Space
Europe postpones Mars mission over ExoMars rover issue and Coronavirus
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that its ExoMars rover would not fly this year. The mission, a collaboration with the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), was set to launch this summer. However, the launch has been postponed to 2022 due to technical issues and the logistical impact due to the global Conoavirus outbreak.
“This is a very tough decision, but it’s, I’m sure, the right one,” ESA Director General Jan Wörner said during a news conference at ESA’s headquarters in Paris after consulting with the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin. “The parties had to recognise that the final phase of ExoMars activities are compromised by the general aggravation of the epidemiological situation in European countries.”
“We agreed together it’s better to go for success than just to go for launch at this time,” Wörner said. “Although we are close to launch readiness, we cannot cut corners. Launching this year would mean sacrificing remaining essential tests.”
The ExoMars rover is Europe’s first Mars rover. Named after Rosalind Franklin, a British pioneer of DNA science, the robotic explorer will search for signs of life on the red planet’s surface. Wörner said the agency needs more time to troubleshoot issues with the spacecraft’s parachute system as well as precise electronics, so the delay is necessary.
Also, the recent coronavirus outbreak that’s spreading around the globe isn’t helping. So instead of rushing, the team is taking the next two years to conduct extensive testing and make sure they get it right.
“We have made a difficult but well-weighed decision to postpone the launch to 2022,” Rogozin said in a statement. “I am confident that the steps that we and our European colleagues are taking to ensure mission success will be justified and will unquestionably bring solely positive results for the mission implementation.”
The ExoMars rover is a follow-on to ESA’s ExoMars Orbiter mission, which reached the red planet in 2016. That mission consisted of two parts: the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and the Schiaparelli lander, a technology demonstrator. Unfortunately, the Schiaparelli crash-landed during its descent to the Martian surface.
Landing a spacecraft on Mars is hard. The planet’s atmosphere is thinner than what we see on Earth, and as such its takes a combination of sophisticated tools, including heat shields, retrorockets, and even giant, inflatable airbags, to safely touch down on the surface.
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If anyone of those techniques fails, the spacecraft will crash, which is what happened with Schiaparelli.
Despite being around for decades, parachutes are still pretty tricky, especially using them on another planet. ESA engineers have made many adjustments to the parachute system, but keep seeing the same result: they rip as soon as they deploy. Test, after test, the chutes failed. Engineers have tried reinforcing them with Teflon to make them slide out of their bags easier, but no luck.
ESA even tried to seek advice from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has built every single rover on Mars and, unfortunately needs more time to collaborate on parachute design. Because there’s only a limited window of launch opportunity, ESA officials decided to make the tough call to postpone until the next Mars window opens in 2022.
Appreciate @esa and @roscosmos for making the tough decision to postpone @ESA_ExoMars to 2022. Launching & safely landing a spacecraft on Mars are extremely demanding and require many technologies & systems to function perfectly. Your work is inspiring everyone to do hard things. https://t.co/ttPzDyQJWa
— Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) March 12, 2020
The rover and its launcher, a Russian Proton rocket, are ready to go. The agency has more parachute tests in the works, including high-altitude drops.
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Additionally, Wörner said the team discovered issues with the descent module’s electronic equipment, which are essential to the mission’s success. This piece of equipment controls functions like spacecraft power, propulsion, and even parachute control. It will take some time for the bugs to be fixed.
“Due to the troubleshooting of these anomalies at system level, the final version of the flight software has been delayed, and there is not enough time to fully test it before a 2020 launch and gain the confidence we need,” Wörner said.
You can technically launch to Mars anytime, but space agencies around the world choose specific windows that open every two years. During this time, Mars and Earth are in line, so that it takes less time and uses less fuel. In 2022, that window is open from August to October.
Once it reaches the Martian surface, the rover will study an ancient lake bed. It will scour the red planet’s surface in search of biosignatures, or signs of life.
Elon Musk has declared that SpaceX has effectively solved one of Starship’s most persistent engineering challenges: the reliability of its heat shield tiles.
During the company’s first-ever Earnings Call, the SpaceX CEO stated:
“I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I think I would call the heat shield problem solved at this point. All indications from data and visual inspection is we have solved it. That doesn’t mean we won’t make improvements, but we do not see any technical obstacles to achieving rapid reusability at this point.”
Starship’s heat shield consists of roughly 18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles covering the windward side of the upper stage. These tiles form the thermal protection system that shields the vehicle’s stainless-steel structure from the extreme heat of atmospheric reentry.
