Space
Mars’ atmosphere could help us better understand radio interference here on Earth
Have you ever tuned in to your favorite radio station only to hear another station playing on top of it? That’s a result of a weird atmospheric phenomenon called a sporadic E layer.
The Earth’s upper atmosphere, called the ionosphere, is a region full of charged particles. Those particles can be blown about by the wind, forming clumps called sporadic E layers. These dense layers of ions are constantly in flux — appearing and disappearing at random — which can be disruptive to radio communications.
With the help of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, NASA scientists have discovered the same phenomenon at Mars, which will help scientists better understand them. Even though these layers are quite common here on Earth, they form at altitudes that are very difficult to explore.
Mars has a thinner atmosphere that allows spacecraft, like MAVEN, to fly at lower altitudes and observe many of these weird layers.
“The low altitudes observable by MAVEN will fill in a great gap in our understanding of this region on both Mars and Earth, with really significant discoveries to be had,” Joe Grebowsky, a former MAVEN project scientist at Goddard, said in a statement.
MAVEN uncovered two types of structures — called layers and rifts — while studying the Martian ionosphere. The layers typically form suddenly and last for hours, acting like a mirror and reflecting radio signals. Scientists have known about the existence of these layers for a decade but have never been able to study them in detail until now.
“The layers are so close above all our heads at Earth and can be detected by anyone with a radio, but they are still quite mysterious,” Glyn Collinson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author on the study explained in the same statement. “Who would have thought one of the best ways to understand them is to launch a satellite 300 million miles to Mars?”
In total, the team found 34 E layers in the MAVEN data. They form higher in the Martian atmosphere and are probably too high to interfere with any future radio communications on the ground, which is good news for future human missions.
But they are troublesome here on Earth. In addition to interfering with your radio listening enjoyment, they can also block crucial radar signals that track things like aircraft and missiles.
In addition to the layers, MAVEN also found “rifts” in the planet’s atmosphere. These are gaps in the plasma — basically the opposite of a layer. These areas have never been spotted on Earth.
One thing the team noticed in the data is that the layers and rifts seem to always form at the same places. They think that’s because of how the charged particles in Mars’s ionosphere react to its tangled magnetic field.
This observation could make them much easier to find and predict at Mars, which could help scientists identify them easier here on Earth and mitigate their effects.
The research was published in a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
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Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
Elon Musk
How much of SpaceX will Elon Musk own after IPO will surprise you
SpaceX’s IPO filing confirms Musk will maintain his voting power to make key decisions for the company.
Elon Musk will retain dominant voting control of SpaceX after it goes public, according to the company’s IPO prospectus that was filed with the SEC. The filing reveals a dual-class equity structure giving Class B shareholders 10 votes each, concentrating power with Musk and a handful of other insiders, while Class A shares sold to public investors carry one vote.
Musk holds approximately 42% of SpaceX’s equity and controls roughly 79% of its votes through super-voting shares. He will simultaneously serve as CEO, CTO, and chairman of the nine-member board after the listing. Beyond that, the filing includes provisions that may limit shareholders’ influence over board elections and legal actions, forcing disputes into arbitration and restricting where they can be brought.
The case for Musk holding this level of control is grounded in SpaceX’s actual history. The company’s most important bets, from reusable rockets to a global satellite internet constellation, were decisions that ran against conventional aerospace thinking and would likely have faced resistance from a board accountable to investor gains. Fully reusable rockets were considered economically irrational by established industry players for years. Starlink, which now generates over $4 billion in annual operating profit, was widely dismissed as financially unviable when it was proposed. The argument for concentrated founder control seems straightforward, and the decisions that built SpaceX into what it is today required someone willing to ignore consensus and absorb years of losses.
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For context, Musk’s position is significantly more dominant than Zuckerberg’s at Meta. The comparison with Tesla is also worth noting. When Tesla did its IPO in 2010, it did not issue dual-class shares. Musk has only recently pushed for enhanced voting protection, proposing at least 25% control at Tesla in 2024 after selling shares to fund his Twitter acquisition left him with around 13%.
SpaceX has clearly learned from that experience and structured the IPO differently by planning to allocate up to 30% of shares to retail investors, roughly three times the typical norm for a large offering. The roadshow is expected to begin the week of June 8, with a Nasdaq listing rumored to be a $1.75 trillion valuation and a $75 billion raise.
Elon Musk
ARK’s SpaceX IPO Guide makes a compelling case on why $1.75T may not be the ceiling
ARK Invest breaks down six reasons SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion IPO valuation may be justified.
ARK Invest, which holds SpaceX as its largest Venture Fund position at 17% of net assets, has published a detailed investor guide to why a SpaceX IPO may be grounded in a $1.75 trillion target valuation.
The financial case starts with Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation, which has surpassed 10 million active subscribers globally as of early 2026, with 2026 revenue projected to exceed $20 billion. ARK’s research puts the total satellite connectivity market opportunity at roughly $160 billion annually at scale, and Starlink is adding customers faster than any telecom network in history. That growth alone would justify a substantial valuation.
Additionally, ARK notes that SpaceX has reduced the cost per kilogram to orbit from roughly $15,600 in 2008 to under $1,000 today through reusable Falcon 9 hardware. A fully operational Starship targeting sub-$100 per kilogram would represent a significant cost decline and open markets that do not currently exist. SpaceX executed a staggering 165 missions in 2025 and now accounts for approximately 85% of all global orbital launches. That infrastructure position took decades to build and would be nearly impossible to replicate at comparable cost.
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The February 2026 merger with xAI added a layer to the valuation that straightforward financial models struggle to capture. ARK argues that at sub-$100 launch costs, orbital data centers could deliver compute roughly 25% cheaper than ground-based alternatives, without power grid delays, permitting friction, or land constraints. Musk has stated a goal of deploying 100 gigawatts of AI computing capacity per year from orbit.
The $1.75 trillion figure itself is not a conventional earnings multiple. At roughly 95x trailing revenue, it prices in Starlink’s adoption curve, Starship’s cost trajectory, and the orbital compute thesis together. The public S-1 prospectus, due at least 15 days before the June roadshow, will give investors their first complete look at the financials to test those assumptions. ARK’s position is that the track record earns the benefit of the doubt. Fully reusable rockets were considered unrealistic for years. Starlink was considered financially unviable. Both happened on timelines that surprised skeptics.
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