The upper stage of a SpaceX rocket that delivered two lunar landers in early 2025 is set to come crashing down on the lunar surface several months after it ended its mission. According to Japan Today, the large piece of rocket debris is expected to hit the moon at an estimated 5,400 mph or 8,690 kph, which is seven times the speed of sound.

While a piece of debris hitting the moon might seem like an inconsequential event for most people, scientists and astronomers are keeping a close eye on it because this will be one of the few times that an object will impact the moon while being observed. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter will take before-and-after photos of the impact site, while the latter will also fly close to the stricken SpaceX rocket a few minutes before it begins its final descent.

NASA has previously deliberately crashed objects on the moon — it did this with sections of the Saturn V rocket and discarded Lunar Landers to conduct seismic experiments during the Apollo missions in the 70s. It repeated the experiment in 2009 with its LCROSS mission, where it crashed the probe near the south pole of the moon in search of ice.

What interests researchers this time is how the impact will affect the surface of the moon, which is expected to deliver energy that’s equal to about three tons of TNT. Even though this might seem like a huge amount of energy, we likely cannot see the actual crash from Earth. But because the moon does not have wind or an atmosphere, the ejected material could stretch for miles and be visible on telescopes.

“The gravity on the moon is low and there is no wind to blow the dust away,” said Benjamin Fernando of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Part of the reason for our interest in this event is to figure out how much of a hazard debris impacts pose to future astronauts.”

Space debris is not a major concern for the moon as it is for our planet at the moment, but this might change in the near future. As the U.S. and China are locked in a space race to see who will be the first one to land on people on the moon again after more than half a century, there will soon come a time when operators cannot just leave their rocket debris in an orbital decay, lest it come crashing down on their settlements and data centers.

Reflect Orbital, a California startup that markets itself as “The Sunlight Company” and aims to make “clean, abundant energy available on demand,” has just received approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch the Eärendil-1. According to Space News, this is a low-earth orbit satellite equipped with four 18-meter (~60ft) thin-film reflectors designed to reflect sunlight on specific areas on Earth. This deployment will test the spacecraft’s capabilities in extending daylight for several minutes, which can be used from lighting construction sites and search-and-rescue operations to increasing solar farm energy production.

“We’re grateful to the FCC for recognizing the importance of testing novel technologies in space,” Ben Nowack, chief executive of Reflect Orbital, said in a statement. “This license is the first step toward rigorously testing our technology’s efficacy and the safeguards we have developed.” While the company envisions launching two satellites into space this year, it says on its website that it wants to deploy more than 50,000 satellites by 2035, allowing it to provide “up to 36,000 lux for hours comparable to daylight” or “up to 100 lux 24/7 comparable to indoor working areas.”

This idea is similar to the Icarus satellite developed by the antagonist in the James Bond movie Die Another Day, which was supposed to deliver “light and warmth to the darkest parts of the world” and “grow crops the year round, bringing an end to hunger.” The Reflect Orbital satellite could potentially achieve the same things, but experts from various fields are concerned about its potential adverse effects.

Astronomers from across the world criticized the project, saying it would make it harder to observe the night sky and could even be dangerous to sensitive instruments and people using telescopes. The Chief Scientist of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Tony Tyson, said that this plan to light up the ground using orbital mirrors was “even crazier” than the Starlink satellite constellations that have been affecting nighttime observations. The European Southern Observatory (ESO), which operates several telescopes in the Chilean desert, said that Reflect Orbital’s full deployment “would increase the background sky brightness at its facilities by a factor of three to four, limiting the ability of telescopes to detect faint objects.”

The orbital space mirror’s potential for disrupting astronomy is even greater than the threat posed by Elon Musk’s planned million-satellite Orbital Data Center and China’s planned competing project. But aside from making it harder for astronomers and scientists to survey the night sky, environmentalists also raised their reservations, saying that artificially extending daytime could disrupt the day-and-night cycles that the biology of living beings — from plants and animals to humans — rely on.

Unfortunately, the FCC said that scientific and environmental concerns were outside its jurisdiction. The government regulator only deals with “interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.” Instead, it appears that the project’s critics should reach out to the EPA and NASA, as these are the relevant agencies that deal with concerns regarding space and astronomy. But even if the FCC had authority over the issues raised by its critics, it seems that the project will still push through as it considers that “…it is in the public interest to make spectrum available to encourage companies to test new and innovative space activities, as it promotes American innovation and the new services and economic growth that come from that innovation.”

U.S. Space Force Combat Forces Command has announced that the first Meadowlands Counter Communications System (CCS) has been delivered for operational duty. This is a powerful new electromagnetic warfare (EW) device in a wheeled mobile and air-transportable form factor, designed to detect, deny, disrupt, and degrade adversary capabilities around the globe and in space. To be clear, Meadowlands isn’t a laser, microwave, particle, or plasma weapon. Instead, its highly targeted electromagnetic warfare abilities rely on a muscular array of directional antennas and high‑power RF amplifiers.

“We have exceptionally trained and skilled electromagnetic warfare professionals who are highly motivated and excited about integrating this new Meadowlands capability,” said U.S. Space Force Lt. Col. Ryan Skilling, 4th Electromagnetic Warfare Squadron commander. “This upgraded system enables us to more effectively and efficiently support the joint scheme of maneuver across the continuum of conflict.”

Meadowlands arrives to provide a critical upgrade to the existing Counter Communications System (CCS) 10.2, notes Space Force. The new system’s advances are described as a “huge milestone” in capability, as well as being lighter, more compact, and more easily transportable. Meadowlands is set to be part of a robust toolkit that will help deliver “spectrum dominance” to the U.S. Space Command and Department of War.

The efficacy of systems like Meadowlands has already been demonstrated in joint force applications like Operation Midnight Hammer. In this example, EW systems were used to successfully create a “silence zone” over Iran for hours to ensure secure bomber ingress and egress during that operation. Meadowlands units can operate in both forward austere environments and from secure rear echelons.

In addition to silence zones, typical EW tasks Meadowlands will be used for include interference with enemy satellite functions, and jamming uplink and/or downlink signals. More cunningly it can change or corrupt data packets, initiate feedback loops, and spoof enemy assets.

While it celebrates the arrival of its first operational next-gen CCS, Space Force Combat Forces Command intends to build its Meadowlands fleet to 32 units in due course.

SpaceX has confirmed in a semi-annual report submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this month that it disposed of 260 Starlink satellites between December 2025 and May 2026, intentionally vaporizing them via re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. According to the report, 176 of these satellites belonged to the first-generation Starlink constellation, with the rest belonging to the second generation. An additional 349 satellites were decommissioned within that 6-month period and will be disposed of in the coming months.

SpaceX’s Starlink operates a huge constellation of over 10,000 satellites as of the time of this report, even as the company plans for Starlink Mobile, which will provide satellite internet directly to mobile phones. However, each of these satellites has a lifespan of about 5 years, a somewhat intentional setup to allow swapping for newer versions, after which their fuel depletes. When this happens, the satellite is programmed to use its remaining fuel to perform a controlled de-orbit. It lowers its altitude and plunges into Earth's atmosphere, where extreme friction completely incinerates 100% of the spacecraft.

The constellation is so large and varied that Starlink reportedly disposes of multiple satellites daily. It removed more than 472 satellite links from orbit between December 2024 and May 2025. Retrieving the deorbited satellites — which weigh roughly 573 to 650 pounds (260 to 295 kg) for first-generation units and 1,764 to 2,756 pounds (800 to 1,250 kg) for second-generation units — is technically impractical and financially unviable, according to the company. Hence, the incineration technique.

While Starlink’s disposal approach disintegrates 100% of the spacecraft, leaving behind no falling debris, it has raised concerns about its effect on the atmosphere. Researchers have urged further studies and regulations on the environmental impact of satellites. The FCC has long excluded satellites from environmental reviews, reportedly out of concern that regulations might slow the space race. Any regulation would likely be under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). However, the FCC is officially proposing “that space-based operations be excluded from NEPA because they are ‘extraterritorial activities’ with effects located entirely outside of the jurisdiction of the United States.” The proposal is yet to be approved.

SpaceX has a multi-phased goal to eventually deploy up to 42,000 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit and obtained FCC approval for 7,500 additional Starlink Gen2 satellites in January. Meanwhile, the company has unveiled plans for its A1 satellite orbital data center, with a 120 kW compute payload. SpaceX is currently building an 11-million-square-foot Gigasat manufacturing facility for these satellites.

