Space
NASA's resilient Curiosity Rover bounces back once more after attitude issue
NASA’s Curiosity rover had a little attitude problem earlier this week. The issue sidelined the rover for a brief time, but the golf cart-sized robot is back to roaming the red planet.
In rover speak, “attitude” doesn’t mean Curiosity is being sassy, but rather it refers to the robot’s position in space. Curiosity needs to know where it and its robotic arm (which is where the robot’s instruments are kept) are at all times. This helps keep the rover safe.
If Curiosity fails to keep track of its attitude, it could accidentally point one of its cameras towards the sun or even damage an instrument by hitting it on a nearby rock or boulder.
“Partway through its last set of activities, Curiosity lost its orientation. Some knowledge of its attitude was not quite right, so it couldn’t make the essential safety evaluation,” Dawn Sumner, a planetary geologist and Curiosity team member wrote in a mission update on Monday (Jan. 20).
“Thus, Curiosity stopped moving, freezing in place until its knowledge of its orientation can be recovered,” she added. “Curiosity kept sending us information, so we know what happened and can develop a recovery plan.”
Curiosity has explored the Martian surface since 2012, and over the course of its mission, the rover has bounced back from numerous glitches—this was no exception. Thanks to the robot’s handlers, a plan was quickly implemented and Curiosity started moving again.
Their plan was to manually send the robot its location information. Soon after, Curiosity was back in action.
The Curiosity rover captures a view of an outcrop with finely layered rocks within the ‘Murray Buttes’ region on lower Mount Sharp. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“We learned this morning that plan was successful and Curiosity was ready for science once more!” said Scott Guzewich, mission team member and atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wrote in a subsequent update.
This isn’t the first time the rover dealt with issues. Curiosity has overcome multiple glitches and setbacks during its time on Mars. But thanks to a robust design and a team of highly-skilled engineers, the rover has been able to work through the various issues that have popped up. (Including memory issues as well as damage to its wheels from the rougher-than-expected Martian terrain.)
In fact, Curiosity originally had just a two-year mission, but has performed so well, that the six-wheeled rover is in its seventh year.
A side-by-side view of the Mars 2020 and Curiosity rovers. Credit: NASA/JPL-Cal-TechThe rover landed inside Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer) crater in August 2012, and was tasked with assessing the region’s habitability. Did life once flourish in this spot? So far, Curiosity has not found direct evidence of past life on Mars, but the rolling scientist did discover that the spot was once home to a lake and stream system, some time in Mars’s past.
Currently, the rover is exploring the foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high mountain jetting up from the crater’s center. Here, the rover will look for clues about Mars’s ancient climate and how it changed over millions of years.
Right now, Curiosity is the only functioning rover on the red planet’s surface. NASA’s storied Opportunity rover was shut down following a planet-wide dust storm that blocked out the lift-sustaining sunshine the rover needed to power its batteries.
ESA’s ExoMars rover will roam the rusty Martian surface in search for signs of life.
In July, NASA will be sending its next rover—a souped up version of Curiosity—to Mars. Designed to search for signs of life, the Mars 2020 rover will arrive on the red planet in March 2021. Landing in Jezero Crater, the rover will bag up samples for return to Earth at a later time.
But that’s not all. The European Space Agency (ESA) is teaming with Russia’s Roscosmos to send its own rover to Mars. The Rosalind Franklin, ExoMars rover will also look for signs of past life on Mars.
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.
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.
Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors
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.
Tesla expands Robotaxi in a way that was long anticipated
UPDATE: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy that launched a Tesla into space is back on a mission
