Space
NASA’s newest Mars rover gets christened with a ‘strong’ official name
NASA’s next Mars rover will depart Earth in July, bound for the red planet. After landing in Feb. of next year, the six-wheeled rover will explore its surroundings. Initially dubbed as Mars 2020 as a nod to its launch date, the rover has just received an official name: Perseverance.
As part of a nationwide contest, NASA challenged children in grades K-12 to come up with a name for the robotic explorer. This follows tradition as rovers of the past, and even planets (hello Pluto), have been named by children. Viking, Pathfinder, Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, InSight, and now Perseverance.
The newest rover will build on the success of those robotic explorers who came before it by collecting the first samples of Mars for a future return to Earth. It will also lay the groundwork for future human exploration by testing new technologies.
“Yes, it’s curiosity that pulls us out there, but it’s perseverance that does not let us give up,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for the science mission directorate said during a news conference on Thursday.
Although Curiosity and Perseverance look like twins, the two rovers are quite different. But, it takes the pair to help us better understand Mars and its habitability.
“Perseverance is a strong word,” he said. “It’s about making progress despite obstacles.”
“There has never been exploration without perseverance,” Zurbuchen added.
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A total of 28,000 entries were received, and over the course of several months, NASA narrowed the field down to just 9 finalists. The public was asked to vote for its favorite, but ultimately the final decision was up to Zurbuchen. Each student was tasked with writing a brief essay supporting their choice in name. The finalists are listed below, and you can read more about the contest here.
- Endurance, K-4, Oliver Jacobs of Virgina.
- Tenacity, K-4, Eamon Reilly of Pennsylvania.
- Promise, K-4, Amira Shanshiry of Massachusetts.
- Perseverance, 5-8, Alexander Mather of Virginia.
- Vision, 5-8, Hadley Green of Mississippi.
- Clarity, 5-8, Nora Benitez of California.
- Ingenuity, 9-12, Vaneeza Rupani of Alabama.
- Fortitude, 9-12, Anthony Yoon of Oklahoma.
- Courage, 9-12, Tori Gray of Louisiana.
The Perseverance Mars rover, which looks nearly identical to the Curiosity rover that landed in 2012, will begin its mission exploring Jezero Crater. Equipped with a suite of specially-designed instruments it will look for signs of life called biosignatures.
NASA’s research indicates that Mars was habitable sometime in its past. But so far, we haven’t been able to detect any real signs of ancient life yet. The rover’s team thinks that its specialized suite of instruments will change that.
To that end, Perseverance will drill into the Martian surface, extracting samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further study. Returning the samples is a challenge that NASA is already starting to tackle, along with the European Space Agency. The agency estimates that the earliest it can send a mission to fetch the rover’s samples would be some time around 2026 or 2027.
In the meantime, Perseverance will be busy scouring the surface for evidence of microbial life as well as testing out technologies that future human missions could rely on. It will also carry the first helicopter to explore another planet.
The small, autonomous rotorcraft, will launch attached to the rover’s belly. Shortly after arriving on Mars, the softball-sized craft will use its dual blades to slice through the Martian atmosphere. According to engineers, its blades will generate nearly 3,000 rpm — 10 times the rate of helicopters here on Earth.
The Mars helicopter will conduct as many as five flights, each time flying a bit further away than the last. For its first flight, the helicopter will climb to 10 feet (3 meters), hovering for about 30 seconds. If this technology proves to be successful, this type of craft could be used to explore Mars ahead of human exploration.
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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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