Ahead of its hotly anticipated IPO, Elon Musk's SpaceX has admitted in its Form S-1 document that to fully scale its orbital AI ambitions, it needs more AI hardware than it can currently obtain. Furthermore, while the company says that the ambitious Terafab project may address chip constraints, it also noted that the project may not be successful and that current partners Tesla and Intel have no obligation to stick with the project long-term.

As with all IPOs, the SEC requires that the company list all risk factors, both large and small, and these often even include 'Acts of God,' such as potential weather events, so the comments must be taken with the proper perspective. However, they do illustrate some of the roadblocks the company could perceive as genuine challenges to its business model.

"Our ability to achieve orbital AI at scale depends on our ability to access a sufficient number of AI chips, significantly more than are currently available to us," the filing SpaceX reads. "Manufacturing and supply of servers and network equipment for our technical infrastructure, particularly for GPUs and other specialized components, is limited to a small number of qualified suppliers. We do not have any long-term or other material contractual arrangements with our direct chip suppliers; instead procuring all of our GPUs on a purchase-order basis."

The current business arrangements with GPU suppliers — such as AMD, Nvidia, or manufacturing partners TSMC and Samsung Foundry — leave SpaceX and its xAI division exposed to 'fab capacity shortages, raw material constraints, geopolitical disruptions, and natural disasters affecting semiconductor manufacturing regions.'

TSMC, the world's largest foundry and the world's largest maker of advanced logic chips, can barely meet demand for AI processors, and industry insiders warn that they are supply-constrained. For example, Nvidia increased its total supply, inclusive of inventory, purchase commitments, and prepaids, to $145 billion to ensure the supply of chips and other components. Other companies tend to do the same.

To at least partly reduce its risks, Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI intend to build TeraFab, a dedicated semiconductor production facility that will exclusively produce chips for these three companies. For now, all we know about TeraFab is that it plans to operate a fab that will be located in a SpaceX campus in Texas and use Intel's 14A process technology to make chips. Elon Musk intends to invest tens of billions in TeraFab, but this does not guarantee that it will be a success, the S-1 warns.

"While we expect to construct Terafab to address such supply constraints, Terafab may not be successful, in which case we may not have other sources of sufficient AI chips to meet our orbital AI compute demands," another claim by SpaceX reads. "While Terafab is intended to expand our internal chip manufacturing capabilities and alleviate potential future AI chip shortages at SpaceX, particularly as we pursue orbital AI at scale, we expect to continue sourcing a significant portion of our compute hardware from third-party suppliers, and there can be no assurance that we will be able to achieve our objectives with respect to Terafab within the expected timeframes, or at all."

Interestingly, Intel and Tesla may leave the project, leaving TeraFab without a significant customer and process technology developer, which might ruin the whole project. "While we have a framework agreement with Tesla, neither Tesla nor Intel are obligated to remain a part of the project, and we may not enter into any such definitive agreements," the Form S-1 reads.

Putting AI servers in space has been discussed as a holy grail of sorts for some time now. The economics of an orbiting data center would benefit from always-available solar power, even considering the relative difficulty in cooling the rack units. The main issue is the stratospheric price tag of lifting that compute to orbit. Now, though, according to a Wall Street Journal report, Google believes that SpaceX might be able to make the dream real.

According to the report, Google is in talks with SpaceX and a few other contenders about this strategy, though given how Elon Musk's orbital enterprise has steadily become by far the main player in commercial launches, it's the clear front-runner in those talks. Google's move may be related to the company's Project Suncatcher initiative, revealed last November, that intends to send satellites laden with Google Tensor Processing Units (AI chips) into orbit starting in 2027.

This news has the potential to boost the impending SpaceX IPO to infinity and beyond. That offering is expected to be the largest of all time, and was already expected to reach stratospheric levels of $1.5 to $1.7 trillion. As of this writing, neither company has offered any comment on the presumably ongoing negotiations.

It's worth noting that SpaceX recently struck a partnership with Anthropic that could include "multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity", and that it filed an application last January with the FCC to launch up to a million satellites for datacenters, so SpaceX would doubtless be happy for another client in this space.

The notion of space AI datacenters has long been derided as a fever dream, even by OpenAI honcho Sam Altman himself, given the financial delta-V required to place thinking rocks in orbit. Estimates pin the theoretical launch cost for SpaceX itself at around $2,700 per kilogram, an amount that works out to a best-case scenario of $3,400/kg for a customer, assuming a completely stuffed rocket — something that's hard to achieve in practice.

That reason is precisely why SpaceX's February 2026 price table lists $7,000/kg as a standard rideshare price, to fill in the gaps and maximize profit during a launch (or minimize losses, depending on how you slice it).

The math for Google's Project Suncatcher says that the financial equilibrium for space datacenters sits at around the $200/kg mark, not even in the same galaxy as current figures. Yet the economics of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets are driving that cost down. One such Falcon 9 recently launched for the 34th time in a row, and some analysts think it's literally a matter of space-time until five to six reuses of the same ship are enough to offset its production cost. After that, in theory, the only major expenses are fuel, maintenance, and launchpad utilization.

It's still hard to say if low-Earth-orbit meme generation will become a reality, but it's a reasonable enough conclusion that SpaceX is currently the only entity that can pull it off. The firm has made 165 launches in 2025, more than the rest of the world combined, up from 134 in 2024. Likewise, it has put 14,844 payloads in orbit in total, and it's reportedly only 218 units away from having launched as many satellites as every country on Earth since space became reachable.

NASA confirmed in a blog post that it had successfully tested two Mars-bound rotor systems, achieving never-before-seen rotational speeds. In the tests, which took place under simulated Mars conditions at the historic 25-Foot Space Simulator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the rotor systems — one two-bladed and one three-bladed — reached rotor tip speeds of up to Mach 0.98 before additional headwinds pushed the blades to Mach 1.08, surpassing the Martian speed of sound for the first time. The rotors reached up to 3,750 rpm. For comparison, that is roughly 10 times faster than the rotor speeds of many modern helicopters.

These extreme speeds are necessary to generate enough lift in Mars’ ultra-thin atmosphere, which is only about 1% as dense as Earth’s. The planet's atmosphere also lowers the speed of sound to roughly 537 mph (864 km/h), compared to about 767 mph (1,235 km/h) at Earth’s sea level. The rotors were jointly developed by NASA and AeroVironment as part of Project SkyFall, a proposed mission to deploy multiple airborne exploratory rotorcraft across Mars. The mission, currently targeted for December 2028, would transport three next-generation Mars helicopters aboard a spacecraft to the Red Planet. Once the spacecraft lands on Mars, the helicopters would deploy to different regions of the planet for independent exploration missions, using the landed spacecraft as a communications and operational base.

SkyFall would mark only the second time NASA has conducted Mars exploration using an airborne craft. The pioneering 2021 Ingenuity Mars Helicopter mission deployed the small rotorcraft — equipped with carbon-fiber blades — to access parts of Mars that ground-based rovers such as the famous Perseverance Rover could not easily reach. NASA reports that while Ingenuity was initially planned for just five flights, it ultimately completed 72 flights, with its longest covering approximately 2,300 feet (704 meters). These achievements confirmed the viability of powered-rotor flight on Mars and laid the foundation for developing new ultra-fast rotor systems.

“NASA had a great run with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, but we are asking these next-generation aircraft to do even more at the Red Planet,” said Al Chen, Mars Exploration Program manager at JPL. “That’s not an easy ask. While everything about Mars is hard, flying there is just about the hardest thing you can do. That’s because its atmosphere is so incredibly thin that it is hard to generate lift, and yet Mars has significant gravity.”

The biggest obstacle to airborne exploration on Mars has always been the planet’s ultra-thin atmosphere, which requires extremely high rotor speeds to generate sufficient lift. Ingenuity achieved this with rotor tip speeds of around Mach 0.7 as a safety precaution. However, despite its success, the entire craft was only about the size of a tissue box, weighed 1.8 kg (4 lbs), and did not carry a payload, so it did not carry any scientific or communication equipment. The obvious solution was larger aircraft, but bigger craft create more drag and require significantly more thrust to remain airborne. That thrust could theoretically be achieved at near-supersonic rotor speeds, but rotor blades would normally be at risk of structural failure under such extreme conditions, until now.

“The successful testing of these rotors was a major step toward proving the feasibility of flight in more demanding environments, which is key for next-gen vehicles,” said Shannah Withrow-Maser, a NASA aerodynamicist and member of the test team. “We thought we’d be lucky to hit Mach 1.05, and we reached Mach 1.08 on our last runs. We’re still digging into the data, and there may be even more thrust on the table. These next-gen helicopters are going to be amazing.”

