Financial stakes of AI race rise as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are slated to go public this year
Anthropic has filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market, the company announced on Monday. The AI firm makes the Claude chatbot, popular with software engineers and other business clients, and has seen a meteoric rise this year.
The company did not disclose the valuation it will target on the stock market, nor did it make public other terms of the offering. The startup announced on Thursday that it had raised $65bn in funding to value the company at $965bn post-money. Anthropic was valued at $380bn in February.
Jared Isaacman, administrador da NASA, afirmou que a agência espacial vai colaborar com a Blue Origin na investigação do incidente com o foguetão New Glenn, avaliando também eventuais impactos nos programas Artemis e na futura missão Moon Base.
SpaceX has established itself as an influential contractor for the US military, allowing the Pentagon access a proprietary intelligence-based satellite network dubbed Starshield.
The related network of Starlink broadband satellite services has also played a major role in ongoing military conflict, with Ukrainian soldiers making use of thousands of Starlink terminals to bypass internet blackouts amid the country’s war with Russia.
But who gets to use which network, and what SpaceX is getting out of the agreement, remains a hotly contested subject. As Reuters reports, SpaceX officials hiked up the price for Starshield connectivity of the US military’s LUCAS (Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System) suicide drones, which are uncrewed kamikaze aircraft that can identify targets and detonate on impact.
According to the news agency’s sources, SpaceX successfully convinced the military to pay closer to $25,000 per connection, instead of just $5,000, a fivefold increase in the cost per drone.
Since then, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk both angrily accused Reuters of making “false” claims — while simultaneously confirming the agency’s reporting in the very same tweet.
“Reuters article is false,” he wrote. “They made improper use of the Starlink civilian system for military purposes. Direct violation of terms of service.”
In other words, it’s Musk versus Musk: he’s broadly denying Reuters‘ claims while confirming its central thesis that the military and his space company have been butting heads over how its suicide drones were connected.
In a follow-up tweet, Musk clarified that “there is a US government arm of SpaceX called Starshield, which has a different set of satellites than Starlink, which is for civilian use.”
“The company that makes the suicide drones incorrectly used the civilian system, instead of the Starshield,” Musk added.
The billionaire also called attention to what he called a “correction” by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, who had tweeted that the “Fake News media has the story wrong, again.”
“SpaceX remains a strong and valued partner to the Department of War,” Parnell had tweeted earlier. “The claims in this article are simply not based in reality and do not reflect the close, effective collaboration between our teams.”
The controversy highlights just how much leverage SpaceX has gained over the military. The reporting also couldn’t have come at a worse time, with the company gearing up to go public later this year at an absurd valuation of $2 trillion. SpaceX’s lucrative government contracts, as well as its consumer Starlink service, continue to represent a major chunk of its revenue. Strong-arming the Pentagon into jacked-up prices for Starshield connectivity could send a mixed signal to investors.
The US military started deploying the first LUCAS drones earlier this year during the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, with leadership praising them as “indispensable” in the US-Israel war on Iran.
During a Tuesday event, the space agency announced a slew of new contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for Moon base infrastructure including lunar rovers, as well as timeframes for upcoming development and exploration missions.
Before the end of this year, NASA wants to send two of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar landers to the Moon’s surface to deliver two lunar terrain vehicles being developed by commercial partners Astrolab and Lunar Outpost.
Meanwhile, Firefly Aerospace, whose Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on the Moon in March 2025, will develop drones to explore the rugged surface.
And that’s just the buildup to NASA’s Artemis 4 mission, the first planned crewed landing in over half a century, which is tentatively slated for 2028. Artemis 3, which was originally envisioned as a landing attempt, will now involve the testing of either or both Blue Origin’s lander and SpaceX’s Starship in low-Earth orbit sometime next year.
To call NASA’s plans for its Moon base ambitious would be a staggering understatement. For one, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander has yet to successfully deliver a payload into Earth’s orbit following a failed attempt last month. Getting to the Moon, softly landing, and releasing a robotic lander will likely prove far more difficult.
The agency laid out plans for three “Moon Base missions,” starting with a Blue Moon delivery of scientific instruments in “fall 2026,” followed by a delivery of “more than 1,100 pounds of cargo on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander,” including a rover.
The third mission, which is “also targeted for this year,” will deliver even more scientific payloads, including ones being developed by the European Space Agency and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.
“These missions are the first of more than a dozen missions that will be announced this year, each designed to generate operational data and reduce risk ahead of crewed Artemis surface activities,” the agency wrote in its writeup of Tuesday’s event.
