Starship Aims for Orbit With Working Cargo Every Starship launched so far has followed a suborbital arc that

Pending regulatory approval, SpaceX said today it intends to launch its 14th Starship mission as early as September 22. This flight is notable, as it will be the first time that SpaceX attempts to launch the experimental vehicle into orbit.

The company set a target liftoff time of 7:15 am local in Texas (12:15 UTC), with a 75-minute launch window. Sunrise in Brownsville, Texas, is 7:17 am CT, so the launch could make for some striking imagery.

The super heavy lift rocket will be carrying 26 of the larger V3 Starlink satellites into an orbit 275 km above the Earth. In an update on its website, SpaceX said the Starship upper stage will seek to complete six orbits around the Earth before completing its mission after about 10 hours.

Read full article

Comments

© SpaceX

Pending regulatory approval, SpaceX said today it intends to launch its 14th Starship mission as early as September 22. This flight is notable, as it will be the first time that SpaceX attempts to launch the experimental vehicle into orbit.

The company set a target liftoff time of 7:15 am local in Texas (12:15 UTC), with a 75-minute launch window. Sunrise in Brownsville, Texas, is 7:17 am CT, so the launch could make for some striking imagery.

The super heavy lift rocket will be carrying 26 of the larger V3 Starlink satellites into an orbit 275 km above the Earth. In an update on its website, SpaceX said the Starship upper stage will seek to complete six orbits around the Earth before completing its mission after about 10 hours.

Read full article

Comments

© SpaceX

Welcome to this edition of The Intelligence Brief… This week, SpaceX launched USSF-153, a classified U.S. Space Force mission carrying a mysterious payload into orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, highlighting the growing intersection between commercial spaceflight and U.S. national security operations. In our analysis, we’ll be looking at 1) what we currently know about the highly secretive USSF-153 mission, 2) how details surrounding its flight path may offer clues that classified satellites potentially based on SpaceX’s Starshield platform were aboard, 3) how the mission comes amid growing concerns about an emerging era of military competition and potential conflict in Earth’s orbit, and 4) why the launch represents another milestone for SpaceX as reusable commercial rockets play an increasingly important role in national security space missions.

Quote of the Week

“SpaceX’s ongoing work with the Department of Defense and other partners demonstrates our ability to provide in-space and on-ground capability at scale.”

– SpaceX Statement

If you enjoy the news and perspectives offered by The Debrief, make sure that you aren’t missing our stories by making us one of your “preferred sources” on Google News. You can simply follow this link to add The Debrief to your list of favorites, and you can read more about Google’s preferred sources in our article here.

---

RECENT NEWS from The Debrief

• Scientists challenge the lizard brain myth, revealing two distinct neural systems that may explain how mammalian brains evolved.
• Analysis of the 4,000-year-old Devil’s Arrows stone pillar monument has finally revealed the site’s mysterious origins.
• A recent discovery is revealing fascinating new insights about Tyrannosaurus Rex.
• Get all the latest stories from The Debrief, with more breaking stories at the end of this week’s newsletter.

---

A Classified Mission is Carried to Orbit

Earlier today, SpaceX launched a classified mission for the U.S. Space Force, which carried a mysterious payload to orbit on one of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets.

The mission, officially known as USSF-153, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at around 11:37 a.m. EDT on Thursday. Beyond that, little else is known about what, exactly, the classified payload carried aboard the Falcon 9 might have been.

Here’s a look at what we currently know about this morning’s secretive launch, and how it may be related to other recent developments involving the growing use of Earth’s orbit in the advancement of U.S. national security objectives.

USSF-153 Mission

According to the company’s website, SpaceX says the USSF-153 mission marks the 27th flight for the first stage SpaceX rocket booster supporting this mission.

The same booster was previously used for the launches of missions that included the Crew-7, CRS-29, PACE, Transporter-10, EarthCARE, NROL-186, Transporter-13, TRACERS, NROL-48, COSMO-SkyMED Second Generation FM3, and 16 Starlink missions, according to an update on the USSF-153 mission page.

“Following stage separation, the first stage will land on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship, which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean,” the SpaceX update read, noting that it may be possible for sonic booms to be heard in the region around Santa Barbara and surrounding communities, adding that “what residents experience will depend on weather and other conditions.”

Clues About a Classified Payload

The launch was live-streamed by SpaceX, and the moment of takeoff of the classified mission was subsequently added to the company’s official X account. However, few additional details about the exact nature of the mission were revealed, although experts have noted that at least a few details about the rocket’s mission could be discernible from its planned flight path, offering some clues about what USSF-153 might be carrying.

