The Exploration Company (TEC) has raised $450 million to build reusable spacecraft, in what it describes as “the largest-ever Series C by a European space company.”
On Wednesday, the American space agency reported that the completed telescope, presently contained within its payload fairing, has been transported from NASA’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility to a SpaceX hangar located at the famous Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
If all goes according to plan, the telescope will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. EDT this Sunday, Aug. 30.
What Roman’s Science Tool Kit Includes
The telescope’s unique science instruments make Roman a different breed of space observatory from its predecessors, like the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Telescope, as they are designed with the special focus of advancing the search for dark energy.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, seen as it was nearing assembly (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech).
Roman is equipped with two primary capabilities, which involve its Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and Coronagraph Instrument. With a 300-megapixel, near-infrared camera designed for large area image capture and spectroscopy, the WFI will enable astronomers to observe a 0.281 square degree field of view and includes a special imaging mode with two slitless spectroscopy modes.
“The instrument provides a sharp point spread function, precision photometry, and stable observations for implementing the Dark Energy, Exoplanet Microlensing, and NIR surveys,” according to a NASA FAQ page detailing Roman’s primary instrument.
Exoplanet Imagery and Spectroscopy
Meanwhile, the telescope’s Coronagraph Instrument also features both imaging and spectroscopy modes, with capabilities fine-tuned for imaging exoplanets.
“The Coronagraph will be the first instrument on a space telescope to make use of numerically optimized, precision-fabricated coronagraph masks,” NASA’s FAQ page reads. This will be achieved by employing a combination of deformable mirrors that will enable high-order wavefront control, a low-order wavefront sensing and control system, and finally, CCD detectors designed for electron multiplication and counting low-flux photons.
A Next-Generation Space Observatory Prepares for Launch
Along with its search for dark energy and exoplanets, Roman will also provide NASA and researchers around the world with an unprecedented opportunity to study the formation of galaxies and the way that dark matter governs their evolution over time.
NASA will begin live coverage of Roman’s launch on Sunday morning at 6:20 a.m. Eastern Time, and you can follow the updates online with NASA’s free streaming platforms.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
SpaceX made Florida's Space Coast home to the world's busiest spaceport for a decade, but that will change this year. The company is significantly cutting the number of launches from Florida until Starship arrives, a senior SpaceX official confirmed Tuesday.
The Falcon 9 rocket has been SpaceX's workhorse, routinely launching batches of satellites for the company's Starlink network, primarily from launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There were 165 Falcon 9 launches last year—about three flights per week—and about 75 percent of them carried Starlink satellites.
This year is different. SpaceX has launched more missions from its West Coast launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California since January, and this trend will amplify for the rest of the year.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has captured the clearest images yet of a newly formed impact site on the Moon.
The 60-foot-wide crater was formed on August 5, 2026, as the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the lunar surface, prompting amateur and professional astronomers around the world to watch for signs of the spacecraft’s impact.
Although no obvious evidence of the lunar crash landing was observed, six days later, NASA trained the powerful eye of the LRO onto the suspected crash site, eventually gathering several close-up views that reveal the best images of where the rocket made impact that have been captured to date.
A Rocket Collides with the Moon
The rocket that collided with the Moon was a leftover from Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which originally launched in January 2025.
Although the upper stage of the rocket was never intended to collide with the Moon at the time of its launch, after carrying the Firefly Aerospace mission to space, it entered a highly elliptical orbit that, over the course of about 18 months, subjected it to intense solar radiation and repeated gravitational tugs from both the Earth and the Moon. The resulting deviations altered its trajectory enough that the rocket was placed on an unavoidable lunar collision course.
Capturing images of the new crater was no small task and required precision spacecraft pointing. The LRO travels approximately one mile per second in its orbit around the Moon, which means it completes a pole-to-pole orbit roughly every two hours.
