SpaceX
SpaceX’s steel Starship gets new official render, this time with a huge NASA telescope
SpaceX recently provided NASA with the third known official render of its stainless steel Starship, focused on the vehicle’s potential utility for launching massive scientific spacecraft for NASA. Starship’s only direct competition for the proposed LUVOIR telescope: NASA’s own SLS rocket.
Published by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Starship is shown with a smaller “B” variant of the proposed LUVOIR space telescope in its payload bay. According to a scientist from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI), the massive LUVOIR-A variant could “barely” fit inside Starship’s clamshell bay, but the telescope could also be tweaked to more perfectly fit the constraints of its chosen launch vehicle. LUVOIR is effectively being designed as a logical follow-up to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and could be ready to launch no earlier than 2039 if NASA selects the idea – one of three under consideration – for future development.
The LUVOIR telescope (shorthand for Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor) is currently grouped into two different categories, A and B. A is a full-scale, uncompromised telescope with a vast 15-meter primary mirror and a sunshade with an area anywhere from 5000 to 20000 square meters (1-4 acres). B is a smaller take on the broadband surveyor telescope, with an 8-meter primary mirror (a quarter of the area of LUVOIR-A’s) accompanied by a similarly reduced sunshade (and price tag, presumably).
— Teslarati, July 2018
Goddard’s “we asked, SpaceX checked” statement refers to a funded analysis of LUVOIR launch options the group announced back in July 2018, at which point the future prospects of NASA’s SLS rocket were far more stable. Approximately nine months later, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that all work on future SLS upgrades – including the Block 1B and Block 2 variants that could have supported the launch of LUVOIR-A – was to be halted as soon as possible. All of that funding would instead be focused on mitigating a never-ending string of delays and pushing SLS to actually prepare for its first launches. Bridenstine has since publicly waffled on that aggressive plan, simultaneously indicating that some of those SLS upgrades (mainly an advanced upper stage, EUS) would be critical for one variant of his proposal to return astronauts to the Moon as early as 2024.
Regardless, the blood of SLS is currently in the water as NASA pursues an answer to the question of whether commercial rockets can instead be used to launch the agency’s Orion spacecraft and Lunar Gateway segments. Based on preliminary interviews focused on NASA’s internal study of the subject, there is still plenty of room for SLS as long as its contractors (namely Boeing) can stem relentless delays, cost overruns, and quality control issues and finally prepare the rocket for its first missions.
As described above, it appears likely that NASA is going to require the SLS rocket’s core stage to conduct a critical mission-duration test fire before permitting the vehicle to begin launch preparations in Florida. As a result, there will be almost no conceivable way for the rocket to rise to the 2020 launch debut challenge issued by Bridenstine, potentially meaning that NASA will put significant resources into studying and developing alternatives to SLS. If or when NASA sets the precedent for allowing serious studies and funding of SLS alternatives, the death of the rocket will almost certainly be assured. Relative to commercial rockets like Falcon Heavy, New Glenn, Vulcan Heavy, and even SpaceX’s BFR (i.e. Starship/Super Heavy), conservative estimates suggest that SLS will be no less than 5-20+ times as expensive on a per-launch basis.
Consequently, it should come as no surprise to see NASA Goddard openly confirm its willingness to launch future flagship science missions on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, so long as the rocket is successfully developed, launched, and certified by NASA for high-value missions. Given just how distant the proposed ~2039 launch of LUVOIR is and how early SpaceX is in the process of developing Starship/Super Heavy into a highly mature and reliable launch vehicle, one should not read too far into Goddard’s public support.
However, there should be no doubt at this point that SpaceX’s next-generation Starship and current-generation Falcon Heavy rockets are already upsetting certain aspects of the status quo. If SpaceX continues to refine Starship’s design and demonstrate Falcon Heavy’s reliability and readiness, studies like Goddard’s LUVOIR launch case can be expected to crop up throughout domestic and global space industries, both pubic and private.
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Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
SpaceX launched three final O3b mPower satellites Sunday, finishing a lesser known SES satellite network.
SpaceX had an 87 minute window opening at 2:49 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to fly a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying the final three satellites for SES’s O3b mPower constellation, a project that has taken more than a decade to finish since Boeing and SES first signed SpaceX on for the work.
Unlike the thousands of Starlink satellites SpaceX has stacked into orbit over the years, O3b mPower flies in a different neighborhood entirely. The three new satellites, tagged F11, F12 and F13, are headed for medium Earth orbit at roughly 5,000 miles up, more than ten times higher than Starlink’s shell around 340 miles but still a small fraction of the 22,000 miles where old school geostationary satellites sit. That middle position is the whole point, because a satellite that far out needs far fewer siblings to blanket the globe than a low orbit constellation does. Essentially, SES only needed 13 satellites total to build a network offering quick, steady service that used to require thousands of spacecraft.
With most people having heard plenty about Starlink and almost nothing about O3b mPower, SES and SpaceX already blend the two networks for some customers. Both SpaceX and SES sell satellite broadband, but they’re aimed at different buyers. Starlink is built for volume, direct to consumers, RVs, homes, small businesses, plus a growing aviation and maritime business. O3b mPower skips consumers entirely and sells enterprise grade connectivity to airlines, cruise lines, offshore energy operators, telecoms needing backhaul, and governments, priced and provisioned more like a dedicated circuit.