Some outlets have noted the similarity between the current mission’s rocket-stage drop zones and those from past SpaceX Starlink Group 15 missions, which could mean that a group of classified satellites, possibly built using SpaceX’s Starshield satellite platform, may be part of what’s on board.

Serving as the national-security counterpart to the technologies driving SpaceX’s massive Starlink broadband constellation, the program reportedly uses the company’s existing satellite and launch technology to support national security missions. If this is indeed a part of USSF-153’s mission, it would add to the increasingly important role commercial space technologies are playing in U.S. military and intelligence operations.

A New Cold War in Space

Last week’s Intelligence Brief newsletter covered recent concerns about potential future conflict in space, which include the use of sophisticated military capabilities in space by the U.S. and foreign adversary nations.

Experts warn that Earth’s orbit might become a critical battlefield in future conflicts, with recent examples of technologies currently being tested for this that include China’s secretive Shenlong spaceplane, as well as the U.S. and its allies demonstrating similar “dogfighting,” rendezvous, and other potentially military operations in orbit.

Additionally, Russia’s longstanding pursuit of anti-satellite weapons adds to the emerging threats that may soon occupy Earth’s orbit. Although it remains unknown whether Thursday’s mission could be related to such capabilities and other technologies aimed at leveraging Earth’s orbit for military purposes, its classified nature does leave this possibility open.

A New Milestone for SpaceX

Finally, Thursday’s mission also represents a milestone in SpaceX’s busy 2026 launch schedule, with USSF-153 expected to become the company’s 104th Falcon 9 mission of the year.

Eighty of those launches have been dedicated to expanding the company’s ever-growing Starlink constellation, which now consists of more than 11,000 active satellites in low Earth orbit.

Despite the unusual secrecy surrounding its cargo, the USSF-153 launch showcases the new reusable commercial rocket industry SpaceX has developed, which is now frequently relied on by the U.S. military for carrying national-security hardware into orbit.

That concludes this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief. You can read past editions of our newsletter at our website, or if you found this installment online, don’t forget to subscribe and get future email editions from us here. Also, if you have a tip or other information you’d like to send along directly to me, you can email me at micah [@] thedebrief [dot] org, or reach me on X: @MicahHanks.

Here are the top stories we’re covering right now…

Os maiores operadores europeus de telecomunicações estão a discutir a criação de um consórcio para disputar o espectro de satélite que a União Europeia quer reservar para serviços diretos ao telemóvel

The post Operadoras europeias alinham estratégia para levar comunicações por satélite aos telemóveis appeared first on Tek Notícias.

Russia's attempt to replicate SpaceX's Starlink satellite network seems to be moving as slowly as the front lines in eastern Ukraine.

The Rassvet program, often billed as Russia's answer to Starlink, started launching its first operational satellites earlier this year. Two launches, one in March and a second in July, have delivered 32 Rassvet satellites to low-Earth orbit, some 10 percent of the roughly 300 Rassvet spacecraft Russia aims to put into orbit by the end of next year to provide connectivity for military and civilian users. The company in charge of Rassvet, Bureau 1440, wants to deploy 924 satellites by 2035.

But none of the 32 satellites launched so far have reached the 500-mile (800-kilometer) orbit they were designed to operate in. The rockets that launched the first two batches of Rassvets released the satellites much closer to Earth, and the satellites were expected to use their own plasma engines to raise their orbits over the next few months.

Read full article

Comments

© Bureau 1440

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.

Read full article

Comments

© SpaceX

Mobile World Live (MWL) brings you our top three picks of the week as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk outlined Starlink’s global broadband ambitions, Verizon lifted the lid on the network behind the FIFA World Cup 2026 and the World Bank urged developing nations to boost AI adoption.

Musk targets global broadband domination with Starlink

What happened: Musk outlined plans to increase Starlink’s network capacity 100-fold, claiming the satellite broadband business could eventually “deliver a majority of the world’s internet”.