NASA’s new supersonic rotor technology could enable significantly larger exploratory aircraft capable of carrying bigger batteries for longer missions, more advanced scientific instruments, and improved communication systems. NASA says Project SkyFall’s helicopters will perform low-altitude aerial exploration and scouting missions, gathering scientific data while helping pave the way for future robotic and potentially human missions to Mars.

SpaceX has filed a property tax abatement application in Grimes County, Texas, for a semiconductor fab that would cost $55 billion in its initial phases and up to $119 billion if all planned expansions are completed.

The filing, posted on the county government's website ahead of a public hearing scheduled for June 3, describes the project as a "multi-phase, next-generation, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing and advanced computing fabrication facility" to be built at the Gibbons Creek Reservoir site, roughly 90 miles northeast of Austin.

The capital figures in this filing far exceed what was disclosed when Elon Musk announced Terafab in March, where the project carried a $20 billion price tag. Musk later confirmed during Tesla's earnings call that SpaceX would handle high-volume chip manufacturing while Tesla operates a smaller R&D pilot line at its Austin campus. The Grimes County filing appears to be SpaceX's first formal step toward securing a site for that production facility.

The filing designates the site as "Gibbons Creek Reservoir and surrounding areas," a rural location about 20 miles east of Bryan-College Station. The area previously hosted a coal-fired power station operated by the Texas Municipal Power Agency from 1982 until 2018.

Charah Solutions acquired the roughly 6,000-acre former plant property in 2021 for demolition and remediation, and subsequently sold it off in parcels to undisclosed buyers. A member of a local community group described the proposed SpaceX project site as a brownfield location, per local news outlet KBTX.

The $55 billion initial estimate alone would make the Grimes County project one of the largest single semiconductor investments ever proposed, exceeding the roughly $52.7 billion Congress authorized through the CHIPS Act for the entire U.S. semiconductor industry. The $119 billion full build-out figure approaches TSMC's total planned investment across its Arizona campus, which includes multiple fabs and packaging facilities built over many years.

Bernstein analysts previously estimated that reaching Musk's stated goal of 1 terawatt of annual compute output would require $5 trillion in total capital and up to 358 individual fabs. Even at $119 billion, the Grimes County project would represent a fraction of that ultimate total.

The county's Commissioners Court will hold the public hearing at 9:00 a.m. on June 3 at the Grimes County Justice & Business Center in Anderson, Texas, where it will consider the abatement agreement. Residents have expressed frustration over the lack of communication from county officials about the project, according to KBTX. Neither SpaceX nor Musk has publicly commented on the filing.

The U.S. Department of War has announced deals with "seven of the world’s leading frontier artificial intelligence companies" for operational use. According to the Classified Networks AI Agreements press release, SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services will deploy their LLMs across the Pentagon’s classified networks “for lawful operational use.” The government said that this move will help turn the United States military into “an AI-first fighting force” and will help with “decision superiority across all domains of warfare.”

It seems that the AI tools that these companies offer will, for now, be limited to data analysis and help make decision-making faster and easier as the U.S. faces complex situations. These tools are accessible via GenAi.mil, the Pentagon’s official AI platform, through the Department of War’s network and are widely available for its personnel.

“Over 1.3 million Department personnel have used the platform, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents in only five months,” the Pentagon said. “Warfighters, civilians and contractors are putting these capabilities to practical use right now, cutting many tasks from months to days.”

Nevertheless, there have been concerns about the use of AI in military applications. Anthropic has famously refused to budge on the Department of War’s demand to lower its safeguards, saying that doing so could mean that its AI products could be used for mass surveillance or to create autonomous weapons. This move resulted in President Donald Trump banning the company from federal agencies, even going as far as designating it a supply chain risk for refusing to bow to the federal government’s demands.

While AI is certainly useful for distilling massive amounts of information and spotting patterns that humans can miss, it’s still not a 100% reliable tool for making decisions that could have a global impact. A researcher discovered this when they pitted GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, and Gemini 3 against each other in a wargame, with 95% of the outcome ending in a tactical nuclear strike. Three scenarios even ended in a strategic nuclear strike that would have ended the world.

But even though these AI tools are limited to analysis and support, with a human operator at the helm still responsible for every decision, there’s also the risk of automation bias. This is a person’s tendency to follow a computer’s suggestion despite contradictory information, especially as AI systems can process a ton of data so much more quickly than any human could. However, the data the AI is relying on could be false, erroneous, or misinterpreted, so it’s crucial that humans apply their intuition and experience before accepting AI suggestions at face value.

The U.S. military isn’t the only one experimenting with and deploying AI technologies in operational use. China, for example, has been showing off a 200-strong AI drone swarm that can be controlled by a single soldier, as well as ground-based drone wolfpacks armed with machine guns and grenade launchers for urban combat. While we cannot stop these armed institutions from deploying AI tools for intelligence-gathering, reconnaissance, and decision-making on the battlefield, we can only hope that they do not ignore safeguards and never give AI the triggers to any weapon.

Leaked excerpts from SpaceX's confidentially filed $1.75 trillion S-1 form shed some light on the company's business plans, which includes plans for it to build its own GPUs. The listing notes its intent to invest billions in production of some of the processors it needs internally as it does not have long-term supply agreements with its silicon suppliers. Interestingly, the silicon to be produced in-house is said to be GPUs, not specialized ASICs for AI acceleration, according to Reuters. However, the naming convention is still up for debate. The news comes on the heels of yesterday's blockbuster announcement that Musk will use Intel's 14A process node in its new TeraFab chipmaking venture, with SpaceX managing the manufacturing facilities.

The S-1 form seen by Reuters mentions 'manufacturing our own GPUs' as one of the reasons of the 'substantial capital expenditures' the company will incur in the future as it appears to lack ' long-term contracts with many of our ​direct chip suppliers.' While the fact that SpaceX will build and operate its own high-volume semiconductor manufacturing facility to produce silicon developed at Tesla was confirmed by Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, last night, the firm's plans to build its 'own GPUs' seems like something new.

Reuters recons that different companies name their AI accelerators differently. While AMD and Nvidia explicitly call them 'GPUs,' Google calls its AI accelerators 'TPUs,' Microsoft calls its Maia devices 'accelerators,' while SambaNova calls its AI chips 'RDUs.' Most of hyperscale cloud service providers and independent hardware vendors (IHVs) call their AI accelerators application specific integrated circuits, or ASICs. Since SpaceX does not clearly mention AI ASICs developed by Tesla, Reuters believes that SpaceX intends to design and produce something they call their 'own GPUs,' which would mean something different from Tesla's AI-series processors.

We have no idea whether SpaceX — or its xAI division — has the capability to design its own sophisticated custom silicon that would compete against AI GPUs/accelerators from AMD, Nvidia, Rebellions, or SambaNova. However, Elon Musk himself referred to Tesla's AI5 processor as a 'GPU' even though this chip cannot process computer graphics (at least not in a traditional way) due to a lack of special-purpose hardware.

"With the AI5, we we deleted the legacy GPU, or the traditional GPU, which is in AI4, but AI5 does not have the legacy GPU because it basically is a GPU," Musk said in a earnings conference call. "We also deleted the image signal processor. There is a long list of delitions that are very important."

Given the inconsistent naming of its AI accelerators at Tesla — mostly because they are aimed at very specific workloads — it is hard to verify whether SpaceX means producing Tesla's AI5 and/or AI6 hardware, or indeed in-house designed 'GPUs.'

Since the S-1 form has been filed confidentially, Tom's Hardware could not verify its content.

The historic computer software code that took Apollo 11 to the moon has been open-sourced and is available for anyone to read, download, and tinker with. NASA’s Chris Garry made the code available on GitHub as public domain. The published resource is basically in two large codebases, one set of code for the Command Module (Comanche055) and another for the Lunar Module (Luminary099). These modules both had their own Apollo 11 guidance computers (AGC) upon which to run the code, and were instrumental to the success of the remarkable mission – the first human Moon landing in history.

On the GitHub repo, Garry indicates that this momentous code was digitized by the folks at Virtual AGC (Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer) and the MIT Museum. That means the hard copy of the code held at the MIT Museum has been scanned and proofread for digital distribution. In this particular case, we have reams of machine code now in the public domain, easily accessible online.

To take a closer look at some of the example code, we dived into the Commanche055 directory, and the first interesting file that caught our eye was ALARM_AND_ABORT.agc. After a boilerplate introduction to the code at the top of the file, the purpose of the code is revealed – something which is quite obvious from the file name in this instance. Moreover, comments within the code reveal that the code logs alarm conditions, turns on a warning light if applicable, and handles various abort-level and non-abortive alarms.

Another interesting code example, shared on social media (embedded above), highlights the crucial 30 lines of assembly for calculating Apollo 11's navigation trajectories.