Elon says he believes the heat shield problem with Starship is currently solved.
He called it “arguably the single biggest problem” pic.twitter.com/eEE9vM5zlz
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 4, 2026
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During descent, atmospheric friction generates temperatures exceeding several thousand degrees Celsius and creates plasma flows capable of melting unprotected metal. The tiles absorb, radiate, and insulate against this energy, allowing the vehicle to survive and potentially fly again. Without a durable heat shield, full and rapid reusability, the cornerstone of Starship’s design for frequent launches, satellite deployments, and deep-space missions, would remain impossible.
The tiles have long been a source of difficulty. On earlier test flights, a significant number of tiles detached during ascent due to vibration, aerodynamic loads, and imperfect attachment methods using pins and adhesives. Gaps between tiles allowed hot plasma to infiltrate, causing secondary damage and hot spots on the underlying structure.
These issues echoed challenges faced by NASA’s Space Shuttle, whose ceramic tiles required extensive, labor-intensive inspections and replacements between missions, preventing rapid turnaround. SpaceX has iteratively improved materials, standardized tile shapes, refined attachment techniques, added secondary ablative layers, and tested sealing methods such as “crunch wrap” felt to close gaps.
Progress was visible across Flights 10–12, with steadily better tile retention, yet questions remained about whether the system could support the minimal-refurbishment goal of rapid reuse.
Flight 13 on July 24 provided the decisive evidence. Ship 40 flew a deliberately more demanding profile with higher dynamic pressure to stress the heat shield beyond typical operational loads. It successfully deployed 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites, the first such payload on a Starship mission, performed an in-space Raptor engine relight, and executed a controlled reentry.
Elon Musk sheds two new bits of detail on Starship after 13th test launch
Cameras on six of the satellites and onboard sensors captured extensive imagery and data of the shield throughout the flight. The ship then achieved its softest splashdown to date in the Indian Ocean, remaining intact and floating rather than breaking apart or exploding as on prior missions. This allowed drone inspections and continuous telemetry of the heat shield in near-real time.
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Post-flight analysis showed the majority of tiles remaining attached with only minor damage and limited plasma streaking at seams. Musk noted that the mission delivered “all the heat shield data we needed and then some.” Combined with visual inspections, these results underpinned his subsequent assessment that the core technical barriers to rapid reusability have been cleared. While refinements will continue, Flight 13 marked a pivotal step toward Starship’s operational future.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX and Nvidia team up on Musk’s orbital AI bet
SpaceX revealed a new Nvidia satellite partnership, then Musk pledged an exclusive Nvidia hardware commitment.
SpaceX and Nvidia are now working together on the hardware that will power Musk’s orbital data center ambitions. SpaceX announced on X on Tuesday that it is partnering with Nvidia to design the compute payload for Starmind AI1, the first satellite in a planned constellation built to run AI workloads directly in orbit. Each Starmind satellite will carry Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, according to the post, which included renderings of the payload design.
The announcement landed hours before SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, where Musk went further, saying the company has committed to building its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware. “We think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it’s the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia,” Musk told investors on the call,. “So we’re exclusive to Nvidia.”
Musk said SpaceX plans to deploy Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rackscale system, codenamed Kyber, both on the ground and in space. He set a target of 2 gigawatts of compute capacity online by the end of this year, scaling to roughly 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Starmind has been in development since Musk confirmed the name in June, following an xAI trademark filing that tipped off the project before SpaceX made it official. The idea is massive in scope and instead of moving data down to ground based servers, satellites equipped with onboard processors and large solar arrays would compute AI workloads in orbit and beam results back to Earth. SpaceX has already filed with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites to support the effort, citing constant solar power and the absence of zoning restrictions as advantages over terrestrial data centers.
The Nvidia exclusivity marks a shift in tone from just two weeks ago, when Musk was busy knocking down a report that SpaceX had ordered $52 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs through Foxconn, calling it fake news at the time. The dollar figure in that rumor may have been wrong, but the underlying direction seems correct. SpaceX’s AI division already leases Colossus compute capacity to Anthropic and Google, and Tuesday’s earnings report showed AI revenue climbing sharply as those deals ramp up.
Nvidia shares rose roughly 3% in Tuesday trading on the news, while SpaceX stock climbed nearly 9% during the day before giving back gains after hours as investors digested the earnings report’s capital spending figures.
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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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