Why it matters:  The tech mogul said the goal hinges on the rollout of an expanded V3 satellite constellation capable of delivering around 10 times the performance of current V2 models. To support the plan, the company asked the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval to deploy up to 100,000 low-Earth-orbit V3 satellites, supplementing the roughly 9,600 V2 satellites already in orbit. Musk argued the additional capacity would allow Starlink to eventually carry a majority of global internet traffic in countries where the service is authorised to operate, while driving a tenfold increase in Starlink revenue even if revenue per bit falls by 90%. Quilty Space founder and CEO Chris Quilty told MWL that the company’s “bold claim” flouts its “prior statements that Starlink was most appropriate for rural user”. While V3 satellites are expected to provide a “10x boost”, he noted “aggregate network capacity is a misleading metric because capacity is geographically distributed while demand is geographically concentrated”. Earlier this week, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell claimed that Starlink Mobile could compete directly with operators including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US using upgraded satellites and additional spectrum.

Musk targets global broadband domination with Starlink

Podcast: Inside Verizon’s World Cup connectivity

What happened: In the latest edition of the MWL podcast, Kavit and Justin sat down with Verizon wireless chief network officer Srini Kalapala, who detailed how the operator delivered connectivity as the official network provider for the FIFA World Cup 2026.

Why it matters: Earlier this month, the operator revealed its network carried almost 500TB of data across all US host stadiums, including 29.2TB during the final between Argentina and Spain. To handle demand, Verizon boosted stadium capacity by three to five times, installed thousands of under-seat antennas, deployed nearly 140 small cells around venues and fan zones, and laid 80,000 miles of fibre to transport broadcast feeds from all World Cup stadiums. In the podcast, Kalapala described the tournament’s “104 games in 39 days across 18 different stadiums in three countries” as “probably one of the largest projects that we worked on.” He explained Verizon had to ensure stadiums comprising 70,000 to 85,000 people could access “good quality mobile connectivity”, while also delivering “the most reliable network” for broadcasters and powering private 5G applications including referee cameras.

Podcast: Inside Verizon’s World Cup connectivity

World Bank urges lower income nations to grasp AI opportunity

What happened: The World Bank called on developing economies to accelerate AI adoption, arguing low-cost, locally adapted tools could accelerate economic development without requiring frontier models or hefty AI infrastructure investments.

Why it matters: In its World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, the organisation said AI “could allow developing countries to do in a decade what might otherwise take a century”, provided governments address gaps in electricity, internet access, digital skills and institutions. World Bank SVP and chief economist Indermit Gill said AI has “thrown developing economies a lifeline”, but warned countries “must hurry” because the technology is “spreading faster and is more context-specific than earlier general-purpose technologies”. He added many high-impact use cases do not require large models or data centres, instead relying on “small, low-cost AI tools” tailored to local conditions. The report highlighted applications across healthcare, agriculture, tax collection and judicial services, while warning AI could also deepen inequality and weaken public trust without appropriate action. Foresight Communications Consultancy CEO Howaida Nadim argued the World Bank’s framework recognises that “greater opportunity lies in adopting proven tools and adapting them to local languages, data, institutions and development priorities”. She added “the next AI divide” might be “between those that successfully adapt AI to their development needs and those that remain primarily consumers of systems built elsewhere”.

World Bank urges lower income nations to grasp AI opportunity

The post The Friday File: Starlink; Verizon; World Bank appeared first on Mobile World Live.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (pictured) highlighted an ambitious growth plan for the company’s Starlink broadband service, forecasting a hundredfold increase in total delivered bandwidth driven by its next-generation V3 satellite constellation.

Speaking on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, Musk and president Gwynne Shotwell detailed a long-term strategy to capture a majority of global internet traffic in accessible markets.

To support the push, the operator recently applied to the Federal Communications Commission seeking approval to deploy up to 100,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites for its V3 satellite network, supplementing the approximately 9,600 broadband V2 birds currently in orbit.

SpaceX’s Starlink broadband customers doubled to 12 million year-over-year despite price increases for the service. Starlink ended Q2 with service availability in 167 markets “with some very exciting announcements coming soon,” he said.

Those numbers are the tip of the iceberg, according to Musk.  

“This is a big deal,” he said. “It’s kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around this, but it’s not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world’s internet, at least in countries where we’re allowed to operate.”

Musk stated individual Starlink V3 satellites deliver roughly 10 times the performance of V2 models. While V2 hardware typically maxes out between 100Mb/s and 450Mb/s depending on network congestion, the V3 constellation deployment is designed to unlock gigabit-class downlinks for standard end users.

Musk stated a V3 Starlink bird will launch on Starship flight 14, but this time they’ll enter an “operational orbit.” Last month’s Starship flight sent up a batch of V3 satellites as part of a suborbital test.