If you want to go beyond nosing around the historic codebase, it is possible to compile the code now shared into the public domain using the Virtual AGC tool (GitHub link). The Virtual AGC software has been designed to work in Linux, in Windows XP/Vista/7, and in Mac OS X 10.3 or later, and some versions of FreeBSD. This repo is also a good place to learn about the AGCs carried on both the Command Module and the Lunar Module.

The specs of the AGC pale in comparison to even the most rudimentary computers today. For example, an AGC had just 3,840 bytes of RAM and 69,120 bytes of storage. It could run at a maximum of about 85,000 instructions per second. Nevertheless, it was comparable in size to a desktop gaming tower PC of today at 24.250 x 12.433 x 5.974 inches (61.595 x 31.580 x 15.174cm), and weighed 70.1 pounds (31.8kg). It also needed two DSKY controller units at 17.8 pounds (8.1kg) each in the Command Module, and one DSKY in the Lunar Module.

Over half a century before Artemis II

It is fascinating to see this Apollo 11 code from nearly 60 years ago shared in the context of the ongoing Artemis II lunar mission. Today, we aren’t marveling at the lean and mean machine code that NASA is using to get humans to and from the Moon. Rather, Microsoft Outlook email bugs and a malfunctioning toilet on the Orion spacecraft may have taken the shine off the momentous achievement this latest mission represents.

NASA’s Artemis II mission blasted off on Wednesday. Now brace yourselves for exciting high-resolution 4K footage live-streamed from the surface of the moon thanks to NASA's laser-based O2O system. The cutting-edge Orion Artemis II Optical Communications system (O2O) will be used to beam 4K moon footage at up to 260 Mbps. We should also be treated to never-before-seen views of “the far side of the Moon, using Nikon digital cameras,” reports The BBC’s Sky at Night magazine.

So, what is O2O? NASA prepared a page dedicated to the technology ahead of the beginning of the Artemis II mission, here. Basically, O2O is a laser-based communications system that will be able to pipe the headlining 4K footage from astronauts on the moon to the Earth. Data rates of 260 Mbps can be achieved by O2O, and it isn’t just for fancy videos; it will also be used for fast and efficient transmission and receipt of procedures, pictures, flight plans, and more.

Meanwhile, on Earth, laser ground stations are situated in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Table Mountain, California. These locations were chosen for their typically clear skies, important for fast and reliable laser communications.

However, the astronauts will also use traditional radio communications to stay in contact with the ground team via NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN). With prior mention of the potential for cloud interference, this could be an essential backup. DSN was the key communications tech used by Voyager, the Mars rover, and Artemis I.

Losing sight of the Earth on a planned mission to the far side of the Moon will block both laser and DSN comms, notes the source report. NASA is well aware of this ‘dark window,’ which is estimated to last for 41 minutes.

If you aren’t that impressed by the 260 Mbps O2O laser comms terminal's performance, NASA’s page about this laser tech highlights a Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration it has completed that achieved 622 Mbps. Moreover, some nearer-Earth space laser comms projects have reached data speeds up to 200 Gbps.

Starlink has posted an update on satellite 34343, which it lost communication with on Sunday. The SpaceX-owned global internet firm says that the satellite “experienced an anomaly” while it was in LEO at around 560 km above the Earth. It also used wording to play down any concerns about risk to the thousands of other man-made objects at a similar altitude. However, orbital intelligence agency LeoLabs is less coy and describes Sunday’s incident as a “fragment creation event.”

Rapid Unplanned Disassembly

Following the anomaly on Sunday, Starlink’s official line (as above) was to play down any risks to the International Space Station, Monday’s Transporter-16 mission, or the upcoming launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission. It doesn’t go as far as admitting there is any post-rapid unplanned disassembly debris, but does say that it will “continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the U.S. Space Force.”

Naturally, SpaceX and Starlink teams are working to determine the cause of the anomaly and implement any changes necessary to prevent this from happening again. Sadly, the analysis of whatever happened towards the end of last year, when another Starlink satellite tumbled from space after an “anomaly,” didn’t stop this latest debris‑generation incident.

LeoLabs provides some further analysis regarding the fate of satellite 34343. Its radar system “immediately detected tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite after the event.” Moreover, the independent space‑situational‑awareness (SSA) data provider reckons that the not-an-explosion was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris” or another satellite.

On potential risks to other satellites and missions from the now-ex-satellite, LeoLabs doesn’t highlight any specific dangers. It reckons the fragments from the anomaly will probably de-orbit within a few weeks.

This was indeed a similar Starlink satellite incident to that which occurred last December, think the independent analysts. It goes on to recommend greater clarity to ensure safety in the operating environment.

SpaceX IPO

SpaceX is warming up Wall Street for what could be the largest IPO of all time. It reportedly wants to raise around $75 billion in its offer, which equates to a $1.75 trillion valuation.

It would be better for Elon Musk’s firm if fewer rapid unplanned disassembly incidents happened between now and the IPO, tipped to be this summer.

However, with FCC approval and plans for thousands more Starlink LEO satellites and even talk of a 1 million satellite Orbital Data Center System from SpaceX coming to light, one might assume that any unsolved anomalies become more frequent.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, announced Saturday night that his TeraFab semiconductor project will be built on the Tesla campus in eastern Travis County, Austin, Texas, as a joint venture between the two companies.

In a livestream broadcast via X, Musk stated that the facility exists because the global chip industry cannot expand quickly enough to meet his projected demand across AI, robotics, and space computing. "That rate is much less than we'd like," Musk said from the defunct Seaholm Power Plant in downtown Austin. "We either build the TeraFab, or we don't have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the TeraFab." The project reportedly carries a $20 billion price tag.

The Austin fab will house equipment for logic, memory, packaging, testing, and lithography mask production in a single building. Musk claimed that capability does not exist at any other facility in the world, and that having everything under one roof enables a rapid iteration loop: make a chip, test it, revise the mask, and repeat without shipping wafers between sites.

The facility is expected to produce two types of chips. One will be optimized for edge inference, primarily for Tesla's vehicles and Optimus humanoid robots. The other will be a higher-power chip hardened for the space environment, which Musk says will run hotter than “terrestrial” designs to minimize radiator mass on satellites.

Musk compared the project to the current global output of global AI compute, which he estimated at roughly 20 gigawatts per year. That figure, he said, represents about 2% of his companies’ eventual needs. On the terrestrial side, he projected 100 to 200 gigawatts per year of chip output; the remainder, up to a terawatt, would go to space-based AI compute aboard solar-powered satellites that SpaceX has already petitioned the FCC to launch.

“That's why I think it's probably a hundred to two hundred gigawatts a year of terrestrial chips, and probably on the order of a terawatt of chips in space," noted Musk. "Just because of power constraints on the ground.”

Musk said Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI — which SpaceX acquired in February — will continue buying chips from existing suppliers, including TSMC, Samsung, and Micron, adding that he would like them “to expand as quickly as they can.” He gave no timeline for when the TeraFab would begin producing chips or reach its target output, and while he has previously referenced 2nm as the target process node, he didn’t repeat that figure in the broadcast.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has revealed its plans to launch up to 51,600 satellites to create a data center constellation in space. The filing was posted for the public to view by the FCC on Thursday (via The Register), with explanations of Blue Origin’s goals and details of how ‘Project Sunrise’ is of benefit to the public interest.

Blue Origin’s application to the FCC starts by sketching out the scale of the proposed constellation. Project Sunrise “will consist of up to 51,600 satellites operating in circular, sun-synchronous orbits from 500–1,800 km in altitude, with inclinations between 97 degrees and 104 degrees, with each orbital plane containing approximately 300–1,000 satellites,” a rather technical description reads.

The constellation satellites will feature at least three antenna variants to address uniform coverage requirements. But, the filing goes on to elaborate that optical links will be used extensively between the satellites to reduce dependence on radio spectrum, with Earthbound traffic routed through the firm's TeraWave system and other mesh backhaul networks to the ground.

Of course, this colossal project and undoubted billions in investment are destined to complement the insatiable demand for Artificial Intelligence data processing on Earth with space-based data centers. Project Sunrise will “make AI computer more accessible,” argues the FCC filing, by ensuring the “societal benefits of AI” aren’t bottlenecked by terrestrial data centers.

It is hard to deny that the efficiencies of always-on solar power and the removal of land use/costs are attractive aspects of this space-based project. But satellite constellations will have their own uniquely significant costs. Clearly, it will not be cheap to make this complex, custom hardware and send it to space. Then it will require servicing and maintenance – for example.

