Space
NASA’s Mars Rover blasts off on ULA rocket for mission to the red planet
The summer of worldwide Mars missions saved the best for last with the successful launch of NASA’s most advanced rover ever. Following on the heels of the successful launches of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars spacecraft and the United Arab Emirates Hope Mars mission, NASA joined the 309 million miles (497 million kilometers) interplanetary journey to the Red Planet with the successful launch of the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission. Safely secured to the top of a mighty United Lunch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket and Centaur upper stage, NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover – and accompanying Ingenuity helicopter – left Earth on Thursday morning (July 30) in spectacular fashion. Getting off this planet, however, is only the beginning.
Why go to Mars again?
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is perhaps NASA’s most ambitious Mars mission. Formally announced in 2012, the then-unnamed Mars 2020 rover would be tasked with studying the Red Plane in a way that had never been attempted before. It would be collecting samples for eventual return to Earth in search of finding evidence of ancient microbial life.
NASA’s 2012 Curiosity mission uncovered the fact that Mars was rich in material that could have potentially supported microbial life once upon a time. Now, eight years later, the Perseverance mission will hunt for and collect the evidence to back up that claim.
A rover tasked with such an important astrobiological mission required NASA to develop the most technologically advanced range of scientific instruments that had ever been sent to Mars. As described by NASA, Perseverance is outfitted with seven different “state-of-the-art tools for acquiring information about Martian geology, atmosphere, environmental conditions, and potential signs of life (biosignatures).” Perseverance will be the first rover to collect and cache samples of the Martian surface to later be collected and eventually returned to Earth by future joint NASA and European Space Agency missions.
Credit: NASA
It is also the first rover to travel to Mars with a vast array of high-definition cameras with advanced imaging capability. Perseverance will also carry high-definition microphones with it, allowing, for the first time, the sounds of Mars to be captured. This will include the ability to hear entry, descent, and landing from the point of view of the rover, as well as the sound of what it’s like to drive over the Martian terrain.
Perseverance also carries with it two demonstration missions. Onboard is MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment, designed to test technology that can convert carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen – an important precursor experiment to one day sending humans to Mars. Also aboard is Ingenuity, the first-ever rotorcraft – or helicopter – designed to fly on another planet. Ingenuity will test the effectiveness of rotorcrafts on other planets with different atmospheric and gravitational makeup than Earth to perhaps one day serve as planetary observational crafts or delivery systems.
Leaving Earth was the easy part, sort of
A major challenge that faced the Mars 2020 mission was completing final integrations during the global Coronavirus pandemic, which required most NASA and JPL personnel to work from home. NASA LSP senior launch director, Omar Baez, stated that “I never would have thought that a launch director would be working from home and I’ve done that for the last five months.” He went on further to state that “It’s humbling to see how our whole team from the range, to our partners at JPL, to our partners at ULA, to our folks at headquarters – how we all had to adjust to work in this environment, to work electronically.” Although challenging, the Mars 2020 mission persevered to overcome the obstacles and meet the targeted launch date.
The Mars 2020 mission initially targeted a July 18th liftoff at the very opening of the available one-month interplanetary launch window. The mission did suffer a few minor setbacks during the integration phase when ULA had to take a few days to address an issue with a crane at the Vertical Integration Facility pushing the launch date to July 22nd. Then, as explained in a statement provided by NASA the launch date suffered another delay, this time eight days to July 30, “due to launch vehicle processing delays in preparation for spacecraft mate operations.”
The ULA Atlas V in its 541 configuration consisting of a common core booster and four solid rocket motors fully stacked with the precious payload stood 197 feet (60 meters) tall. The Atlas V 541 provided 2 million lbs of thrust rocketing the spacecraft east away from Florida over the Atlantic Ocean. After approximately ninety seconds of flight, the solid rocket motors burned out, separating away from the booster followed quickly by stage separation. The Centaur upper-stage was the workhorse of the mission left to deliver the Mars 2020 payload to its Earth parking orbit.
