Space
NASA’s newest space observatory could sniff exoplanet atmospheres for signs of life
Over the course of our existence, humanity has struggled to definitively answer the question: “Are we alone?”
Is Earth the only planet in the vast cosmic sea that contains life? As our technology becomes more advanced, we get closer and closer to the answer.
Our solar system contains a multitude of worlds, planetary bodies ranging from ice planets to gas giants with magnificent rings to rocky, terrestrial worlds like our own. But what lies out beyond our stellar neighborhood?
It’s only been in the last few decades that scientists have detected planets orbiting other stars. We call them exoplanets. Since that initial discovery, researchers have trained their telescopes on the cosmos in search of new and different worlds.
Their efforts were not in vain, as thousands of exoplanets have been detected. Now, scientists are starting to shift their focus to the individual planets and learning as much as they can about them. Do they contain life? What are they made of? What kind of atmosphere do they have?
These are the types of questions we hope to answer about the alien worlds that fill our universe.
One element essential to life on Earth is oxygen. Its presence is what scientists refer to as a biosignature. (These are the types of things NASA’s next Mars rover will look for.) A recent paper published in Nature Astronomy details a new technique that scientists are hoping will help them detect the presence of oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres.
Like methane, oxygen is a biosignature but its presence does not guarantee we will find life. There are plenty of non-biological processes that produce oxygen (as well as methane). However, if other biosignatures are detected in addition to oxygen, the chances of life increase significantly.
NASA’s Curiosity rover detected a methane cycle on Mars that varies with the seasons. However, its orbital counterparts — European spacecraft TGO and Mars Express — have not. The science team is working to identify what is causing the methane spikes as well as why it seems to disappear as it rises through the atmosphere.
“Oxygen is one of the most exciting molecules to detect because of its link with life, but we don’t know if life is the only cause of oxygen in an atmosphere,” Edward Schwieterman, an astrobiologist at UC Riverside and co-author on the study, said in a statement. “This technique will allow us to find oxygen in planets both living and dead.”
The new method was developed by a team led by Thomas Fauchez, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It is derived from the behavior of oxygen molecules in Earth’s atmosphere.
When oxygen molecules collide, they produce a signal—a very subtle dip in infrared radiation. Unfortunately, that signal is so faint that current observatories cannot detect it in distant planets. But that will soon change. NASA’s latest and greatest telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will come online sometime in the next few years. Fauchez’s team has shown that JWST, which will observe the universe in the infrared, should have what it takes to spot it.
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- When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope comes online, it will help us identify the best planets to look for life. Credit: NASA
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- The Mars 2020 rover now has an offical name: Perseverance. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Before our work, oxygen at similar levels as on Earth was thought to be undetectable with Webb,” said Fauchez in a statement. “This oxygen signal is known since the early 1980s from Earth’s atmospheric studies but has never been studied for exoplanet research.”
In the meantime, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will launch to the red planet in July. Once it’s on Mars, it will study Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient river delta and scan the region for signs of life (like oxygen, methane, and other biosignatures). The rover will also bag up bits of Mars to be returned to Earth at a later date.
SpaceX is preparing for the 13th integrated flight test of its Starship system, with a targeted launch as early as Thursday, July 16. The 90-minute launch window opens at 5:45 p.m. CT from Starbase in South Texas.
This comes roughly seven weeks after Flight 12 on May 22, underscoring the company’s accelerating pace in its rapid development campaign. The mission will use the latest Starship and Super Heavy V3 vehicles equipped with Raptor 3 engines. Booster 20 will attempt a controlled boostback burn, followed by a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while Ship 40 will follow a suborbital trajectory.
Starship’s thirteenth flight test is preparing to launch as early as Thursday, July 16 → https://t.co/Rp7VwBzpWx pic.twitter.com/jdpFlQUEpF
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 11, 2026
Key objectives for Flight 13 will include demonstrating reliable stage separation, engine performance under various conditions, and controlled reentry.
A major milestone for Flight 13 is the first deployment of 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites. These satellites feature advanced laser links for inter-satellite communication, deployable solar arrays, and onboard cameras, six of which will capture imagery of Starship’s heat shield during flight.
Several heat shield tiles on Ship 40 will be painted white to serve as imaging targets, while additional experiments test upgraded tiles on aft flaps, modified attachments on the aft skirt, and load-sensing tiles to measure stresses. The upper stage will also attempt a single Raptor engine relight in space before a targeted splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
These tests build directly on lessons from Flight 12, which introduced the V3 configuration but encountered issues including a booster flip anomaly during boostback and an engine-out event on the ship. Hardware and software modifications on Booster 20 and Ship 40 aim to improve engine relight reliability, startup sequencing, and overall robustness.
Next Starship launch aiming for Thursday https://t.co/SajPPd4pdb
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2026
The short interval between Flights 12 and 13 highlights SpaceX’s iterative approach. Elon Musk has repeatedly emphasized that Starship launches will become “incredibly common” in the coming years.