As this is an FCC filing, Blue Origin also appealed to the regulator by insisting that Project Sunrise will “use spectrum efficiently and operate on a non-interference basis.” In case you are curious about the spectrum, the constellation will use the 18.8–19.3 GHz (space-to-Earth) and 28.6–29.1 GHz (Earth-to-space) bands.

Blue Origin also states that “safety is core” to the project. That’s a little reassuring after reading recent reports about satellite proliferation, density-induced near-misses, and terminal anomalies.

NASA just reported that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, was successful in altering the orbit of the smaller body in a binary asteroid system. The space agency launched the DART probe in November 2021, taking nearly nine months before it hit the 560-foot or 170-meter-wide Dimorphos in September 2022. According to NASA, the agency, alongside several volunteer astronomers, observed the pair over several months, where it was noted that Dimorphos’ 12-hour orbit around its larger sibling, the 880-yard or 805-meter-wide Didymos, was reduced by around 33 minutes. More importantly, it also affected the system’s orbit around the Sun by 0.15 seconds.

DART is the first-ever mission that looks at the feasibility of conducting a kinetic strike to deflect any celestial threat to the Earth, and it seems that it was quite successful. The probe’s impact ejected a significant amount of debris from the asteroid, essentially doubling the DART spacecraft’s effectiveness. Even though only the smaller Dimorphos was targeted, the changes to its momentum and orbit also affected the larger Didymos.

The numbers mentioned might seem minuscule, especially when compared to the size of these celestial bodies, but NASA is banking on detecting any collision hazards to our home planet early on. By affecting its trajectory as soon as it's detected, even a small change can make a huge impact over the massive distances involved in space.

DART can make the difference

“The change in the binary system’s orbital speed was about 11.7 microns per second, or 1.7 inches per hour,” Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbanas-Champaign, the lead author of the study on the DART mission, told NASA. “Over time, such a small change in an asteroid’s motion can make the difference between a hazardous object hitting or missing our planet.” Although the DART’s target is pretty small and won’t destroy the entire planet, it still has the potential to wipe out an area the size of London and its surrounding areas. However, its larger companion is a bigger threat, with the capability of destroying the entirety of Southern England.

Thankfully, these two asteroids would’ve never impacted Earth, even after the DART mission. Still, NASA is concerned that there might be several other smaller rocks floating in space that could pose a danger to the planet. Because of this, the U.S. space agency is now building an orbiting telescope designed to detect incoming threats like asteroids and comets — the first such satellite designed for planetary defense. That way, it can find these early, and if there’s one that could potentially impact our home, NASA could send a kinetic impact vehicle early on to change its direction.

A Mozilla engineer has shared survey data and calculations suggesting that up to 15% of Firefox crashes are due to a bit flip. For the purposes of this report, a bit flip occurs when a memory cell (RAM, cache, etc) updates its value from 0 to 1, or vice-versa, following some unintentional external input. The most common triggers for bit flips are thought to be electrical issues and instability, thermal effects, underlying manufacturing defects and aging, crosstalk, and even memory cells being flipped by an ionizing cosmic ray.

No one seems to have a hard figure for the biggest bit flip contributor. However, systems sent to space will use specialized components hardened to resist interference from cosmic radiation, extremes of temperature, etc, and to include aggressive error checking.

The Mozilla team received nearly half a million auto-submitted crash reports last week (opt-in feature). Data from a recently introduced “memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes,” guided senior engineer Gabriele Svelto towards his eyebrow-raising bit flips, causing 15% of crashes figure, which he admits “dwarfs all the previous estimates I saw regarding this problem.”

Mozilla employed, self-confessed ‘old school nerd’ Svelto says that an initial 10% estimate was revised up because “If I subtract crashes that are caused by resource exhaustion (such as out-of-memory crashes) this number goes up to around 15%.” Moreover, it was determined that one in two bit flip crashes was due to a “genuine hardware issue.” Svelto notes this could be undershooting the real figure as Mozilla’s memory test on crash feature “only checks up to 1 GiB of memory and runs for no longer than 3 seconds.”

Thus, it is hard to drill down to probably the most fascinating statistic of how many Firefox crashes are precipitated by an errant cosmic ray passing though…

As a parting shot, Svelto doesn’t want fancy Arm-based MacBook owners, or any other niche device owner, thinking this is just about PCs with shaky RAM. Every device with memory can be affected by bit flips, asserts the engineer. That doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac, smartphone, or even a printer or router. From that perspective, PC desktop DIYers are probably in a better position, as they can replace any faulty component without throwing away the whole caboodle. But please, great cosmic ray caster in the sky, please don’t make me think I have RAM issues in 2026…

European officials believe that two Russian “Inspector” SIGINT spacecraft operating in geostationary orbit have intercepted communications from at least a dozen European satellites. According to the Financial Times, both spacecraft have made “risky close approaches” to some of Europe’s most important satellites, which operate high above Earth and serve not only Europe but also parts of Africa and the Middle East.

The two Russian spacecraft are thought to be associated with the Luch program, with the intercepts taking place at roughly 22,000 miles above the Earth. Russian spacecraft have been shadowing European satellites more intensively over the past three-or-so years following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, and the Luch-1 and Luch-2 craft are known to have carried out several suspicious manoeuvres while in orbit.

Orbital data and ground-based telescopic observations reportedly show that the two craft have lingered nearby for several weeks at a time, with Luch-2 having approached 17 European satellites since its launch in 2023. Both satellites are said to have done “sigint [signals intelligence] business”, said Major General Michael Traut, head of the German military’s space command, in comments to the Financial Times.

Officials are concerned that sensitive information, such as command data for European satellites, is unencrypted and could therefore be intercepted because many were launched decades ago without advanced onboard computers. Once this command data has been recorded, it can potentially be replayed or spoofed later, enabling deliberate interference with things like altitude control, manipulating trajectory, and even causing satellites to crash. Even a limited disruption in geospatial orbit could have outsized effects, because satellites are packed into narrow orbital slots shared by multiple operators.

Aside from this, there is growing concern among European defense officials that activities like these actively blur the lines between intelligence gathering and active interference. Germany’s defense ministry has previously warned that Russian satellites were “shadowing” commercial platforms used by German forces and allies, and that even civilian communications satellites were being used as part of Russia’s military space operations.

Russia has naturally not publicly acknowledged the allegations and has repeatedly described its Inspector satellites as tools for monitoring the health of its own space assets. However, such activity would be decidedly on-brand for a country that continues to bait the West with disinformation bots, cyberattacks, drones, incursions into sovereign waters, and de facto attacks on undersea cables.

A SpaceX FCC filing said that it plans to put a million satellites in orbit to build an Orbital Data Center system. The company said in the document that these will support AI, machine learning, and edge computing applications, taking advantage of the sun's energy without interference from the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization — one that can harness the Sun’s full power — while supporting AI-driven application for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future amongst the stars,” the company wrote in its filing.

The filing went on to explain, “To deliver the compute capacity required for large-scale AI inference and data center applications serving billions of users globally, SpaceX aims to deploy a system of up to one million satellites to operate within narrow orbiting shells spanning up to 50 km (over 31 miles) each (leaving sufficient room to deconflict against other systems with comparable ambitions). This system will operate between 500 km and 2,000 km (310 miles and nearly 1,250 miles) altitude and 30 degrees and sun-synchronous orbit inclinations.”

SpaceX claimed that a million tonnes of satellites generating 100kW of compute per tonne would deliver 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity without all the limitations of ground-based deployments, making orbiting data centers far more cost-efficient than their terrestrial counterparts.

The Kardashev scale measures the advancement of a particular civilization based on how it harvests energy. A Type I civilization uses all available energy on its own planet, which barely puts humanity and its current technology just below this level. On the other hand, a Type II civilization directly harvests energy from its nearby star, while Type III captures all the energy produced inside its galaxy.

The risk of Kessler Syndrome

While Elon Musk's plans to launch a million satellites into orbit come into view, a former Russian geostationary satellite has reportedly broken up in space. According to Space.com, the Luch/Olympic satellite, which the Russians use to observe other satellites in orbit, has recently been decommissioned and brought up to a graveyard orbit above its former geostationary altitude of more than 35,000 km or nearly 22,000 miles.

However, ground observers noticed the unit has fragmented, likely due to an external impact (see time-lapse video, embedded above). This incident produced more debris that is now orbiting the earth, which could collide with other satellites, further exacerbating the space junk problem.

Many experts are concerned about an event wherein multiple space collisions would produce so much debris that it would make it impossible to launch satellites or even keep them operating in orbit. SpaceX’s current fleet of 9,000 satellites already has experts concerned, especially as its competitors are also considering launching their own constellations.

