket (it currently has one, named Jacklyn). Finally, Blue Origin said it would add a new customer integration facility, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will feature four payload bays to process multiple missions at the same time.

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NASA on Friday released a much-anticipated "request" to the US commercial space industry to develop private space stations that, as early as 2030, will succeed the International Space Station as a place for astronauts to live in low-Earth orbit.

In a cover letter accompanying the 360-page "request for proposals," NASA stated its plan: "This will ensure NASA has a sustained human presence in LEO for crew members to perform science and exploration." Several private companies that have worked for years on designing and developing such stations have been keen to learn exactly what capabilities NASA is seeking. These new documents finally provide some answers.

NASA's solicitation can be found here. Industry responses are due back to NASA on December 8. NASA said it plans to select "two or more" contractors in this phase of the competition and intends to make a final decision in April.

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Welcome to Edition 9.14 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week, from our perspective, is that United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket appears to be close to launching. We've seen a no-earlier-than launch date for the return to flight mission of October 29 (an Amazon Leo flight), and the next rocket up after that, also an Amazon Leo mission, is also planned for this year. Assuming the solid rocket boosters work, Vulcan could be poised for a major breakthrough next year in cadence.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Nuri rocket notches another success. South Korea successfully deployed five satellites for its first domestically launched microsatellite constellation during the fifth flight of its homegrown Nuri rocket Wednesday, Yonhap News Agency reports. In addition to the primary payload of five New-space Earth Observation Satellite Constellation for National Safety microsatellites, nine of the rocket's 10 CubeSat secondary payloads were released as planned, according to the Korea AeroSpace Administration. PERSAT-02, developed by South Korean startup Quaternion, failed to separate from the rocket.

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The world's largest retailer wants to sell you something else—Internet from space.

Amazon has been developing a constellation of satellites to deliver broadband Internet from low-Earth orbit for the better part of a decade, and the company is just about ready to pull back the curtain. It is entering a market that SpaceX, with its Starlink Internet, has dominated for the last half-decade. Amazon's debut into satellite Internet is being closely watched, not just by some consumers, but by businesses ranging from airlines to shipping companies to governments. Broadband Internet from orbit has proven broadly useful for a lot of purposes, from video games to commerce to warfighting.

But until now, most people had to buy it from Elon Musk and SpaceX. OneWeb has only offered limited services, leaving Amazon as the only real competitor to deliver high-speed Internet globally. Moreover, at the head of the company's broadband efforts is Rajeev Badyal, who led Starlink during its early years, but whom Musk fired eight years ago for moving too cautiously on Starlink.

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As a flight director during NASA's Apollo missions, Gerry Griffin led several lunar landings. He helped bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Later, he directed Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Through these experiences, Griffin learned the value of teamwork in spaceflight—during the dynamic moments that can make or break a successful launch or landing, you absolutely have to trust your colleagues in the trenches.

"When lightning struck the rocket during Apollo 12, we had to react in a hurry," Griffin said in an interview. "With people like John Aaron and Jerry Carr, the trust and communications came through. It made the difference."

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In late 1970, a Titan IIIC rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at what was then called Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It carried a top-secret payload for the US military.

Much has changed in spaceflight since then. The Titan IIIC would bow out in 1982 after dozens of launches. Various Titans continued launching from Space Launch Complex 40 until 2005, at which point the US Air Force—in a competitive process hotly opposed by United Launch Alliance—turned the pad over to a small, largely unknown startup called SpaceX. And Cape Canaveral is now a "Space Force" station.

But those unspecified payloads? Until last month, some of them were still flying operationally.

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