The base itself will span hundreds of square miles, according to Moon base program executive Carlos Garcia-Galan. Drones, called MoonFall, will mark the perimeter of said base in what could inevitably be a highly contentious marking of territory.
MoonFall, an initiative led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, aims to land near the lunar South Pole by 2028. High-definition optical cameras attached to drones measuring roughly seven feet across and four feet tall will take detailed imagery of the base’s envisioned terrain far ahead of any crewed landings.
In a note, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman vowed that the US would “never give up on the Moon again” by building out its Artemis program.
“We are going back to the Moon, building the base, and doing the other things,” he wrote, referencing John F. Kennedy’s iconic 1962 speech about going to the Moon. “This is no longer something to read in the history books, you are making history.”
However, given the vast degree of complexity involved, successfully launching not just one but a whole slew of missions on the surface of the Moon before the end of 2026 could soon get a massive reality check. In other words, we wouldn’t be shocked to hear from even more delays as Isaacman’s NASA dials up the pressure to build out a permanent presence on the Moon.
The idea of manually tampering with our atmosphere to combat climate change, such as by seeding clouds with reflective particles to dim the Sun, remains extremely controversial. These acts of geoengineering could deliver us from climate doom, the thinking goes, or backfire spectacularly in ways we never anticipated — which is why scientists are proceeding with caution.
But to an extent, something like this is already happening on a global scale. In a new study published in the journal Earth’s Future, researchers warn that the air pollution caused by satellites burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere is already decreasing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. And if the space industry continues growing at its current pace, the impact could eventually become significant enough to alter the entire climate.
Project lead and coauthor Eloise Marais, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and air quality at University College London, laid out the stakes in a striking comparison: “The space industry pollution is like a small-scale, unregulated geoengineering experiment that could have many unintended and serious environmental consequences,” she warned in a statement about the work.
Space launches have accelerated in the past decade and have tripled in the past five years, spearheaded by companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. A good chunk of the launches are to bring satellites into the Earth’s orbit. SpaceX’s Starlink internet service boasts nearly 12,000 of them (and Musk wants to launch a million more). These huge networks are referred to as megaconstellations, signaling a new paradigm in how satellites are used and deployed. Competitors are racing to build their own megaconstellations, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which plans to deploy over 5,000 satellites.
These satellites are expendable. They’re designed to deorbit after a few years and then burn up — harmlessly, we’re told — in the Earth’s atmosphere, and constantly need to be replenished. But scientists have begun paying closer attention to the environmental impact of treating the atmosphere like a crematorium for satellites, with early studies finding that they release metals like lead and aluminum. Other research has raised the ominous possibility that some of these metal pollutants could trigger a chain reaction that lays waste to the ozone.
In this latest work, the researchers modeled the major pollutants from de-orbited megaconstellation satellites between 2020 and 2022. In 2020, the satellites accounted for 25 percent of the total climate impact from the space industry and will climb to 42 percent by 2029. By that same year, they project that the accumulated pollutants released by burning satellites will produce similar effects to solar geoengineering strategies, like aerosol injection.
The researchers also mapped the impact of rocket launches, which release soot particles. Once released in the upper atmosphere, the soot stays there for years, unlike soot released from the ground, which gets washed away by rainfall. By 2029, rocket launches will emit about 870 metric tons into the atmosphere annually, which is roughly equal to the total soot emissions from passenger cars in the UK, a release notes.
“Currently the impact on the atmosphere is small, so we still have the chance to act early before it becomes a more serious issue that is harder to reverse or repair,” Marais said in the statement. “So far there has been limited effort to effectively regulate this type of pollution.”
“The cooling effect from the reduction in sunlight that we calculate with our models may sound like a welcome change against the backdrop of global warming,” she added, “but we need to be extremely cautious.”
The future of space travel is pay to play, but that might not be a bad thing.
During the final 15 minutes counting down to SpaceX’s aborted Starship V3 mission on Thursday, Elon Musk’s space company revealed a fascinating tidbit: the man who’s going to lead SpaceX’s first crewed mission to Mars.
Spotted by Gizmodo, broadcasters on the company’s live feed announced that crypto billionaire Chun Wang has been tapped to lead humanity’s first interplanetary human flight.
At first glance, Wang might seem like an unlikely candidate for such a monumental task. A software developer who dropped out of college, Wang made his fortune by developing one of China’s first and most successful Bitcoin mining pools — striking it rich just before the Chinese government shut all of that crypto stuff down in 2021.
However, his resume includes another space flight, SpaceX’s April 2025 Fram2 mission, which he personally funded in order to secure a spot as mission leader. Though the media made a spectacle of that brief trip, Christopher Combs, associate dean of research at the University of Texas’ Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design described it as a “notch above a gimmick, but not exactly a groundbreaking milestone.”