Musk’s plan to launch a million satellites is likely a nightmare scenario for many scientists, as this would put the risk of a Kessler Syndrome event several magnitudes more plausible. Moreover, under such a cascade of space debris, humanity could effectively become trapped on Earth for generations, dashing the billionaire’s dream of landing astronauts on Mars.

The Federal Communications Commission has partially approved a significant expansion of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink constellation, authorizing 7,500 additional low Earth orbit satellites under a partial grant issued by the agency’s Space Bureau and clearing a major regulatory hurdle for SpaceX’s next phase of Starlink growth. The decision brings the total number of authorized Starlink Gen2 satellites to 15,000, while leaving the remainder of SpaceX’s broader proposal under continued review.

The order, released this week, responds to SpaceX’s request to deploy a much larger Gen2 constellation that would ultimately approach 30,000 satellites. Rather than approving the full plan, the FCC granted authority for roughly half of the requested spacecraft and explicitly deferred action on the remaining satellites. The Bureau framed the decision as a balance between expanding broadband capacity from space and managing growing concerns around orbital congestion and spectrum coordination.

Alongside the increased satellite count, the FCC approved substantial changes to Starlink’s orbital design. The order authorizes new orbital shells at lower altitudes, including ranges around 340km and 365km, as well as additional shells in the 475km to 485km range. Lower altitudes can reduce latency and shorten the time non-functional satellites remain in orbit, but they also require more frequent launches to maintain coverage.

The approval also addresses spectrum access, with the FCC authorizing Gen2 operations across Ku- and Ka-band frequencies, while also approving the use of higher-frequency V-band, E-band, and W-band, primarily for gateway and backhaul links. The order emphasizes that these authorizations remain subject to coordination requirements with other satellite systems and terrestrial services operating in the same bands.

Within the U.S., the FCC approved Supplemental Coverage from Space operations in the 1910-1915 MHz uplink and 1990-1995 MHz downlink bands. For deployments outside the U.S., the order authorizes mobile satellite service direct-to-cell operations across a wider set of cellular-adjacent frequencies, subject to national regulatory approval in each market.

To accompany the expansion, the FCC says SpaceX must have 50% of the newly authorized Gen2 satellites launched and operational by December 1, 2028, with the remainder required by December 1, 2031. The order also includes ongoing reporting obligations regarding collision avoidance and satellite disposal, and it grants the Bureau the authority to pause further deployments if debris risk thresholds are exceeded.

A team from Cardiff, Wales, is experimenting with the feasibility of building semiconductors in space, and its most recent success is another step forward towards its goal. According to the BBC, Space Forge’s microwave-sized furnace has been switched on in space and has reached 1,000°C (1,832°F) — one of the most important parts of the manufacturing process that the company needs to validate in space.

“This is so important because it’s one of the core ingredients that we need for our in-space manufacturing process,” Payload Operations Lead Veronica Vera told the BBC. “So being able to demonstrate this is amazing.” Semiconductor manufacturing is a costly and labor-intensive endeavor on Earth, and while putting it in orbit might seem far more complicated, making chips in space offers some theoretical advantages. For example, microgravity conditions would help the atoms in semiconductors line up perfectly, while the lack of an atmosphere would also reduce the chance of contaminants affecting the wafer.

These two things would help reduce imperfections in the final wafer output, resulting in a much more efficient fab. “The work that we’re doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today,” Space Forge CEO Josh Western told the publication. “This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it’s going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it’s going to be in the latest planes.”

Space Forge launched its first satellite in June 2025, hitching a ride on the SpaceX Transporter-14 rideshare mission. However, it still took the company several months before it finally succeeded in turning on its furnace, showing how complicated this project can get. Nevertheless, this advancement is quite promising, with Space Forge planning to build a bigger space factory with the capacity to output 10,000 chips. Aside from that, it also needs to work on a way to bring the finished products back to the surface. Other companies are also experimenting with orbital fabs, with U.S. startup Besxar planning to send “Fabships” into space on Falcon 9 booster rockets.

Putting semiconductor manufacturing in space could help reduce the massive amounts of power and water that these processes require from our resources while also outputting more wafers with fewer impurities. However, we also have to consider the huge environmental impact of launching multiple rockets per day just to deliver the raw materials and pick up the finished products from orbit.

Starlink satellite 35956 suffered from a serious anomaly on December 17. It is described as largely intact, but is currently “tumbling, and will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks,” says the official Starlink X account. Geospatial intelligence partner Vantor shared what is likely the last clear image of the ill-fated satellite after SpaceX urgently requested visual intelligence.

Space anomaly damages satellite 35956

We don’t have a clear description of what exactly happened with satellite 35956. Starlink just describes the problem as an “anomaly” that occurred on December 17. Engineers working for Starlink are said to be “rapidly working to root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly.” No insight into this investigation is ready yet, but apparently, some software changes are already being deployed that “increases protections against this type of event.”

It was observed that satellite 35956 lost communications at an altitude of 418km. “The anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects,” says Starlink.

Currently, the “tumbling” satellite remains largely intact, according to the satellite communications firm. It is estimated that it will “reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks.” Importantly, neither the larger part of the satellite nor its “small number of trackable low relative velocity objects” are thought to pose any threat to humans on Earth. It is also noted that its trajectory will place it below the International Space Station, so those folks don’t need to worry either.

Partner SpaceX urgently requested visual intelligence, and Vantor quickly responded by capturing a “12 cm non-Earth image that provided visual intelligence about the condition of the spacecraft.”

Vantor explains that its WorldView-3 satellite was 241 km away from the Starlink satellite 35956 when it captured this image of the “tumbling” spacecraft. The image reproduced in the LinkedIn post isn’t the sharpest picture of a satellite we have seen, but it was enough to “provide confirmation that the satellite was mostly intact, enabling SpaceX to assess potential damage,” says Vantor.

Starlink is currently the largest satellite operator by quite some margin. There are approximately 12,000 active satellites now in LEO space, with over 8,000 operated by Starlink. Tens of thousands more are planned by Starlink and global rivals, and it isn’t surprising that there are issues, accidents, and near-misses from time to time.

There was a notably “dangerously close” approach between a newly launched Chinese satellite and Starlink-6079 a few days ago. VP of SpaceX’s Starlink Engineering, Michael Nicolls, disclosed that a Chinese satellite came within 200m (219 yards) of an orbiting Starlink device. That’s an extremely close call with catastrophe, with Starlink LEO satellites known to travel at speeds exceeding 17,400mph. Nicholls called for improved coordination between space agencies.

On December 9, a rocket launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center took nine satellites into orbit. One of the Long March 2D rocket payload satellites was then observed to pass within 200m of the Starlink-6079 satellite (NORAD ID 56120) in low-Earth orbit (LEO) at 560km (348 miles) altitude.

Nicolls emphasized that near-misses like this will continue to happen. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators,” claimed the Starlink VP. “This needs to change.” Indeed, change is required to prevent the near-miss news, bad as it is, from taking a tragic twist.

There are approximately 12,000 active satellites now in LEO space, with probably 8,000 operated by Starlink. Starlink satellites travel at incredible speeds, exceeding 17,400mph, so a collision could easily destroy anything involved.

Moreover, the resulting high-velocity debris fragments, in their thousands, could cause far more damage, with some commenters on Nicolls’ post raising the specter of the Kessler Syndrome. That would be a chain reaction of collisions, exponentially increasing debris, and potentially making LEO space unusable for generations to come.

Science can help prevent such an unfortunate outcome, but global coordination is lacking, so a policy push seems to be required. China doesn’t notify or share trajectories to voluntary platforms such as the U.S. Space-Track.org or the UN’s International Telecommunications Union. Hopefully, it won’t need to see a massive space incident to prompt it into some sensible preventative collaborative action.

If you think LEO space is crowded now...

Meanwhile, plans for greater numbers of LEO satellites are forging ahead, cranking up the chance/danger of a collision. Starlink plans to expand its constellation to around 42,000 for global internet coverage. Amazon Leo has plans for over 3,200 satellites. In China, Guowang talks about targeting 13,000 satellites, and Shanghai Spacecom has mentioned a target of 14,000. Over in Europe, the Eutelsat OneWeb constellation numbers 648 satellites, with Gen2 mega-scale rollout still in consultation. And there are more…

Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object from Earth, is about to hit one light-day distance from us, or the distance that light travels in a single day. According to Science Clock, the satellite is going to be 16.1 billion miles or 25.9 billion kilometers away on November 15, 2026 — 49 years, 2 months, and 10 days since it launched. This means that the spacecraft travels at an approximate speed of 37,300 miles per hour (over 60,000 kilometers per hour) or more than 10 miles per second. At its current distance, it takes about a day to send commands to Voyager 1 and another day for it to respond.

