SpaceX
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk proposes Starship, Starlink tech for Solar System tour
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has proposed an unusual approach to conducting a robotic survey of the Solar System’s major outer planets, asteroids, and comets, requiring a stripped-down Starship with a minimalist payload of Starlink satellites modified for interplanetary cruises and high-resolution cameras.
To enable this arrangement, it sounds like an expendable variant of Starship would have to be designed and built, cutting as much extraneous mass as possible to put as much energy as physically possible into its payloads. Outer planets – those lying beyond the Solar System’s main asteroid belt – are a minimum of 400 million miles (~650 million km) from Earth and stretch out to bodies like 2014 MU69 (below) at 4+ billion miles (6.8+ billion km) beyond Earth’s orbit. To travel those truly absurd distances, the time-to-destination can often be measured in decades, a timeframe that is physically impossible to shrink without hugely powerful rockets like BFR. Even then, SpaceX would face major hurdles to pull off Musk’s impromptu mission design.
New Horizons, the tiny but amazing spacecraft responsible for the first-ever close-up photos of Pluto and (more recently) the bizarre MU69 comet/asteroid, is perhaps the best categorical example of what Musk is proposing. Weighing less than 480 kg (1060 lb) and powered by a radioisotope generator (RTG), the spacecraft was launched in January 2006 and – after a single gravity assist around Jupiter – flew by Pluto a bit less than ten years later in July 2015, traveling a blistering ~13.8 km/s (8.6 mi/s).
Coincidentally, at least the first prototypes of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation weighed around 400 kg (880 lb) during their March 2018 launch, just shy of New Horizons’ own dry mass. Major differences abound, however. Most notably, Starlink satellites will be powered by solar arrays optimized for energy generation at Earth’s distance from the sun, compared to New Horizons’ RTG reactor. At distances beyond Saturn, reliance on solar power would be an extraordinary challenge for any spacecraft hoping to do more than simply survive. For example, due to certain unforgiving laws of physics, New Horizons would receive – quite literally – 0.06% the solar energy per unit of area at Pluto.
To produce the scant ~300 Watts New Horizon receives from its nuclear power source, a single Starlink satellite would need a minimum of 1400 m^2 (~15,000 ft^2) of high-efficiency solar panels to survive and power a minimal suite of instruments and communications hardware. Assuming an extraordinary 170 g/m^2 solar array as proposed by Alta Devices, a Starlink satellite would need solar cells weighing no less than 250 kg (550 lb) total to operate at Pluto, a mass that absolutely does not factor in the complex mechanisms necessary to deploy a third of an acre of solar panels from an area of just a few cubic meters.
Frankly put, solar-powered exploration beyond the orbit of Jupiter and perhaps Saturn becomes almost inconceivably difficult. Further, the above numbers don’t even take into account each Starlink spacecraft’s electric thrusters, which would need several times more solar panels or massive batteries (themselves needing heaters) to operate at an optimal power level for long, uninterrupted periods of time, a necessity for electric propulsion. Several billion miles closer to the sun, in the main asteroid belt or around the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, solar power is still extremely challenging but not impossible. NASA’s Juno spacecraft, the first solar-powered vehicle to visit the outer planets, 
At the end of the day, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and Starship-based boost stage would need to undergo radical (and thus expensive) redesigns to accomplish such an ambitious ‘tour’ of the Outer Solar System, quite possibly also requiring the development and integration of wholly new technologies and exploration strategies to get off the ground. While the challenges are immense, the fact that Mr. Musk is already expressing interest in supporting such an exploratory, science-focused mission inspires confidence in the many future benefits that could soon be derived from Starlink and Starship, if successfully developed. Assuming missions that remain within the Inner Solar System, an exploration architecture as described by Musk is already readily doable and wouldn’t need the major modifications and leaps necessary for Outer Solar System ventures. Possible destinations where it could be practical include the Moon, Mars, Venus, the main asteroid belt (i.e. Ceres, Vesta, etc.), and many others.
If SpaceX can find a way to get both Starlink and Starship off the ground and into operational configurations, the future of space exploration – both human and robotic – could be extraordinarily bright.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
SpaceX’s massive investment in AI will make it a big winner, Argus Research said after the company’s successful earnings call last week.
The firm also upgraded shares to a Buy from Hold and set a $160 price target.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) is currently recovering from its heavy AI infrastructure investments, as it spent nearly $16 billion in Q2 alone. The company did this primarily by monetizing high-demand GPU compute capacity at a much faster pace than traditional data center economics would suggest.