After a coast phase lasting about 30 minutes, the upper-stage Centaur performed another eight-minute long nominal burn delivering the payload to a heliocentric – or solar bound, rather than Earthlocked – orbit for the Trans Mars Injection maneuver lining it up to intercept with Mars in February 2021. Upon spacecraft separation and successfully propelling the Perseverance mission onward to Mars, the Centaur upper-stage performed what is called a blowdown maneuver for planetary protection, ensuring that it would miss Mars. Twenty minutes later, the Perseverance spacecraft initiated its transmitter to communicate with Earth, and a good acquisition of signal was received by NASA’s international array of giant radio antennas, the Deep Space Network.
The Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter are expected to continue on the journey to the Red Planet and attempt entry, descent, and landing on February 18, 2020.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s IPO might arrive sooner than you think
Musk has hinted for years that an eventual public offering was inevitable, though he has stressed the need to maintain operational focus. Insiders have told outlets that the CEO is pushing for a significant retail investor allocation, reportedly more than 20 percent of shares, and tighter lock-up periods to limit early selling pressure.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is on the verge of one of the most anticipated Initial Public Offerings (IPO) in history.
However, a new report from The Information indicates the rocket and satellite giant is aiming to file its IPO prospectus with U.S. regulators as soon as this week, or early next week at the latest.
People familiar with the plans told The Information that advisers involved in the process expect the IPO could raise more than 75 billion dollars, potentially making it the largest stock market debut ever and eclipsing Saudi Aramco’s 29.4 billion dollar offering in 2019.
The filing would mark the formal start of what has long been rumored: SpaceX’s transition from a closely held private powerhouse to a publicly traded company.
The timing aligns with earlier signals.
In late February, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was targeting a confidential IPO filing in March and a possible public listing in June, with a valuation north of 1.75 trillion dollars. At the time, the company’s private valuation hovered around 1.25 trillion dollars.
SpaceX considering confidential IPO filing this March: report
Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation, has been the primary driver of that surge, now serving millions of customers worldwide and generating steady revenue. Recent Starship test flights and a record pace of Falcon launches have further bolstered investor confidence.
Musk has hinted for years that an eventual public offering was inevitable, though he has stressed the need to maintain operational focus. Insiders have told outlets that the CEO is pushing for a significant retail investor allocation, reportedly more than 20 percent of shares, and tighter lock-up periods to limit early selling pressure.
A June listing would give SpaceX immediate access to public capital markets at a moment when demand for space-related stocks remains high. It would also allow early employees and long-time investors to cash out portions of their stakes while giving everyday shareholders a chance to own a piece of the company behind reusable rockets, global broadband, and NASA contracts.
Of course, nothing is certain until the SEC filing appears. Market conditions, regulatory reviews, and Musk’s own schedule could still shift timelines.
Yet the latest word from The Information suggests the window has opened. If the filing lands this week, SpaceX’s roadshow could begin in earnest within weeks, setting the stage for what many analysts already call the IPO of the decade.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI unveiled TERAFAB, a $25B chip factory targeting one terawatt of AI compute annually.
Elon Musk took the stage over the weekend at the defunct Seaholm Power Plant in Austin, Texas, to officially unveil TERAFAB, a $20-25 billion joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI that he described as “the most epic chip building exercise in history by far.” The announcement marks the most ambitious infrastructure bet Musk has made since Gigafactory 1 in Sparks, Nevada, and it fuses three of his companies into a single, vertically integrated AI hardware machine for the first time.
TERAFAB is designed to consolidate every stage of semiconductor production under one roof, including chip design, lithography, fabrication, memory production, advanced packaging, and testing. At full capacity, the facility would scale to roughly 70% of the global output from the current world’s largest semiconductor foundry from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Elon Musk’s stated goal is one terawatt of computing power annually, split between Tesla’s AI5 inference chips for vehicles and Optimus robots, and D3 chips built specifically for SpaceXAI’s orbital satellite constellation.
