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In this week's Avid Space industry update SpaceX continues to add to their massive global lead in mass-to-orbit for the year, we get updates from Rocket Lab, Relativity Space and Blue Origin, and the next Falcon Heavy launch is just around the corner. Falcon Heavy To Launch at The End of This Month! - Weekly Spaceflight News | 8:42 Avid Space | 251K subscribers | 7,979 views | August 19, 2026

A NASA spacecraft circling the moon is providing the sharpest views yet of the crater carved by a crashing SpaceX rocket. The space agency released before-and-after photos of the impact area on Tuesday. The Falcon rocket’s upper stage plowed into the moon at 5,400 mph on Aug. 5 after drifting through space for more than a year. It launched a pair of private moon landers with experiments and even a tiny rover in 2025 as part of NASA’s push to commercialize lunar exploration. Based on these new photos by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the fresh crater appears to be 60...

After approx. 24 days at sea, the SpaceX Recovery team successfully guided Starship to a location just off the coast of Christmas Island. A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase.

SpaceX launched eight satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) for Louisiana-based telecom company Globalstar from Florida, as well as the USSF-366 mission for the U.S. Space Force from California, on Aug. 15, 2026. [Full Story on Space.com] The two rockets launched just 38 minutes apart, breaking SpaceX’s previous record -- set on Aug. 31, 2024, with two Starlink missions -- by 27 minutes. Credit: Space.com | footage courtesy: SpaceX | edited by Steve Spaleta ( / spaleta_space_odyssey ) SpaceX Launches 2 Rockets 38 Minutes Apart -- New Record! Sticks Landings | 9:19 VideoFromSpace | 2.14M subscribers | 7,146 views |...

SpaceX's Starship Expansion Is Getting Ridiculous, with four more Starship launch pads now being built or upgraded across Starbase and Florida. SpaceX Is Building a Starship Empire it seems, all while they prepare for Starship Flight 14 and the first-ever Ship catch attempt. They've even revealed Project Ignition answering where the Florida "Massey's" equivalent will be set up. In the meantime they are still doing the recovery attempt for Starship Ship 40 after Flight 13, and we even have major Starlink V3 deployment plans. Elsewhere this week, Rocket Lab unveils its portable GHOST launch system, China suffers a dramatic Long...

Everyone expected Starship Flight 14 to attempt the first ship catch in history. Then a government filing showed up, and buried inside it is one sentence that changes the entire mission. Bigger than anything SpaceX has announced out loud. And it comes with a solid date. Meanwhile, a strange piece of hardware just rolled through the Port of Brownsville toward Starbase. Almost nobody noticed it. It might be telling us the truth about SpaceX's new Starship launch pad. SpaceX's New Plan For The First Ever Ship Catch | 21:51 What about it!? | 662K subscribers | 25,662 views | August...

Elon Musk is betting that the next phase of his sprawling technology empire will require a building on a scale that has never existed before. SpaceX and Tesla are building Terafab, a 100-million-square-foot semiconductor manufacturing facility in Grimes County, Texas, more than five times the size of the world's largest building. "Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far. And it will be stunningly beautiful," Musk wrote on X. "We're now embarking on the most epic chip-building effort—combining logic, memory, and advanced packaging all under one roof," said Musk in a press release. The...

This video argues that even if the current AI market is experiencing a bubble similar to the dot-com crash of 2000, SpaceX is uniquely positioned to dominate the future. The host posits that while many AI companies may fail, those with robust business models, profitability, and genuine innovation will emerge as industry leaders. Key takeaways include: Vertical Integration: SpaceX is described as the only company that owns the full infrastructure stack: rockets for deployment, satellites for global connectivity, ground networks, and massive AI compute capabilities (8:15 - 9:02). The Infrastructure Play: SpaceX is building a global internet backbone via Starlink,...

SpaceX is closing in on 130,000 acres of Louisiana coastline. A second mega Starbase, so large that today's Starbase would fit into it more than nine hundred times. And that's only half of the expansion story, because in a letter to the federal government on Friday, SpaceX asked to open up the ocean itself. Yes. The Starship oil rigs are back. Meanwhile, at the pad that just launched Flight 13, our flyover caught something nobody expected: scaffolding deep inside the flame trench. We dug into what's happening down there, and the answer comes with a clock attached, because the paperwork...

SpaceX is trying to bring a Starship upper stage back to shore for post-flight inspection, but it's not going so well. It’s been more than two weeks since SpaceX’s Starship splashed down in the Indian Ocean following a largely successful thirteenth flight test. As of Friday, the recovery team was still working to bring the upper stage, known as “Ship,” back to shore, but in a post on X, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said it was “not looking good.” It’s unclear if the team made any headway over the weekend. If SpaceX chooses to abandon Ship (no pun intended), it...

