Space
Solar Orbiter heads to the sun in mission to unravel its mysteries, takes first space measurements
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft is traveling through the cosmos. Its destination: the inner solar system. The 3,900-lb. (1,800-kg) spacecraft will work in tandem with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to unravel solar mysteries that have puzzled scientists for decades.
The probe will spend the next two years cruising towards the sun and using both Venus and the Earth to slingshot itself out of the ecliptic plane — the area of space where all planets orbit. This vantage point will allow the spacecraft to eventually look down upon the sun’s polar regions and snap the very first images of this crucial area.
“We believe this area holds the keys to unraveling the mysteries of the sun’s activity cycle,” Daniel Müller, the mission’s ESA project scientist, said in a prelaunch science briefing on Feb. 7.
The Solar Orbiter and its suite of 10 specialized instruments will act as a mobile laboratory in space, tracking eruptions of solar materials from their origin on the surface of the sun, out into space, and all the way down to Earth.
“Our entire solar system is governed by the activity that comes from the sun,” Nicky Fox, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division said during the mission’s science briefing. “There’s a continually streaming kind of soup of energetic particles that moves away from the sun and bathes all the planets. We call that the solar wind.”
Together, the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field create a huge bubble known as the heliosphere, which shields the Earth from powerful interstellar radiation called cosmic rays.
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are energetic eruptions of solar material and when they make it to Earth, the solar particles can interact with our planet’s magnetic field to produce powerful electromagnetic fluctuations. Known as geomagnetic storms, they are troublesome because they’re known to disrupt technologies like communications systems and even power grids.
Additionally, they can also be dangerous to astronauts and satellites in space. Solar Orbiter will help mitigate damages from these types of storms by helping scientists better predict when they might happen.
Solar Orbiter launched atop an Atlas V rocket on Feb. 9 at 11:03 p.m. EST (0403 GMT on Feb. 10). About an hour after liftoff, the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage as planned, extended its solar arrays and sent a signal back to Earth that it had power.
The spacecraft then spent the next several days deploying its communication antennas as well as its instrument boom.
Its first three months are what’s known as a commissioning phase, during which ground controllers will check out the onboard instruments to make sure everything is in working order. Two years from now, the spacecraft will be close enough to take its first detailed measurements of the sun, but we didn’t have to wait that long for the first bits of science data to come in.
Solar Orbiter carries ten scientific instruments, four in situ (meaning they measure the environment around the spacecraft) and six remote-sensing imagers (which will measure the sun’s properties). The majority of the in situ instruments are located on a 4.4-m-long extendable boom. They study the electromagnetic characteristics of the solar wind, as well as the stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun.
“We measure magnetic fields thousands of times smaller than those we are familiar with on Earth,” Tim Horbury, principal investigator for the magnetometer (MAG) instrument on the Solar Orbiter, said in the statement. “Even currents in electrical wires make magnetic fields far larger than what we need to measure. That’s why our sensors are on a boom, to keep them away from all the electrical activity inside the spacecraft.”
Designed to measure the strength and direction of the magnetic field, the MAG (which is composed of two sensors) was the first instrument to send back data.
“The data we received shows how the magnetic field decreases from the vicinity of the spacecraft to where the instruments are actually deployed,” Horbury said in the same statement. “This is an independent confirmation that the boom actually deployed and that the instruments will, indeed, provide accurate scientific measurements in the future.”
The boom is a pole made constructed out of titanium and carbon-fiber that houses three instruments, which are so sensitive that they need to be kept away from the main body of the spacecraft to avoid potential electromagnetic disturbances.
“Measuring before, during, and after the boom deployment helps us to identify and characterize signals that are not linked to the solar wind, such as perturbations coming from the spacecraft platform and other instruments,” Matthieu Kretzschmar, lead co-investigator of the high-frequency magnetometer of the Radio and Plasma Waves instrument (RPW) instrument, which is also located on the boom and will study properties of the solar wind.
The team will continue to calibrate the spacecraft’s suite of instruments and will begin collecting official science data as early as May.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Board has set a Mars bonus for Elon Musk
SpaceX has given Elon Musk the goal to put one million people on Mars.
SpaceX’s board approved a compensation plan for Elon Musk that ties his pay directly to colonizing Mars and building data centers in outer space. The details surfaced this week after Reuters reviewed SpaceX’s confidential registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, making it one of the first concrete looks inside the company’s financials ahead of a public offering.
The pay package will reportedly award Musk 200 million super-voting restricted shares if the company hits a market valuation milestone, with the most ambitious targets going further. To unlock the full award, SpaceX would need to reach a $7.5 trillion valuation and help establish a permanent human settlement on Mars with at least one million residents. Additional incentives are tied to developing space-based computing infrastructure capable of delivering at least 100 terawatts of processing power.
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
Long before SpaceX filed anything with the SEC, Elon Musk had already spent years framing Mars colonization as an insurance policy against human extinction. The philosophy traces back to at least 2001, when Musk first began researching Mars missions independently, before SpaceX even existed. By 2002 he had founded the company with Mars as the stated long-term goal.