A 2023 partnership lets cruise ships combine Starlink’s speed with O3b mPower’s steady capacity depending on what a ship needs at a given moment. Sunday’s completed 13 satellite constellation effectively finishes the medium orbit half of that pairing, years after.
Sunday’s mission was already a something on SpaceX’s manifest well before O3b mPower entered the picture. This flight marked its 29th trip to orbit, a history that includes two crewed Axiom missions, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope and 22 separate Starlink batches. SpaceX has landed boosters on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas so often that Sunday’s touchdown attempt, if it went as planned, was set to be the 661st successful Falcon booster landing to date.
For a company that pushed the Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites back in August, almost entirely through bulk launches from California, Sunday’s flight was a reminder that SpaceX’s schedule still has room for someone else’s satellites too. SES gets a finished network built for a narrower set of customers, and Falcon 9 gets one more line on an already long resume.
Elon Musk
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
Tesla teased an October 1 Roadster reveal, reviving years of delayed SpaceX thruster hover promises.
Tesla teased an October 1 event date for its next generation Roadster, posting an image on X Saturday that shows the car lit up like it is sitting on a launch pad, with the date “10.01” stamped across the bottom and the caption “Go for launch.” A countdown clock on Tesla’s Roadster order page now points to the same date, which falls on a Thursday. The company has not said where the event will happen or whether it will be streamed at the moment. Stay with us @Teslarati for live updates.
Go for launch pic.twitter.com/Khu03eiZ04
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 12, 2026
Tesla has since sent formal invitations to reservation holders confirming the event will take place in Waco, Texas, about 90 minutes north of its Austin headquarters, based on a digital ticket shared on X by Sawyer Merritt. Tesla did not name the exact venue, though Waco sits close to SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, rocket test site, previously reported as the planned location for a Roadster thruster demonstration. The invite sets the reveal for 8:30 p.m. Eastern on October 1, requires RSVPs by midnight on September 16, and limits entry to guests 21 and older. Invitations are non-transferable.
The tease follows nine years of a project defined by unimaginable specs along with slipped dates. Musk first showed the second generation Roadster in November 2017 as a surprise reveal at the end of the Tesla Semi event, promising a 0 to 60 mph time under two seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery, and production starting in 2020. At last November’s shareholder meeting, Musk set an April 1 demo date and joked the choice gave him “deniability” if it slipped again, which it did, moving first to late April, then to “a month or so,” then to August.
Tesla Roadster SpaceX Package’s 1.1-second 0-60 mph launch visualized in concept video
Whatever Tesla shows on October 1 is expected to center on the SpaceX developed thruster package Musk has described since 2018. Internally code named A71, a nod to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the system reportedly uses cold gas thrusters fed by a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, the same tank design SpaceX uses on Falcon 9. Musk has said a thruster equipped Roadster could hit 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds under roughly 2.75 g of launch force, well past the 1.9 second figure quoted for the standard car. That version reportedly will not be street legal and has reportedly been discussed as a limited run sold through a track only program.
The standard Roadster is still expected to carry the original $200,000 base price and $250,000 Founders Series tier, both set when Tesla opened $50,000 and $250,000 reservations in 2017. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy has confirmed production will happen at Gigafactory Texas, with Musk targeting 2027 or 2028, 12 to 18 months after whatever the company demonstrates next month.
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SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
SpaceX filed with the FCC for Starship Flight 14, its first true orbital launch attempt.
SpaceX has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to fly Starlink terminals during Starship’s fourteenth flight test, and the filing lays out a genuine trip to orbit, something the program has never attempted.
Every Starship flight so far, including Flight 13’s successful splashdown in the Indian Ocean on July 24, has flown a suborbital arc that ends with the ship reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launches. The FCC paperwork describes a mission profile built around an actual orbital insertion instead.
The payload is the other half of the story. Flight 13 carried 20 production Starlink V3 satellites, but because that mission never reached orbit, the satellites reentered along with the ship rather than joining the constellation, something Teslarati covered in detail after SpaceX released footage shot from one of those satellites as it drifted away from Starship in space. Flight 14 is designed to close that gap. If the orbital insertion holds, the roughly 20 V3 satellites onboard would separate into an operational orbit and could eventually go into service, each one rated for about 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity by SpaceX’s own account.
SpaceX announces new Starbase for ‘thousands of Starship launches annually’
Elon Musk first flagged the orbital attempt during SpaceX’s August 4 earnings call, the company’s first as a public entity following its June IPO under the ticker SPCX. He also floated catching the ship with the Starbase tower on the same flight, an idea he walked back on August 20, saying the catch attempt would more likely come “in a few months,” as Teslarati reported at the time. Flight 14 will instead target a splashdown for the ship in the Indian Ocean, the same recovery method used since Flight 12.
Hardware has been catching up to the ambition. Booster 21 completed a full 33-engine static fire on August 28, and Ship 41 finished its own six-engine test the week before. An airspace briefing circulated to pilots on August 20 listed September 15 as the target date, later than the end of August window Musk mentioned on the earnings call, though SpaceX has not confirmed a launch date publicly and Starship schedules routinely slip while hardware and FAA paperwork line up.
The FCC filing itself does not guarantee a launch date. It covers communications authority, and not flight readiness, considering SpaceX still needs Ship 41 fully stacked and cleared by the FAA before Flight 14 can fly. But the filing is a real marker of intent and it puts a specific regulatory process behind what had so far only been Musk’s word on the earnings call.
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
