La sonda Danuri ha fotografato la macchia scura lasciata dallo schianto di uno stadio superiore di un razzo Falcon 9 di SpaceX sulla superficie lunare. Il componente, lungo 14 metri, è stato spinto fuori rotta dall'interazione tra gravità e vento solare, finendo per impattare vicino al cratere Einstein a oltre 8.000 km/h. L'evento, confermato anche dai rilevamenti dello spettro gassoso dal Very Large Telescope in Cile, ha scavato un nuovo cratere di 18 metri di diametro, riaccendendo l'attenzione dei ricercatori sulla gestione dei detriti spaziali nelle orbite cislunari.
Un étage supérieur de Falcon 9 s'est retrouvé sur une trajectoire de collision avec la Lune. Si nous n’avons aucune image du moment de l’impact, un satellite coréen a pu prendre les premières images du cratère.
As imagens captadas pela sonda Danuri permitiram aos investigadores da Administração Aeroespacial da Coreia do Sul confirmar que a colisão do estágio superior do foguetão da SpaceX causou alterações na superfície lunar. Além da Danuri, a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter da NASA também vai fotografar o local do impacto.
Tesla and SpaceX have confirmed where they’ll build Terafab, the semiconductor megafactory Elon Musk first teased in March. It’s going to Grimes County, Texas, about an hour northwest of Houston.
The companies put the initial phase at roughly $16.8 billion and said the finished site will span more than 100 million square feet, which they’re calling the largest chip manufacturing facility on the planet.
Investors were not impressed by SpaceX’s first-ever earnings report earlier this week. Shares dropped by more than ten percent, even after the company reported higher than expected revenue — comforting financial news which, unfortunately for CEO Elon Musk, was overshadowed by the venture’s massive AI spending.
The same day, SpaceX insiders, including employees and executives, got their first real opportunity to turn their holdings into cash after the total shares available for trading grew from around 639 million to 1.55 billion, a chunk of the stock valued at just over $100 billion being unlocked.
As Reuters put it, investors now faces an “irresistible opportunity to cash out.”
“This has to be the most talked-about lockup in the history of IPO lockups,” institutional brokerage firm R.F. Lafferty & Co CEO Robert Hackel told the agency. “You are going to see a lot of exits.”
It’s no wonder Musk’s rocket company is facing massive pressure this week. Shares are down more than 28 percent over the past month, currently hovering around $114, which is miles below its mid-June record high of $225.
SpaceX’s massive volatility briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire — only for him to lose that title once his rocket company’s stock came crashing back to Earth.
Its current share price is also low enough to keep an additional 455 million shares locked up, since it’s still south of its $135 IPO price, setting the stage for even more volatility if it were to claw itself back to that point.
Musk remaind steadfast in his ambitious vision for the company, from orbital data centers to a fleet of humanoid robots that would enable large scale manufacturing on the surface of the Moon.
During Tuesday’s earnings call, he admitted that his plans sound “totally nuts” and “super sci-fi right now,” but maintained that “it’s going to happen.”
Whether investors continue to buy into his vision, though, is anything but guaranteed. SpaceX’s success so far this year has largely been built on hype surrounding AI. The company was merged with Musk’s AI startup, xAI, bringing in plenty of new investors — but saddling it with billions of dollars in additional debt.
Its space ambitions hinge almost entirely on the success of Starship, a super-heavy launch platform that has yet to complete a single successful flight and landing.
SpaceX’s revenues, meanwhile, are heavily dependent on its Starlink satellite internet service. There’s certainly good news there, but the program also saw its average revenue per user drop over the last quarter, rattling investors.
In short, SpaceX’s path to profitability is inextricably linked to the belief that Musk’s sci-fi dreams can be turned into reality in a short enough time period that the dream won’t collapse in on itself.
“SpaceX wants to tell the story they’re the market leader,” The Westly Group founder Steve Westly told CNBC. “But people still have these questions: how quickly can they grow? How big are the costs going to be before this thing gets to profitability?”
A Redwire subsidiary working on space biotech and pharmaceutical applications has signed an agreement to fly microgravity research payloads on SpaceX’s Starfall reentry vehicle.
Being unbelievably wealthy comes with powerful perks — like getting away with being too cheap to pay people the money they’re owed.
This, allegedly, is what Elon Musk is doing with one of the contractors who helped build his sprawling Colossus data centers near Memphis.