In a 2017 presentation at the International Astronautical Congress, Musk outlined the specific vision that still underpins SpaceX’s architecture today. He described a self-sustaining city on Mars requiring roughly one million people to become viable, the same number now written into his compensation package.
SpaceX’s Starship, still in active development, was designed from the ground up to support the eventual colonization of Mars. Musk has stated publicly that getting the cost per ton to Mars below $100,000 is necessary to make mass migration economically feasible. Everything from Starship’s payload capacity to its full reusability targets flows from that single constraint. One can say that Musk’s latest compensation package has put a formal valuation on Mars for the first time.
SpaceX is targeting an IPO around June 28, Musk’s birthday, at a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion. Between the Mars rover contract, the Golden Dome software group, Space Force satellite launches, and now a pay structure built around interplanetary colonization, SpaceX has become the single most consequential contractor in American space and defense. The IPO will put a public price tag on all of it for the first time.
News
UPDATE: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy that launched a Tesla into space is back on a mission
SpaceX Falcon Heavy returns after 18 months away to deliver a satellite that only it could carry.
UPDATE: 10:29 a.m. et: SpaceX is standing down from today’s Falcon Heavy launch of the ViaSat-3 F3 mission due to unfavorable weather. A new target date will be shared once confirmed.
After an 18-month absence, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is returning to mission on Monday morning when it’s scheduled to lift off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 10:21 a.m. EDT.
The mission is called ViaSat-3 F3, and the heavy satellite payload needs to reach geostationary orbit, sitting 22,236 miles above Earth where its speed matches the planet’s rotation. Getting a satellite that heavy to that altitude demands more thrust than a single-core Falcon 9 can deliver.
This marks the Falcon Heavy’s 12th flight overall since its debut in February 2018, and its first since NASA’s Europa Clipper mission in October 2024.
Arguably, the most exciting element for spectators will be watching the booster recoveries in action when the two side boosters, B1072 and B1075, will attempt simultaneous landings at Landing Zone 2 and the newer Landing Zone 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, while the center core will be expended over the ocean.
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
Following satellite deployment, expected roughly five hours after launch, ViaSat-3 F3 will spend several months traveling to its final orbital slot before undergoing in-orbit testing, with service entry expected by late summer 2026
As Teslarati reported, NASA awarded SpaceX a $175.7 million contract on April 16, 2026, to launch the ESA Rosalind Franklin Mars rover aboard a Falcon Heavy no earlier than late 2028, which would mark the first time SpaceX has ever sent a payload to Mars. That contract came on top of an already deep pipeline that includes the Roman Space Telescope, the Dragonfly Saturn mission, and multiple national security payloads.
SpaceX executed 165 missions in 2025 and now accounts for approximately 85% of all global orbital launches. With Starlink surpassing 10 million subscribers and an IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation still ahead, Monday’s launch is one more data point in a company that has quietly become the backbone of both commercial and government space access worldwide.
Elon Musk
The FCC just said ‘No’ to SpaceX for now
SpaceX is fighting the FCC for spectrum that could put satellites inside every smartphone.
SpaceX was dealt a new setback on April 23, 2006 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after the U.S. government agency dismissed the company’s petition to access a Mobile Satellite Service spectrum that would allow direct-to-device (D2D) capabilities.
The FCC regulates communications by radio, television, wire, and cable, which also includes regulating D2D technology that lets your existing smartphone connect directly to a satellite orbiting Earth, the same way it would connect to a cell tower.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been building toward this through its Starlink Mobile service, formerly called Direct-to-Cell, in partnership with T-Mobile. The service officially launched on July 23, 2025, starting with messaging and expanding to broadband data in October of that year.
T-Mobile Starlink Pricing Announced – Early Adopters Get Exclusive Discount
It’s worth noting that SpaceX is not alone in this race. AT&T and Verizon have their own satellite texting deals with AST SpaceMobile, while Verizon separately offers free satellite texting through Skylo on newer phones.
The regulatory foundation for all of this dates to March 14, 2024, when the FCC adopted the world’s first framework for what it called Supplemental Coverage from Space, allowing satellite operators to lease spectrum from terrestrial carriers and fill gaps in their coverage. On November 26, 2024, the FCC granted SpaceX the first-ever authorization under that framework, approving its partnership with T-Mobile to provide service in specific frequency bands. SpaceX then went further, completing a roughly $17 billion acquisition of wireless spectrum from EchoStar, which gave it the ability to negotiate with global carriers more independently.
Starlink’s EchoStar spectrum deal could bring 5G coverage anywhere
This recent ruling by the FCC blocked SpaceX from going further, protecting incumbent spectrum holders like Globalstar and Iridium. But the market momentum is already in motion. As Teslarati reported, SpaceX is targeting peak speeds of 150 Mbps per user for its next generation Direct-to-Cell service, compared to roughly 4 Mbps today, which would bring satellite connectivity close to standard carrier performance.
With a reported IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation on the horizon, each spectrum fight, carrier deal, and regulatory win or loss now carries weight beyond just connectivity. SpaceX is quietly becoming the infrastructure layer underneath the phones of millions of people, and the FCC’s next move will help determine how much further that reach extends.
FCC Satellite Rule Makings can be found here.
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
Tesla Model X shocks everyone by crushing every other used car in America