The Mars trip, which would take up to two years, would be a vastly greater challenge on the billionaire’s mind and body — though Wang seems pretty gung-ho about it.
“I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff through landing, so I think I’m going to enjoy the trip,” Wang told viewers on Thursday.
It’s unknown who else will be making the Mars trip alongside Wang, and whether or not he’s funding it. Either way, the prospect that a billionaire could be willfully catapulting himself around 140 million miles from Earth left some critics buzzing on social media.
“This is the first time I have been 100 percent behind a SpaceX decision,” journalist David Perry wrote on Bluesky. “I hope they launch really soon.”
Writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl joked that it’s a “great start.”
“But,” she concluded, “I think all the crypto billionaires should go, it’s important and will bring America hope.”
Elon Musk has just pulled back the curtain on the biggest public stock offering in history, and the numbers are ghastly.
SpaceX, which is expected to go public on Nasdaq in June, just released the first round of financial summaries all companies are required to share when they’re about to sell stock to the public for the first time. The documents reveal Musk is targeting a raise of at least $80 billion — for a proposed valuation of $1.75 trillion — which would immediately make the rocket company one of the top 10 most valuable conglomerates in the US, Axios calculated.
With that kind of valuation in mind, one might expect SpaceX to be massively profitable going into its debut — but that’d be dead wrong.
According to the financial statement, the company lost $4.9 billion in 2025, even though it brought in around $18.7 billion in revenue. It’s not like that situation is about to turn around in time for the IPO, either: over the first three months of 2026, SpaceX posted further net losses of $4.3 billion.
As analyst Scott Melker pointed out, SpaceX wants investors to believe the company will someday make 93 times what it currently makes in a year. To understand why that’s absolutely nuts, just peep the numbers from the previous IPO record holder, Saudi Aramco, the state oil company of Saudi Arabia.
Commonly understood to be the most profitable corporation on Earth, Aramco went public in 2019. When it did, investors accepted a valuation about 6 times more than what Aramco made in yearly sales, raising $26 billion for a valuation of $1.7 trillion, as one analyst noted. SpaceX is asking for about 15 times more than that.
“Bro, have you seen inflation lately? Ketamine is expensive!” one stock analyst razzed on X-formerly-Twitter (that platform, by the way, has all but imploded under Musk’s leadership, with revenue down around 59 percent compared to 2021, the year before he took over).
To justify its wild revenue ambitions, SpaceX estimates its total addressable market — the maximum money it could make if everything goes perfectly — at $28.5 trillion. Of that, nearly 80 percent is attributed to the imaginary landscape of “enterprise applications,” which the document describes as a buffet of various Earth-shattering AI tools that have yet to be built, including one agentic AI platform called “Macrohard.”
Put it all together, and the numbers only work if you put your faith in unprecedented earnings from technology that doesn’t even exist, in a market as infinite and uncharted as outer space itself.
After completing what it said was a “thorough assessment,” the FAA on Wednesday ordered SpaceX to investigate anomalies that its Super Heavy booster experienced during the 12th test flight of its behemoth Starship rocket. The aviation regulator on Tuesday was ambiguous about whether an investigation would be required into Starship Flight 12, which launched Friday evening fromContinue reading "FAA grounds SpaceX Starship after V3 debut"
Ahead of what observers anticipate will be the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history, SpaceX debuted its largest rocket yet on a mostly successful mission. Though Starship and the Super Heavy booster — which combined stand more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, nearly the length of a Boeing 777 — suffered multiple engineContinue reading "What Starship Flight 12 means for SpaceX’s IPO"
Welcome to Edition 8.43 of the Rocket Report! A disclaimer: No one yet fully appreciates the ramifications of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explosion Thursday night on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. What we know as of this writing is that much of Blue's sole orbital-class launch pad has been destroyed, and the New Glenn rocket will be grounded for an extended period of time. It is too soon for any hot takes, at least until the Sun rises at the Cape on Friday morning. One thing I am sure of is that we will be writing about this event for weeks, months, and years to come.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.
Charting China's contribution to space junk. There's a problem with the drastic uptick in Chinese space launches over the last decade. China appears to be ignoring long-established norms about disposing of the upper stages of rockets, Ars reports. These are the parts of the vehicle that separate from the first stage of a rocket and push a satellite or spacecraft into orbit. In the early decades of spaceflight, launch operators routinely left upper stages in orbit after they released their payloads. But most launch companies today reserve enough propellant in their rockets to remove them from orbit to avoid the risk of spent upper stages becoming a source of space debris. But China is not following this trend. There has been striking growth in China’s rocket body mass. In the past five years, the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in long-lived orbits has risen from less than 100 metric tons to 252, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell.