Tesla Terafab set for launch: Inside the $20B AI chip factory that will reshape the auto industry
The logic behind the merger of these three entities is rooted in a supply chain crisis Musk has been signaling for over a year. At Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, he warned investors that external chip capacity from TSMC, Samsung, and Micron would hit a ceiling within three to four years. “We’re very grateful to our existing supply chain, to Samsung, TSMC, Micron and others,” Musk acknowledged at the Terafab event, “but there’s a maximum rate at which they’re comfortable expanding.” Building in-house was, in his framing, not a strategic option, but a necessity.
The space angle is where the announcement becomes genuinely unprecedented. Musk said 80% of Terafab’s compute output would be directed toward space-based orbital AI satellites, arguing that solar irradiance in space is roughly 5x greater than at Earth’s surface, and that heat rejection in vacuum makes thermal scaling viable. This directly feeds the SpaceXAI vision, which is betting that within two to three years, running AI workloads in orbit will be cheaper than doing so on the ground. The satellites, powered by constant solar energy, would effectively turn low Earth orbit into the world’s largest data center.
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Historically, this announcement threads together every major Musk initiative of the past two years: the xAI-SpaceX merger, Tesla’s $2.9 billion solar equipment talks with Chinese suppliers, the 100 GW domestic solar manufacturing push, the Optimus humanoid robot program, and Starship’s development. TERAFAB is the capstone that ties them into a single coherent architecture — chips made on Earth, launched by SpaceX, powered by Tesla solar, run by xAI, and ultimately extended to the Moon.
“I want us to live long enough to see the mass driver on the moon, because that’s going to be incredibly epic,”Musk said during the presentation.
Announcing TERAFAB: the next step towards becoming a galactic civilization https://t.co/IDKey07mJa
— Tesla (@Tesla) March 22, 2026
Elon Musk
SpaceX is quietly becoming the U.S. Military’s only reliable rocket
Space Force drops ULA for SpaceX on GPS launch after Vulcan rocket anomaly investigation halts flights.
The U.S. Space Force announced today it is switching an upcoming GPS III satellite launch from United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9, a move that is as much a reflection of Vulcan’s mounting problems as it is a validation of SpaceX’s growing dominance in national security space launch. The GPS III Space Vehicle 09, originally contracted to fly on Vulcan this month, will now target a late April liftoff on Falcon 9, marking the fourth consecutive GPS III satellite the Space Force has moved to SpaceX after contracts were originally awarded to ULA.
The immediate trigger is a solid rocket motor anomaly that occurred on February 12 during Vulcan’s USSF-87 mission. Although the payloads reached orbit and ULA declared the mission successful, the company characterized the malfunction as a “significant performance anomaly” and has since paused all military launches on Vulcan pending a root cause investigation.
“With this change, we are answering the call for rapid delivery of advanced GPS capability while the Vulcan anomaly investigation continues,” said Systems Delta 81 Commander Col. Ryan Hiserote. “We are once again demonstrating our team’s flexibility and are fully committed to leverage all options available for responsive and reliable launch for the Nation.”
The broader reality is that SpaceX’s reliability record and launch cadence have made it the path of least resistance for the Pentagon, and bodes well with Elon Musk’s plans to IPO SpaceX sometime this year. Its Falcon 9 is the most flight-proven rocket in history, and the Space Force’s Rapid Response Trailblazer program was specifically designed to enable exactly this kind of provider swap for GPS missions, and effectively building SpaceX’s flexibility into the national security launch architecture by design.
For ULA, the stakes are existential. The company entered 2026 with aspirations of finally turning a corner after years of Vulcan delays, with interim CEO John Elbon pointing to a backlog of over 80 missions as reason for optimism. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s contracts with the Space Force have given it a formal pathway to take on even more national security launches going forward.
The significance of today’s announcement extends beyond one satellite swap. It reinforces that America’s most critical space infrastructure, including GPS, missile warning, and beyond, is increasingly dependent on a single commercial provider.
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