Sawyer Merritt:I don't think most people understand the massive scale of investment Tesla & SpaceX are making in Texas right now.Everything the two companies are/going to build across the state: • Terafab (Grimes County) • Gigasat factory (in Bastrop, currently under construction) • Optimus factory (at Giga Texas, currently under construction) • Advanced technology fab (at Giga Texas, currently under construction) • Tesla Project Crystal Sun (big solar cell plant in Fort Bend County. Late 2026 construction start date) • Expanded Starlink terminal production facility (in Bastrop, currently under construction) • Further Starbase expansion (in Starbase) • Tesla Megafactory 3...

On Tuesday morning, we published an episode arguing that Starship's heat shield doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be serviceable. On Tuesday afternoon, on SpaceX's very first earnings call as a public company, Elon Musk went further than we ever dared. Quote: "I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point." And that was just one hour of this call. A ship catch attempt at the end of this month. Operational Starlink V3 satellites on Flight 14. One Starship launch per day within a year. Boots on the Moon in 2028. All of it on the record,...

This video provides a summary and reaction to *SpaceX*'s recent Q2 earnings call, highlighting the company's rapid growth and shift in focus toward compute infrastructure and cloud services. **Key Takeaways:** * **Compute Infrastructure Expansion:** *SpaceX* is aggressively expanding its compute capacity, moving from 1.4 gigawatts in Q2 to an expected 5-10 gigawatts by the end of 2027 (1:04-1:25). This capacity is primarily dedicated to Cloud Service Agreements (CSAs) with partners like *Anthropic* and *Google* (2:10-2:16). * **Financial Outlook:** Due to these high-margin CSAs, the company is seeing a one-year payback period on capital deployments (0:16-0:29). They are projecting an annual...

Elon Musk reveals what happens when a rocket launch needs approval from Fish and Wildlife Elon: "Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed." Elon: "This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures." Before the seal, there was a shark. Elon: "One of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about our rocket hitting a shark." He asked for the...

With America's support "double that of during the Kennedy era" for returning to the Moon, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said this week that we'll have a permanent lunar base within 20 years, and American astronauts living there full-time. But that might not be today's biggest news from the entrepreneur-turned-astronaut-turned-NASA-head. “If we do want to have that extraordinary future that many of us imagine, you have to have some sort of a space economy to fund it,” he said, adding that "We’re supposed to be doing what no other government agency, no company is capable of doing, no other nation around...

Space exploration enthusiasts have been tracking the unprecedented journey of SpaceX’s latest Starship prototype, which wound up floating in the Indian Ocean after the company’s latest test flight. Now, satellites have captured mind-bending images of boats working to haul the rocket back to shore. The saga of Ship 40 — as this specific Starship prototype is called — began on July 24 with the launch of SpaceX’s 13th fully integrated test flight the rocket system, which includes the upper spacecraft, or “ship,” as well as the Super Heavy rocket booster, the bottommost part of the rocket that fires the ship...

Reuse. It's the entire reason Starship exists. And right now, SpaceX is towing a flown Starship across an ocean just to get its hands on it again. Meanwhile, the internet declares that the heat shield that brought it home can never work as intended. Today, we run the actual numbers on that claim. The result surprised even me. And then there's Flight 14. The signs point to something we have never seen before. A Starship that doesn't come home after an hour. One that might stay in orbit for days, for the first time ever. And then it comes back...

A discarded Falcon 9 rocket will collide with the moon at 5,400 miles per hour. A roughly five-ton piece of a SpaceX rocket that sent two lunar landers to the moon is about to join them, but not on purpose. On Aug. 5 at around 2:34 a.m. ET, the upper stage of a discarded Falcon 9 rocket will collide with the moon at 5,400 miles per hour near the crater Einstein on the western lunar limb, according to Bill Gray, who runs Project Pluto and develops software for tracking astronomical objects. Gray was the first to calculate that the object...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the NROL-95 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on July 30, 2026. Blastoff! SpaceX launches secret US spy satellites, nails landing in Florida | 8:59 VideoFromSpace | 2.14M subscribers | 5,359 views | July 30, 2026

The Moon is about to get a new crater courtesy of Elon Musk, and astronomers are ready to watch it happen. ============================================================= A topographical map of the Einstein crater on the Moon, near where the rocket stage is expected to hit. Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) ===================================================================== VIDEOS AT LINK.............. Astronomers are poised to watch an artificial impact on the Moon, in a collision that is expected to leave a 20-30-meter (66–98-foot) crater on the lunar surface. As well as professional astronomers wishing to study the impact and resulting debris, amateur astronomers may be able...