The contractor, Ohio-based Darana Hybrid, has filed two liens against SpaceXAI — formerly known as xAI, before being merged into SpaceX — demanding that Musk’s firm pay more than $136 million for the work it’s done since 2024, the Memphis Business Journal first reported.
“The contractors are alleging they haven’t been paid for years of construction work,” Dima Amro, the reporter who broke the story, told Action 5 News.
Musk’s rapid construction of the two Colossus data centers in the Greater Memphis area has been the center of controversy. To quickly get the facilities online, the company brought in heavily polluting gas turbines that residents complain is making the air hard to breathe. Laggardly payments could be further evidence of the expedient means SpaceXAI took to get the data centers operational as quickly as possible.
According to the Shelby County Register of Deeds website, Darana Hybrid has filed two liens against SpaceXAI, one demanding $18 million for construction at the first Colossus facility near Boxtown, and another for more than $118 million for work at the second facility in Whitehaven.
And that could be just the start. Darryl Cuttell, Darana Hybrid’s owner, is reportedly expected to file more liens, bringing the total money owed to over half a billion dollars.
“So it looks like more liens are going to be coming to the surface,” Amro told Action 5 News. “About $400 million more worth of liens. I was told that that would be filed in Mississippi for the SpaceXAI facilities there.”
According to the reporting, two other companies, USW-Menard Inc and TorcSill Foundations, have also filed liens totalling more than $2.2 million for work done at SpaceXAI’s data center facilities.
The alleged hundreds of millions of dollars in missing money is upending Cuttell’s life, Amro says.
“He said he hasn’t slept in over four months. He’s lost a lot of weight. And he feels like there’s no future right now after filing those liens,” she told Action 5 News.
This isn’t the first time Musk has been accused of ripping off the smaller companies that helped build his business empire. A 2025 investigation by CNN found that contractors for Musk’s automaker Tesla had filed liens for more than $110 million of unpaid money in the past five years, with many of the contractors being small mom-and-pop operations.
At long last, a Moon landing for SpaceX — just not the kind it was hoping for.
After months of anticipation, a discarded upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is believed to have careened into the Moon on early Wednesday morning. It exploded on impact, causing a flash that may have been visible from Earth, and created a large crater.
Astronomers, who have been closely monitoring the stray rocket, projected it would smash into the lunar surface at 5,400 miles per hour, which is about seven times the speed of sound here on our home planet. At such a velocity, NASA estimated it would blow open a crater about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep, though others have estimated that it could be up to 100 feet wide.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been promising the Moon when it comes to SpaceX’s lunar ambitions. Its Starship megarocket is being built to bring cargo to the lunar surface, and hopefully deposit NASA astronauts there in a historic return. He even plans to construct a Moon base with a factory that can churn out AI satellites. But so far, no SpaceX craft has made it into the Moon’s orbit, let alone land on it.
The discarded Falcon 9 rocket part had been lingering in space for over a year. It was jettisoned during a January 2025 mission that brought two lunar landers, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Hakuto-R, to the Moon. Astronomers soon suspected that it would fall into the Moon’s orbit, and in late April, a report more or less confirmed suspicions that it would slam into the rocky satellite.
Because the explosion — or in SpaceX’s euphemistic parlance, the rapid unscheduled disassembly — was difficult to observe in the moment, it might take some time before scientists can piece together everything that happened.
Another crater will make little difference to the Moon. Because it has no protective atmosphere, it’s surface is bombarded by meteoroids on a daily basis. One “with the same energy as the upper stage hits the Moon about every six days,” according to NASA.
Still, the impact will raise questions about the best practices for space junk and whether it’s negligent to discard spent rocket parts near the Moon’s orbit.
This isn’t the first time that human debris has smashed into the lunar surface. NASA deliberately steered the discarded stages of its Saturn V rockets into the Moon during the Apollo missions in the 1970s. And in 2009, it also crashed a rocket part into the Moon to study the impact.
Scientists will similarly hope to learn more from the accidental SpaceX crash landing, including insights into the physics of the material kicked up by the explosion in a low gravity environment, where ejecta could travel for miles.
“This may be of some — probably minor — scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it,” Bill Gray, an astronomer who created the Project Pluto software used to track near-Earth objects, and who published the report predicting the rocket part’s crash landing, wrote on his website. “It doesn’t present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.”