NASA launched Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977, to explore the giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn, as well as some of their moons, and completed this mission in November 1980. After 10 years, the space agency began the Voyager Interstellar Mission, where it would explore the space outside the vicinity of our solar system. By 2004, it had entered the space where the solar wind from the sun slows down, with the satellite entering interstellar space in 2012.

The satellite is powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which are expected to last until the 2030s, meaning we can still get a few years out of the Voyager 1. Its journey was actually almost cut short back in 2023, when a bit flip or corruption caused a critical memory error that prevented it from sending telemetry to move and align the spacecraft. Thankfully, the scientists and engineers were able to fix the issue, allowing it to continue its mission and gather data from the farthest corners of deep space.

Although it feels that Voyager 1 has covered a massive amount of distance since it was launched, it’s actually minuscule relative to the scale of the universe. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, is four light-years away, meaning it will take Voyager 1 at least 73,000 years to reach it at its current speed. Its batteries would have been long dead by then, but NASA also put a golden record on the spacecraft with the hopes that an alien civilization would find it and initiate contact in the far future.

In addition to hardware costs, power generation and delivery and cooling requirements will be among the main constraints for massive AI data centers in the coming years. X, xAI, SpaceX, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk argues that over the next four to five years, running large-scale AI systems in orbit could become far more economical than doing the same work on Earth.

That's primarily due to 'free' solar power and relatively easy cooling. Jensen Huang agrees about the challenges ahead of gigawatt or terawatt-class AI data centers, but says that space data centers are a dream for now.

Terawatt-class AI datacenter is impossible on Earth

"My estimate is that the cost of electricity, the cost effectiveness of AI and space will be overwhelmingly better than AI on the ground so far, long before you exhaust potential energy sources on Earth," said Musk at the U.S.-Saudi investment forum. "I think even perhaps in the four- or five-year timeframe, the lowest cost way to do AI compute will be with solar-powered AI satellites. I would say not more than five years from now."

Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, notes that the compute and communication equipment inside today's Nvidia GB300 racks is extremely small compared to the total mass, because nearly the entire structure — roughly 1.95 tons out of 2 tons — is essentially a cooling system.

Musk emphasized that as compute clusters grow, the combined requirements for electrical supply and cooling escalate to the point where terrestrial infrastructure struggles to keep up. He claims that targeting continuous output in the range of 200 GW – 300 GW annually would require massive and costly power plants, as a typical nuclear power plant produces around 1 GW of continuous power output. Meanwhile, the U.S. generates around 490 GW of continuous power output these days (note that Musk says 'per year,' but what he means is continous power output at a given time), so using the lion's share of it on AI is impossible. Anything approaching a terawatt of steady AI-related demand is unattainable within Earth-based grids, according to Musk.

" There is no way you are building power plants at that level: if you take it up to say, a [1 TW of continuous power], impossible," said Musk. You have to do that in space. There is just no way to do a terawatt [of continuous power on] Earth. In space, you have got continuous solar, you actually do not need batteries because it is always sunny in space  and the solar panels actually become cheaper because you do not need glass or framing and the cooling is just radiative."

While Musk may be right about issues with generating enough power for AI on Earth and the fact that space could be a better fit for massive AI compute deployments, many challenges remain with putting AI clusters into space, which is why Jensen Huang calls it a dream for now.

"That's the dream," Huang exclaimed.

Remains a 'dream' in space too

On paper, space is a good place for both generating power and cooling down electronics as temperatures can be as low as -270°C in the shadow. But there are many caveats. For example, they can reach +120°C in direct sunlight. However, when it comes to earth orbit, temperature swings are less extreme: –65°C to +125°C on Low Earth Orbit (LEO), –100°C to +120°C on Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), –20°C to +80°C on Geostationary Orbit (GEO), and –10°C to +70°C on High Earth Orbit (HEO).

LEO and MEO are not suitable for 'flying data centers' due to unstable illumination pattern, substantial thermal cycling, crossing of radiation belts, and regular eclipses. GEO is more feasible as there is always sunny (well, there are annual eclipses too, but they are short) and it is not too radioactive.

Even in GEO, building large AI data centers faces severe obstacles: megawatt-class GPU clusters would require enormous radiator wings to reject heat solely through infrared emission (as only radiative emission is possible, as Musk noted). This translates into tens of thousands of square meters of deployable structures per multi-gigawatt system, far beyond anything flown to date. Launching that mass would demand thousands of Starship-class flights, which is unrealistic within Musk's four-to-five-year window, and which is extremely expensive.

Also, high-performance AI accelerators such as Blackwell or Rubin as well as accompanying hardware still cannot survive GEO radiation without heavy shielding or complete rad-hard redesigns, which would slash clock speeds and/or require entirely new process technologies that are optimized for resilience rather than for performance. This will reduce feasibility of AI data centers on GEO.

On top of that, high-bandwidth connectivity with earth, autonomous servicing, debris avoidance, and robotics maintencance all remain in their infancy given the scale of the proposed projects. Which is perhaps why Huang calls it all a 'dream' for now.

Google just announced that it’s exploring the idea of putting AI data centers into orbit to take advantage of the sun’s solar output for power. According to Google Research, Project Suncatcher aims to have a constellation of solar-powered satellites with Google TPUs that communicate optically. This would allow the company to run a power-hungry data center without requiring the massive infrastructure needed to build one on land.

Power is currently one of the bottlenecks of the AI infrastructure build-out, with companies like Microsoft sitting on GPU inventories because it doesn’t have enough electricity for them. It's also causing electricity price hikes all over the U.S., burdening residents with the cost. Tech companies are investing in alternative technologies like small modular reactors and jet engines to solve their future power requirements, while current power supply challenges are quickly changing the makeup of power grids.

Solar power is a clean source of energy that data centers can use for power, but it takes up a lot of space and is subject to the day-and-night cycle and atmospheric conditions. Google suggests that by putting its satellite in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous low-earth orbit (meaning the satellite would orbit the earth’s terminator, or the dividing line between day and night), it would be illuminated by the sun nearly 100% of the time. This would allow it to produce about eight times more power than ground-based solar panels, making space-based AI data centers potentially more scalable.

While the initial study has proven the viability of the concept, Google says that it still has significant engineering challenges to overcome. Some of these include developing a wireless link between satellites that can support massive amounts of data, controlling a compact constellation of satellites so that they work in unison and avoid colliding with one another and other orbiting bodies, ensuring the radiation resistance of semiconductors in space, and managing the costs of launching the entire infrastructure into space. The company says that it plans to launch two prototypes in 2027 to test the system and check its viability for machine learning.

Putting AI data centers might help reduce their impact on the electrical supply on Earth, but it also comes with its own set of issues. These include increasing the number of orbiting space junk around our planet and the possible disruption of ground-based astronomical observation, among others. The project is still in its early stages, though, so scientists and researchers have time to consider these things before launching a full-scale constellation in low-earth orbit.

It's not quite a chip factory in orbit yet, but that's the end goal of yet another project to build processors in space. Washington D.C.–based startup Besxar just announced that it has inked a 12-launch deal with SpaceX to test an idea I would have discarded as science-fiction nonsense before: manufacturing semiconductors in the hard vacuum of space.

The company's prototype manufacturing pods, called "Fabships," will hitch rides on the boosters of Falcon 9 rockets starting late this year. Each booster will carry two microwave-sized units that remain attached during flight, spend a few minutes exposed to near-space vacuum, and then return to Earth with the booster less than ten minutes later. It's the first reusable payload program that SpaceX has signed, and it marks the opening salvo in Besxar's plan to build what it calls the world's first orbital semiconductor foundry.

CEO Ashley Pilipiszyn describes the approach as a pragmatic response to the limits of terrestrial chipmaking. "AI data centers are straining against power and cooling limits, and fabs can't reach the vacuum or yields that next-generation materials demand," she said in the company's announcement.

The logic goes like this: Earth's best clean rooms are still dirtier than the ultra-high vacuum (UHV) of space, which results in poorer yields than chipmakers would prefer. Rather than spending billions recreating an approximation of those conditions inside a fab, Besxar wants to use space itself as the clean room.

It's a bold thesis, but it's a hell of a long way from commercial reality. The first dozen "Clipper-class" Fabships are essentially engineering experiments, designed to test whether delicate wafers can survive launch, exposure, and reentry without cracking or warping. Pilipiszyn herself calls it "the ultimate egg drop challenge," referencing the popular primary school science competition where students attempt to protect a fragile egg from cracking in a drop from the school's roof or a similar height.

