NASA's Crew-13 launched four crew Thursday on a Dragon due to dock at the space station 7 hours 50 minutes later, a U.S. record by NASA's account. NASA stated the record before the docking took place, so it holds only once the 7 p.m. arrival happens.
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Google's orbital compute paper needs Starship to lift 370,000 tons to reach $200-a-kilogram launches, about 180 flights a year for a decade. Its first TPU in orbit will run in 15-minute bursts while Google tests whether a satellite can supply a kilowatt of steady power and keep the chip cool.
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Google is flying four TPUs, roughly one server's worth of compute on a kilowatt of solar power, in Project Suncatcher's first orbital test. The satellite can show whether the chips survive heat and radiation in orbit, a smaller question than whether computing there is cheaper.
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Canada Rocket Company plans to spend C$30 million on a 50-acre rocket engine test site in London, Ontario, against about C$22.5 million raised since November. Its promise that other Canadian launch firms can test there too depends on a larger round CRC has yet to close.
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Anatolii Papulov of NewOrbit says satellite launch lead times have reached 30 to 36 months, up from about 12 a year ago. The figure is one start-up's experience, though Quilty Space analyst Caleb Henry also calls the shortage a crisis with several causes besides Falcon 9.
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NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 will fly four astronauts from three agencies to the space station no earlier than Oct. 1. Its research includes human stem-cell-derived heart and Parkinson's tissue models, and their value will depend on how they compare with matched samples kept on the ground.
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SpaceX flew Starship to orbit for the first time on September 28, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites despite one of the upper stage's six engines going out at liftoff. The flight moves the vehicle closer to the operational heavy-lift launcher NASA and SpaceX are counting on.
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SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time on September 28 and deployed 26 working Starlink V3 satellites, each built to add 1 Tbps of capacity. Buyers can count on that capacity this quarter, while teams hoping to book Starship for their own payloads have one partial orbital flight to judge it by.
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SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 will try to reach orbit for the first time carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites that together add about 26 Tbps of capacity. For a company valued near $2 trillion, it tests how much one launch can lift, while the cost of each launch still depends on reuse.
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Google's MVP satellite takes four TPUs and about 1 kW of solar power into orbit to test whether AI chips survive radiation and shed their own heat. Its results will show whether rebooting away bit flips and cooling through a radiator can carry into the constellations Google has already sketched.
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NASA measured an 18-meter hole left by a spent upper stage on Aug. 5, and the hunt for it doubled as a live test of impact-prediction tools built for planetary defense.
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A White House memo asks federal agencies to clear the way to 1,000 US launches and re-entries a year by 2030, from 178. The scarce input is range frequency and airspace, not hardware.
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The orbital compute startup added an extension to its Series A largely to buy launch capacity before Falcon 9 retires in 2028, according to CEO Philip Johnston.
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LandSpace has brought a Zhuque-3 booster back to Earth, a first for China, but no Chinese booster has flown twice, and SpaceX has done it hundreds of times. Launch savings come from reflying hardware, and China's 2030 'space power' plan depends on exactly that.
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Flight 14 opens its window on 22 September carrying real payload for the first time, though neither stage will attempt a landing and Starship is flying at roughly four a year against the 25 test flights SpaceX officials once hoped for.
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Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital led a $1 billion Series E at roughly $10 billion. The money funds two clean-sheet rockets in parallel: Pathfinder in 2027 and the 14-engine Block 2 in 2029.
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The second flight of Spectrum put satellites into orbit from northern Norway, four days before Macron's sovereignty summit in Paris. For anyone shopping non-US small lift, the constraint is now a manifest described as full to 2028.
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University of Tasmania researchers bounced a NASA signal off a spent upper stage almost 400,000 kilometres out and found it slightly off where models placed it, which is the working argument for radar in cislunar space.
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The $100bn Vermilion Parish plan prices out at roughly $800,000 an acre and $10m per job. Suppliers should read it as a two-year construction programme with launch pads attached.
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The stated ceiling exceeds SpaceX's entire IPO haul, and the refurbishment cycle that would justify ten launch pads has not been demonstrated once.
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Earlier coverage
- Starcloud's $250M is a down payment on rockets it cannot yet buy
Build · August 21, 2026 · 2 publishers
- Trump's 1,000-launch target is a permitting subsidy, and SpaceX owns the queue
Invest · August 21, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Canada buys a launch industry for CAD 305M, roughly half of what one rocket costs
Invest · August 20, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Eight of 17 up: Globalstar's replacement fleet lands three years after a $327m order
Product · August 20, 2026 · 1 publisher
- LandSpace recovers a steel booster while Super Heavy waits on clearance
Product · August 19, 2026 · 3 publishers
- Launch slots, not launch prices, now set the pace for satellite programs
Product · August 17, 2026 · 1 publisher
- A million satellites on paper: read the filings, not Musk's 2029 deadline
Invest · August 15, 2026 · 1 publisher