Tilting the spacecraft to point its Narrow-Angle Camera toward the impact site during successive passes, the images had to be timed to within a window of less than ten seconds to prevent the newly formed lunar feature from being shifted several miles beyond the field of view of the LRO’s camera.
A Scar Becomes Visible on the Moon
Fortunately, the LRO team has a good bit of experience when it comes to spotting and photographing high-resolution images of features on the Moon. The photos they captured between August 11 and 12 reveal the new 60-foot-wide crater, along with patterns evident in the surrounding landscape as lunar regolith was propelled outward from the impact site.
Before and after images showing the area before impact (left) and the same region on the lunar surface after the Falcon 9 collided with the Moon on August 5, 2026 (Image Credit: NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines).
In the new before-and-after images, darker material can be seen, which has weathered over time due to surface exposure to cosmic rays, solar irradiation, and countless micrometeorite impacts. Contrasting with this darker surface area are brighter areas, visible in “rays” near the newly formed crater, where subsurface material that has retained lighter coloration was blasted outward.
Finding the Falcon 9 Impact Site
Before locating the impact site, NASA scientists coordinated with professional and amateur astronomers, as well as several space agencies from around the world, to reconstruct the rocket stage’s trajectory based on publicly available data.
Much of that data came from NASA’s own Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which helped to refine predictions about where the strike was believed to have occurred. Although normally part of the American space agency’s planetary defense efforts that track asteroids and comets that could potentially threaten Earth, the recent lunar impact served as a rare opportunity to test their prediction tools.
Once coordinates for the expected location of the impact were determined, NASA and its partners supplied these to the South Korean Space Agency (KASA), whose Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, or Danuri, and its high-resolution LUTI camera, were first to capture images of the crater.
At that time, it was determined that the crash site and resulting lunar impact feature were within about 0.6 miles of NASA’s original predicted location. Based on the KASA observations, NASA was able to supply the new information to its LRO team in advance of the successful capture of the new NASA imagery.
The resulting images offer one of the clearest views of a new crater on the lunar surface, and one produced by an object originating from Earth. Additional details about the photos and the technologies used to capture them can be found at NASA’s website.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
Un étage d’une fusée SpaceX s’est écrasé sur la Lune le 5 août dernier, laissant derrière lui un nouveau cratère. Quelques jours plus tard, la sonde LRO a braqué ses caméras sur la cicatrice lunaire pour en révéler les moindres détails.
Nvidia has disclosed that it owns nearly 123 million shares in SpaceX, further highlighting the chipmaker’s entangled financial relationships with some of its biggest customers.
The $5.5 trillion company owned SpaceX stock worth nearly $21 billion at the end of June, according to an SEC filing on Friday. Elon Musk’s rocket conglomerate’s shares have fallen sharply since its June initial public offering, meaning Nvidia’s stake would now be worth $17 billion.
The disclosure marks a huge pay-off on Nvidia’s investment in xAI, completed in January, shortly before Musk combined the AI lab with SpaceX.
Rocket launches this week On Tuesday, Aug. 18, Chinese aerospace firm LandSpace is targeting 7:35 p.m. EDT for the second flight of its Zhuque-3 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China, according to tracking from Next Spaceflight. The launch was scrubbed last week after a Long March 7A rocket exploded hours before Zhuque-3’sContinue reading "More Starlink satellites and two big launches for China"
Tesla’s robotaxi account posted photos today of what it’s calling the first Cybercab with a Starlink antenna built into the vehicle.
The pictures show a gold Cybercab parked at Gigafactory Texas, with a low-profile satellite antenna integrated into the roof. It’s the physical version of an integration Tesla teased with a diagram last month.
SpaceX confirmed it will power Terafab, its $16.8 billion chip megafactory in Texas, with its own natural gas power plants and “very large battery arrays.” Tesla solar isn’t in the plan.
That’s despite Tesla being a partner on the project, and despite Tesla selling solar panels, Powerwalls, and grid-scale batteries built for exactly this kind of load.
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.”
Login