The company envisions scaling to rates as high as one launch per hour within 4-5 years, potentially enabling thousands of flights annually. Such cadence is essential for Starship’s goals: establishing orbital refueling for lunar and Mars missions, deploying massive satellite constellations, and making life multiplanetary.
With each flight, Starship edges closer to full reusability and operational maturity. Success on July 16 would mark another step toward routine access to space and the ambitious vision of humanity becoming a spacefaring civilization.
For years, there have been images and videos across social media platforms that have reminded me of when I was a 15-year-old kid teased by “Xbox 720” videos on YouTube. These videos are of the supposed “Tesla Phone” that Elon Musk was secretly developing in between leading Tesla with its electric cars and SpaceX with its reusable rockets.
Would you buy a Tesla phone ? pic.twitter.com/aaTwvvIJit
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) October 6, 2023
Although Musk has put those rumors to bed several times, it was never completely out of the realm that he could get involved in cell phones in some capacity. Think outside the box and more macro-level, though. Instead of reinventing the computer, Musk reinvented connectivity by developing Starlink with SpaceX.
It could be something similar, TD Cowen analyst Gregory Williams said in a note last week, where he hinted SpaceX could be gathering some steam to acquire T-Mobile.
Williams said it would be the “clear choice” for SpaceX if it decided to go through with a network acquisition. He also suggested AT&T.
The move would be possible through selling more of its own stock, which would help SpaceX raise the money to purchase T-Mobile, which would cost roughly $300 billion. It could be one of the moves SpaceX makes post-IPO in terms of an acquisition: it already acquired Cursor AI for $60 billion.
Other analysts, like Dan Ives of Wedbush, believe SpaceX and Tesla will eventually merge into one anyway, and that conglomeration could come as soon as this year, some have said.
The implications of SpaceX purchasing T-Mobile are massive. A combined entity would create a truly ubiquitous network: T-Mobile’s terrestrial 5G towers and Starlink’s growing constellation of Direct-to-Cell satellites. This would essentially eliminate dead zones across the U.S. and potentially globally.
SpaceX would instantly become a full-scale facilities-based carrier with satellite differentiation; a huge advantage. This would pressure AT&T and Verizon heavily.
There are also concerns like a potential reduction in long-term competition, and of course, a deal of that size would face intense scrutiny from government agencies.
The strategic fit is compelling due to the existing Starlink–T-Mobile partnership and complementary technologies (space + terrestrial). It could create a dominant integrated communications player. However, the regulatory, financial, and execution hurdles are enormous — this remains highly speculative with no indication SpaceX is actively pursuing it right now.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Elon Musk confirmed Starmind as SpaceX’s AI satellite constellation name, targeting one million orbital compute nodes.
Elon Musk confirmed that Starmind will be the official name of SpaceX’s planned AI satellite constellation, following a trademark filing by xAI that surfaced earlier this week. Starmind is what’s being described to the FCC as a constellation of up to one million AI satellites
It’s worth noting that SpaceX’s Starlink communication satellite and Starmind are built on the same orbital infrastructure concept but serve entirely different purposes. Starlink is a connectivity network, with satellites receiving and relaying data between points on Earth, and functioning as a high-speed internet backbone in space. The satellites themselves do not process or think, and move information from one place to another, the same function a fiber cable performs underground.
SpaceX just forced Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to team up for the first time in history
Starmind, on the other hand, is something completely different, and tather than moving data, its satellites would compute data through artificial intelligence and directly in orbit using onboard processors powered by large solar arrays. Where a Starlink satellite is essentially a very fast pipe, a Starmind satellite is a server. The practical implication is that Starmind would allow AI models to run inference, process queries, and generate outputs from space, then beam results down to users anywhere on Earth within milliseconds, and without the data ever needing to travel to a terrestrial data center.
Starship will be able to carry 30 to 50 AI1 satellites per launch, delivering the equivalent of dozens of server racks per flight, with no land acquisition, no power grid approval, and no cooling infrastructure required on the ground.
SpaceX is pursuing this new technology as terrestrial data centers are running into hard limits such as lack of physical space, community opposition, and power and water consumption at a scale that is increasingly difficult to permit. Space has unlimited solar power, natural vacuum cooling, and no zoning boards. Musk said in a June 8 video presentation that he expects space to become the lowest-cost location to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Two AI1 prototypes are scheduled to launch in early 2027, with volume production targeted for the end of that year at a new facility called Gigasat.
The real world applications Starmind enables extend well beyond powering Grok. A constellation of orbiting AI processors could run inference workloads for any paying customer, anywhere on Earth, with latency measured in milliseconds rather than the seconds associated with ground-based cloud routing across continents. Starmind, if it scales as described, would make SpaceX the landlord of AI compute the same way Starlink made it the landlord of satellite internet.
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