SpaceX shares dropped on Wednesday after Elon Musk’s plans for blockbuster spending to position his AI and rocket company as a data center developer spooked investors.
SpaceX surpassed analysts’ expectations in Tuesday’s debut earnings report, posting quarterly revenues of $7.8 billion, well above analysts’ estimates of $6.82 billion and up 92 percent from a year earlier. It posted a net loss of about $541 million, better than estimates of $2.12 billion.
But shares in SpaceX fell 10 percent in early trading after it reported capital expenditure of almost $16 billion on AI, double the previous quarter and well above Wall Street’s expectations. It said spending would persist at current levels for at least two more quarters.
Europe risks becoming dependent on foreign orbital computing infrastructure as U.S. companies and China’s government-led push accelerate the development of space-based data centers, according to the European Space Policy Institute.
SpaceX plans to start deploying upgraded Starlink satellites into orbit on the next flight of its Starship vehicle, scheduled for as soon as the end of the month.
Tesla’s sales inside China fell 19% in the first half of 2026 compared to its peak in 2023, dropping to the lowest level in years, according to new data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).
At the same time, exports out of Giga Shanghai surged 127%. Tesla’s China plant is increasingly building cars to ship somewhere else.
SpaceX and the state of Louisiana are close to finalizing a deal for the launch company to acquire about 130,000 acres along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
There have been persistent rumors about such an agreement for months, but now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to announce the agreement later this month.
The deal would give SpaceX control of an 18-mile stretch of marshland southwest of Lafayette. The site, known as Pecan Island, became available as part of a legal settlement that resolves dozens of lawsuits that blame ExxonMobil for pollution and coastal land loss, the newspaper reports.
After heaps of criticism, SpaceX said it’ll remove the dozens of fumes-belching gas turbines it’s using to power its gargantuan data centers near Memphis, Tennessee — which it’s been using without a permit — a year from now.
In an update on its website spotted by TechCrunch, the Elon Musk-owned company laid out its plan to hook up the sprawling AI facilities, some of the largest in the world, to a 1.2 gigawatt nantural gas power plant.
Credit where credit’s due: it’s an improvement over the dismal status quo. But it’ll take a while, and in the meantime the company plans to continue to use its preponderance of 69 portable gas turbines that were trucked in to sustain its data centers. It won’t fully remove them until July 2027, a full year from now.
“We care deeply about being good neighbors and we regularly reconfigure power operations to reduce noise from the facility and minimize our impact on the local Southaven community,” the company said.
The “Colossus” data center campus, comprising two separate data centers, has come under fire from locals and activist groups. The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of the NAACP, sued xAI — which is now known as SpaceXAI, after being rolled into Musk’s rocket company prior to its initial public offering — for operating the turbines without a permit and spewing harmful pollutants.
At the time, the lawsuit estimated that the gas turbines could emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitric oxides every year. It also claimed that the turbines release hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde, a known carcinogen linked to lung and nasal cancer that can also inflame airways.
In May, Politico reported that the data center had become one of the largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides in the county, where smog levels were already considered unhealthy before the facility went online.
Some parents in nearby communities have complained that their children have developed respiratory problems since the facility went online. And residents in the predominantly black neighborhood of Boxtown say that the fumes are so oppressive that it’s making it hard for them to breathe.
After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have […]
Tesla is looking at cutting loose its China business to clear a path toward a merger with SpaceX, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.
If true, it would be a massive deal in the auto industry. Tesla’s Shanghai factory builds more than half of all Tesla vehicles, so any separation would carve out the single biggest piece of Tesla’s car operation.
Update: Elon Musk has denied the WSJ report, but as usual, that should be taken with a grain of salt.
SpaceX successfully launched its Starship vehicle on Friday and appeared to demonstrate important and credible steps toward fulfilling the massive rocket's immense promise. As soon as the vehicle's next flight, Starship could go orbital, begin delivering satellites into space, and potentially return to the launch site to be 'caught' by the tower.
All of this is impressive engineering on a gigantic scale. But despite the marked progress with the 13th test flight of Starship, one key issue—probably the key issue when it comes to Starship's future—remains unresolved.
This concerns Starship's heat shield, the roughly 18,000 ceramic tiles that protect the vehicle's underbelly during its fiery return through Earth's atmosphere. And some experts say SpaceX's current approach may not get Starship to its ultimate goal of flying frequently, at low cost.
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