“The Starlink V3 satellite is about an order of magnitude more capable than the Starlink V2 satellite, which was already a very capable satellite,” he explained. “And we expect to launch about an order of magnitude more Starlink V3 satellites.

Combined with plans to launch 10 times as many V3 birds, the upgraded constellation is projected to increase overall bandwidth capacity by two orders of magnitude. He emphasised that even if revenue per bit decreased by 90%, the expansion will still drive a tenfold increase in Starlink revenue.

“It’s certainly a bold claim and one that contravenes the company’s prior statements that Starlink was most appropriate for rural users,” Quilty Space founder and CEO Chris Quilty told Mobile World Live. “Starlink V3 will provide a 10x boost, reaching 8Pb/s of downlink capacity, but aggregate network capacity is a misleading metric because capacity is geographically distributed while demand is geographically concentrated.”

AI compute capacity
SpaceX ended Q2 with 1.4 gigawatts of compute capacity, up from 1 gigawatt in the prior quarter and 400 megawatts a year ago.

“We expect to end this year with over 2 gigawatts of compute,” Musk stated.

Asked about the outlook for compute capacity, Musk revised his earlier target upward on the call. Rather than the roughly 10 gigawatts previously floated for the end of 2027, he said SpaceX is now aiming for approximately 15 gigawatts of power and cooling capacity online by the end of next year, with a stretch goal of 20 gigawatts.

“We’re actually aiming to far exceed that gigawatt number in terms of power online, power cooling, and electrical equipment,” he explained.

“I don’t think we’re going to achieve 20 gigawatts, but we want to have a series of projects that cumulatively come to 20 gigawatts by the end of next year,” he added. “Our goal is to have far more power, cooling, and electrical equipment than we have GPUs. That’s a logical thing to do given the relative expense of GPUs.”

He said SpaceX is taking the expertise it uses for rockets and satellites and applying it to scaling terrestrial data centres.

“SpaceX as a company is incredibly good at hardware,” Musk said.

Going forward on data centres, Musk said SpaceX has decided “to build exclusively on Nvidia, because we think the Vera Rubin is the best architecture.”

The post Musk targets global broadband domination with Starlink appeared first on Mobile World Live.

Another wave of constellations has staked claims for communications satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO), but what hope do newcomers have alongside the industry’s entrenched, vertically integrated giants? A mix of […]

The post Finding room in Starlink’s shadow appeared first on SpaceNews.

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.

Read full article

Comments

© Timothy A Clary/GEtty

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell claimed Starlink Mobile is positioned to compete directly with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US, pointing to the trio’s roughly $600 billion in combined annual revenue as a measure of the opportunity.

Speaking on SpaceX’s Q2 earnings call, Shotwell said the service’s capability could improve roughly 100-fold once the company deploys next-generation birds and spectrum acquired from EchoStar, with commercial service targeted to begin by the end of next year.

Shotwell said the current direct-to-cell system operates using around 5MHz of bandwidth through local telco partners, but SpaceX now has access to 65MHz of bandwidth via the EchoStar spectrum deal, alongside plans to deploy roughly 10 times as many satellites.

“So, simplifying, you could look at Starlink Mobile leveraging the next-generation satellite and the EchoStar spectrum as being 100 times better, 10 times 10 better than what we’ve got right now,” she said, adding the upgraded service already supports voice and video calls over apps such as Signal and WhatsApp.

Shotwell described a terrestrial deployment approach built around Starlink’s existing broadband hardware rather than a conventional cell tower build-out.

“You could put a base station, a cellular base station on the gear that holds a Starlink broadband dish,” she said. “You can have kind of these little femtocells around the country and you deploy that as you need it. You don’t have to necessarily spend many billions of dollars in low band spectrum all upfront before you deploy your system.”

She was reluctant to give a specific capex figure for the terrestrial build-out.

“We have a lot of really kind of great and new ideas for how we’re going to do that,” she said. “And I think it will be quite capex efficient.”

CEO Elon Musk elaborated on the same point, saying it was worth emphasising given its importance to the economics of the rollout.

Rather than deploying expensive, hard-to-site large cellular base stations, he said SpaceX expects to deploy a large number of small stations which are effectively Starlink dishes also equipped to provide connectivity in mobile spectrum bands.

“The Starlink antennas are located on the roofs of houses and businesses,” he said. “So, they’ve got a sort of a clear view for providing connectivity directly to cell phones on the ground.”

Musk expects the resulting service to offer “better and higher bandwidth than what is currently available from cellular providers”.