Company CFO Bret Johnsen said that SpaceX would be able to pay back anything on new deployments within a year.
There are plenty of ways the company can do this:
Leasing excess compute capacity through contracts
SpaceX has already built Colossus and Colossus II, largely for its own model training. However, much of that capacity is already rented out to third parties. It already has major deals with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI. These partnerships are adding billions per month to SpaceX’s spreadsheet.
High utilization driven by industry-wide scarcity
The demand for advanced AI training and inference capacity continues to exceed what is available for use. SpaceX can fill new racks quickly after they come online, so the capital deployed converts into revenue with minimal idle time.
Additionally, management and outside observers have described the new compute capital as behaving more like a cost-of-goods-sold than traditional multi-year capex, especially because of this rapid monetization pattern.
Capacity has already scaled from ~0.4 GW a year to 1.4 GW annually by the end of Q2. There are targets of more than 2 GW by year-end.
High incremental margins on the rental business once capacity is online
GPU cloud providers often operate at strong gross margins. SpaceX can monetize capacity that was already partially built or can be added efficiently. This means that incremental EBITDA margins on the rental revenue are usually high. This accelerates cash recovery relative to the gross capital outlay.
Parallel monetization of its own AI software and applications
Beyond pure infrastructure rental, SpaceX also generates revenue from Grok through subscriptions and usage, from X through ads, data, and other related services, enterprise APIs, and the planned integration of the Cursor coding tools acquisition.
These application layers ride on the same compute infrastructure and provide additional high-margin streams that could offset build-out costs. AI-segment revenue overall rose sharply to about $2.6 billion in Q2, according to Motley Fool. This was driven primarily by the infrastructure contracts, but the software side is also partially responsible.
Efficient, large-scale deployment and vertical integration advantages
SpaceX has emphasized the rapid construction of power and cooling infrastructure and favorable cost-per-megawatt economics relative to industry benchmarks in some disclosures.
Combined with its ability to scale capacity aggressively and the fact that many contracts start generating revenue within months of capacity coming online, the effective payback compresses dramatically compared with more conventional multi-year data-center projects.
SpaceX’s dominant near-term recovery path will turn the AI clusters into a hyperscale-style compute rental business for other leading AI companies while still using a portion for internal models.
Elon Musk
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
Elon Musk again denies a Tesla China split as new SpaceX merger speculation resurfaces quickly.
Elon Musk restated that Tesla has no plans to separate its China business from the rest of the company, responding to a new round of merger speculation from ARK Invest.
On the firm’s “Brainstorm” podcast, Cathie Wood’s team, including chief futurist Brett Winton and research director Nick Grous, argued a Tesla and SpaceX combination remains likely, with an announcement possible before the end of the year even if the deal itself would not close that quickly. Winton called Tesla’s Shanghai operations a “small ish wrinkle” for a merger rather than a real obstacle, since SpaceX’s national security work with the U.S. government sits uneasily next to Tesla’s manufacturing base in China.
Musk pushed back on the framing directly. “China is awesome. I strongly encourage people to visit,” he wrote on X. He also repeated language he first used in late July, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla executives had been told to prepare for a possible spinoff, sale, or closure of the China business ahead of a SpaceX tie up. Musk called that report “absurdly fake news” at the time, adding that a separation had “never even come up in a discussion ever,” a line he echoed again this week.
The repeated denial has not settled the underlying question, because Shanghai’s role in Tesla’s business is exactly what makes a merger complicated. Gigafactory Shanghai still ships more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries and functions as the company’s main export hub for Europe and Asia. Teslarati previously reported on Musk’s initial denial, and the merger conversation itself has been building since SpaceX’s IPO gave it public shares to use as acquisition currency.
Wedbush’s Dan Ives has pegged the odds of a Tesla SpaceX merger at 80 to 90 percent by early 2027, and ARK’s prediction of a year end announcement adds another data point to that timeline, even as Musk keeps rejecting the specific mechanics reporters have described. Neither position rules out the other. Musk can deny a China spinoff was ever discussed while analysts still expect some form of combination to move forward, since ARK and Ives are both describing convergence at the corporate level, not necessarily the internal restructuring the Journal described in July.
For now, Tesla’s China business remains intact, and Musk’s comments this week make clear he has no interest in publicly walking that position back, no matter how often the merger question resurfaces.
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