SpaceX has won a lucrative contract to provide the US military with a means of distributing space-based sensing and targeting data, forming the "backbone" of a rearchitected network after separate Pentagon initiatives stalled, officials announced Tuesday.
Space Systems Command, the Space Force's primary procurement and acquisition center, announced the $2.29 billion firm-fixed-price agreement, confirming long-simmering reports that the Pentagon was likely to tap SpaceX for a new communications network in low-Earth orbit. SpaceX's selection for the Space Data Network (SDN) Backbone contract "accelerates the delivery of a resilient, high-speed communications network in space," Space Systems Command said in a statement.
The network will be based on technology originally developed for SpaceX's Starlink global Internet constellation. SpaceX already builds and launches specially designed satellites, called Starshield, for military applications. The SDN Backbone network in low-Earth orbit (LEO) will presumably use the Starshield platform.
SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results.
The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas at 5:30 pm CDT (6:30 pm EDT; 22:30 UTC) Friday. Within a few seconds, the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) rocket, the largest ever built, cleared the launch tower and turned onto an eastward heading over the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean a little more than an hour later to conclude the first flight of the latest version of SpaceX's stainless-steel mega-rocket. Starship V3 fared better on its debut than the first flights of Starship V1 and V2 in 2023 and 2025. Both past versions of Starship broke apart during launch on their inaugural flights.
SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.
Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX's launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.
That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before SpaceX called off the launch attempt.
After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX on Wednesday afternoon released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
SpaceX, founded in 2002 and still led by Elon Musk, submitted the filing in anticipation of an initial public offering of its stock as soon as June 12.
The document revealed no major surprises about the company's space operations, but there was a trove of details about its sprawling operations, which now encompass launch, spaceflight, space-based Internet, and, thanks to its recent acquisition of Musk's xAI, social media and AI.
SpaceX has won a lucrative contract to provide the US military with a means of distributing space-based sensing and targeting data, forming the "backbone" of a rearchitected network after separate Pentagon initiatives stalled, officials announced Tuesday.
Space Systems Command, the Space Force's primary procurement and acquisition center, announced the $2.29 billion firm-fixed-price agreement, confirming long-simmering reports that the Pentagon was likely to tap SpaceX for a new communications network in low-Earth orbit. SpaceX's selection for the Space Data Network (SDN) Backbone contract "accelerates the delivery of a resilient, high-speed communications network in space," Space Systems Command said in a statement.
The network will be based on technology originally developed for SpaceX's Starlink global Internet constellation. SpaceX already builds and launches specially designed satellites, called Starshield, for military applications. The SDN Backbone network in low-Earth orbit (LEO) will presumably use the Starshield platform.
SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results.
The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas at 5:30 pm CDT (6:30 pm EDT; 22:30 UTC) Friday. Within a few seconds, the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) rocket, the largest ever built, cleared the launch tower and turned onto an eastward heading over the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean a little more than an hour later to conclude the first flight of the latest version of SpaceX's stainless-steel mega-rocket. Starship V3 fared better on its debut than the first flights of Starship V1 and V2 in 2023 and 2025. Both past versions of Starship broke apart during launch on their inaugural flights.
SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.
Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX's launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.
That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before SpaceX called off the launch attempt.
Federal Aviation Administration documents have provided new details about a SpaceX project to develop and test reentry vehicles that could be used to support in-space manufacturing projects.
Welcome to Edition 8.43 of the Rocket Report! A disclaimer: No one yet fully appreciates the ramifications of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explosion Thursday night on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. What we know as of this writing is that much of Blue's sole orbital-class launch pad has been destroyed, and the New Glenn rocket will be grounded for an extended period of time. It is too soon for any hot takes, at least until the Sun rises at the Cape on Friday morning. One thing I am sure of is that we will be writing about this event for weeks, months, and years to come.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.
Charting China's contribution to space junk. There's a problem with the drastic uptick in Chinese space launches over the last decade. China appears to be ignoring long-established norms about disposing of the upper stages of rockets, Ars reports. These are the parts of the vehicle that separate from the first stage of a rocket and push a satellite or spacecraft into orbit. In the early decades of spaceflight, launch operators routinely left upper stages in orbit after they released their payloads. But most launch companies today reserve enough propellant in their rockets to remove them from orbit to avoid the risk of spent upper stages becoming a source of space debris. But China is not following this trend. There has been striking growth in China’s rocket body mass. In the past five years, the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in long-lived orbits has risen from less than 100 metric tons to 252, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell.
Login