Shotwell stated SpaceX expects strong customer uptake once the improved service launches.

“I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers, because I think our service will be better,” she said, citing Starlink Mobile’s ability to eliminate dead zones and maintain service during natural disasters, given the relative stability of the satellite environment compared with terrestrial infrastructure on the ground.

Q2 numbers
SpaceX reported Q2 revenue of $7.8 billion, up 92 per cent year-on-year from $4.1 billion, in the company’s first results release since going public in June.

Net loss narrowed to $541 million, an improvement of $467 million from the $1 billion loss posted a year earlier.

Capex surged to $18.4 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, driven overwhelmingly by the AI segment where it reached $15.8 billion. Space segment capex came in at $1.2 billion and Connectivity capex at $1.4 billion.

The AI division, spanning Grok, X, cloud infrastructure and advertising, posted revenue of $2.6 billion, up 247%, driven by new Cloud Services Agreements and Grok/X subscription growth.

The business generates compute-contract revenue from customers including Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI, though some recurring revenue has yet to be recognised.

The segment narrowed its operating loss 49% quarter-on-quarter to $1.3 billion, though SpaceX cautioned the unit needs sustained investment to turn profitable. It signed $14.1 billion in contracted Cloud Services Agreements and announced a $60 billion deal to acquire coding tool Cursor.

Connectivity, the Starlink-led segment, generated $4.3 billion in revenue, up 66%, with operating income up 79% to $1.7 billion. Starlink subscribers doubled to 12 million.

The Space segment posted revenue of $962 million, up 29% with an operating loss of $542 million as the company invested heavily in Starship.

SpaceX ended the quarter with $100 billion in cash and marketable securities, and a $47.5 billion backlog.

The post SpaceX claims Starlink Mobile will rival AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US appeared first on Mobile World Live.

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.

The post SpaceX to begin Starship orbital flights appeared first on SpaceNews.

In March 2021, while serving as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, I hosted a discussion with General Chance Saltzman, now Chief of Space Operations for the United States […]

The post The new space wars: lessons from Ukraine and the Middle East appeared first on SpaceNews.

Un internaute a découvert qu’un satellite de télécommunication Starlink de SpaceX est passé devant un satellite d’imagerie de la surface Terre pendant qu’il survolait le Texas. L’image a été retrouvée sur Google Earth. Que nous dit cet événement pas si anodin que cela ?

One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink."

The story was the product of a long-running inquiry by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Reporters at those publications said they reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous "swarm" loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation, the report said.

According to the papers, the investigation found evidence of a partnership between China and Russia in the field of space weapons far deeper than either country has acknowledged. One particular focus for China and Russia has been developing strategies to counter SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network.

Read full article

Comments

© SpaceX

SpaceX aborted the launch of its latest Starship test flight July 16 when some of the vehicle’s engines failed to ignite.

The post SpaceX aborts Starship Flight 13 launch attempt appeared first on SpaceNews.

One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink."

The story was the product of a long-running inquiry by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Reporters at those publications said they reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous "swarm" loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation, the report said.

According to the papers, the investigation found evidence of a partnership between China and Russia in the field of space weapons far deeper than either country has acknowledged. One particular focus for China and Russia has been developing strategies to counter SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network.

Read full article

Comments

© SpaceX

Starlink V5 Arrives Quietly SpaceX released its V5 residential dish this week without much noise, and it does

The next test flight of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster could take off as soon as Thursday, and much of the hour-long mission will look a lot like the last Starship flight in May.

But there are a few key differences for this launch, set to occur during a launch window that opens at 5:45 pm CDT (22:45 UTC) on Thursday. The most notable change is the inclusion of real, functioning Starlink satellites inside Starship's cargo bay. SpaceX previously tested the ship's payload deployment mechanism using simulators mimicking the mass and dimensions of the company's next-generation Starlink Version 3 broadband satellites.

This time—Starship's 13th full-scale test flight and the second to use SpaceX's newest version of Starship—technicians have installed 20 Starlink V3 satellites into the ship's deployer, a system of pulleys and cables designed to eject a stack of satellites one at a time through an opening on the side of the spacecraft. The satellites will not be part of SpaceX's operational network, but engineers will attempt to briefly establish laser communication links between the Starlink V3s and other spacecraft flying in low-Earth orbit. If successful, these links will validate Starlink V3's interoperability with SpaceX's previous generation of Starlink satellites.

Read full article

Comments

© SpaceX