The company purportedly has more missions under contract than employees, backed by a mix of strategic angel investors, institutional funds, and early support from NVIDIA's Inception program. Besxar is also apparently working under a Department of Defense contract, which hints at longer-term ambitions in defense-grade materials and radiation-hardened components.

If all goes well, the campaign will run through next year, producing data to inform larger, longer-duration orbital manufacturing systems. Even then, don't expect the first "Made in Space" chips before 2030 or beyond. This is a feasibility study; it's the aerospace equivalent of tinkering in a garage, except the garage keeps landing on a drone ship.

Still, if Besxar's bet pays off, the company could rewrite the economics of chip purity and supply chain resilience, which is no doubt exactly why it has attracted so much early funding. Even if its ploy doesn't pan out, it's still a fascinating footnote — a real, expensive experiment in expanding where and how we build the world's most important technology.

Starcloud is already launching an AI-equipped satellite featuring an Nvidia H100 GPU into space next month. Still, it plans to build a 5-gigawatt data center eventually, and Rendezvous Robotics can be key to achieving that. Speaking to Ars Technica, co-founder Phil Frank said, "Our mission is to build things that are going to be useful in space."

Data centers have become the new gold rush in the wake of the AI boom, with proponents looking to expand compute at an exponential pace that outstrips our ability to build them. They also require massive amounts of energy and cooling, potentially with detrimental effects on our environment, which we only have one of. Space, on the other hand, is virtually infinite with a free fusion reactor at the center of our solar system that never shuts down—starting to sound like a plan, right? Lots of other companies think so, too, and are convening to explore this landmark opportunity.

The challenge at hand is more difficult than it might seem because, unlike satellites or telescopes, a data center is not inherently mobile. Historically, all our efforts have been focused on building them on land with sprawling construction sites that aren't feasible outside our atmosphere. Deploying a data center in space, therefore, requires ingenuity and efficiency on a scale never sought before — this is where Rendezvous Robotics can help. The space construction firm was born at MIT last year and emerged from stealth this September with a pre-seed round.

Fast forward a few months, and now, it has just signed an agreement with Starcloud, which itself is partnered with Nvidia, to explore data center opportunities in space. All three companies are part of a coalition rethinking how computing facilities can work in a new era.

Rendezvous's flagship product is a tile-based autonomous module system that can assemble itself. Essentially, tiles with their own componentry, like battery cells, processors, and more, that use electromagnets to unfurl after being deployed as a payload from a spacecraft. What you see in the picture above are the tiles stacked on top of each other, ready to separate from the rocket and build themselves out. This tech is based on MIT Media Lab's Project TESSERAE, whose architect, Ariel Ekblaw, is one of the founders of Rendezvous Robotics. NASA has already tested TESSERAE, but the founders intend to turn it into a commercial venture, selling the technology to space architecture firms (such as Starcloud).

Joe Landon, the last of three co-founders, clarified that "you have to either send a person with a wrench to space to assemble, use a robotic arm and plan out every movement of that arm, or design a complicated origami folding mechanical system, which limits how big you can build." Those three techniques are what Rendezvous's work can replace, and the tech is designed to be scalable to huge sizes, perfect for the extraterrestrial dreams of AI GPUs humming alongside our satellites. As part of this agreement, Starcloud and Rendezvous will work together to tailor the tiles for the 5-gigawatt data center specifically.

Speaking of which, Starcloud has said its data center will use "super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length," which are astronomically larger than anything humans have built before. Ars Technica calculated that the International Space Station's solar arrays — the largest ever deployed in space — are only 0.005% the size of what Starcloud is planning to build. This is why autonomous assembly becomes a necessity; at this scale, conventional techniques (as if anything space-related were typical) lag eons behind, and AI money doesn't stop for anything.

You can see Elon Musk's response to the original coverage above, claiming that Starlink's V3 satellites "will be doing this," and it seems to be relatively easy, too. The currently in-orbit V2 satellites cap out at a maximum data transmission rate of 100 Gbps, which the upcoming V3 satellites will increase to 1 Tbps. Through Starlink, SpaceX has already demonstrated it can deliver high-speed internet to even remote parts of the globe, so it's not entirely unprecedented that hyperscale data centers are on the world's richest person's mind. Unlike Starcloud and Rendezvous Robotics, though, we'll need more details here before speculating on what the future holds.

SpaceX is expected to receive $2 billion for President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome project, which sources say will include up to 600 satellites as part of an “air moving target indicator” system. According to the Wall Street Journal, this would represent another satellite project the Elon Musk-led company would have with the Pentagon, alongside a military communications network called Milnet, which uses SpaceX’s classified Starshield satellites and terminals, and a ground-tracking satellite system. The Pentagon and SpaceX did not comment on the news, especially as no official announcement has been made. However, funding for this project has already been approved as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed in July 2025, although it hasn’t yet been linked to a specific defense contractor.

A massive project

Golden Dome is an advanced missile shield that will use a sophisticated system of satellites, interceptors, command and control, and other related infrastructure. It’s expected to cost at least $175 billion, with some experts projecting total expenditures to be much higher. So, the $2 billion deal that SpaceX is set to receive would just be one giant drop in the even bigger bucket of the Department of Defense. We should also note that SpaceX likely won’t be the only company working on this project, as other startups and defense firms have pitched their products and services.

Some of these companies include new names such as Anduril Industries and Palantir Technologies, as well as giants such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris. “What we’re relying on is industry to help us innovate by showing us the art of the possible—bringing ideas to us,” said U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman during an industry event in 2024.

Given the size of the project, neither the legislative nor the executive bodies are keen on relying on a single supplier like SpaceX. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said he does not want to rely on a single company as Washington builds its missile defense umbrella. The Pentagon’s Defense Science Board called this monopoly ‘vendor lock’ and can “negate the strengths of the market by stifling innovation and inflating prices.”

Inspired by other missile defense systems

Trump’s missile defense project sounds similar to, and is likely inspired by, Israel’s Iron Dome interceptor system, though on a much larger scale. The latter has a reported 90% success rate and can intercept various threats, including missiles and mortars. However, there’s an even older project from the 1980s that is similar to the White House’s plan. Then U.S. President Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983, intended to protect the United States against incoming ballistic missile threats from the Soviet Union using lasers and other systems. However, it’s been deemed that the required technology for it to run effectively was too advanced for its time, and with the dissolution of its main rival in 1991, the project fell into obscurity.

The advent of new technologies, like hypersonic missiles, meant that the U.S.’s current defenses aren’t equipped to handle this new threat. However, Golden Dome is more than just a new missile system — it’s an integrated defense network that would combine ground, sea, space, and, likely, even cyberspace systems, with SpaceX being just one of the cogs in this massive defensive machine.

One of the most charming bug = feature tales is the story behind the thrilling crescendo of pacing gamers experienced when playing the original Space Invaders arcade machine. This weekend, self-proclaimed C/C++ expert Zuhaitz reminded us that the adrenaline-pumping rising intensity of Taito’s arcade classic was not due to genius-level coding. Rather, it was simply the fact that the underlying Intel 8080 could run the game code faster as aliens were wiped from the screen one by one, by the player dishing out laser missile death.

Intel’s 8080 processor, launched in 1974, was the successor to the legendary 8008, enhanced with a more powerful and flexible architecture. However, with its ~5,000 transistors, 8/16-bit bus, and ~2.0 MHz clock speed, powering the original Space Invaders with 224 x 256 mono pixels was probably near the limits of its gaming capabilities. Hence, the impact on gameplay ‘feel’ as the alien horde was eliminated by the player.

The processor-bottlenecked performance slowdown persisted, even though the CPU was aided by a dedicated Fujitsu MB14241 video shifter in this cabinet design. Also, a Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip was used for the iconic audio.

As Zuhaitz states in the above-linked Tweet, checking the original arcade game’s source code confirms there is no code to adjust the game speed as aliens are wiped from the game.

At the beginning of the game, “changing the position, redrawing the sprites and checking for collisions for each one of the 55 aliens was really expensive,” notes the computer engineering prodigy. In a way this isn’t just a bug becoming a feature, but for players of the original game this was a killer hook, and helped arcade machine owners liberate gamers of many shiny silvery quarters.

Space Invaders was launched by Taito in Japan in June 1978.

Later versions of the game, and emulators running on more modern, powerful platforms, would need mitigations to implement the ‘arcade perfect gameplay’ the original was renowned for. Rewrites and reboots could achieve the correct balance of game pacing using code. However, as emulators like MAME became popular, allowing the running of original code ROMs, they would benefit from custom configurations that limit CPU/timing parameters to period- and architecture-correct levels.

The first Nvidia H100 GPUs are heading into space next month. This out-of-this-world news comes as AI factory company, Crusoe, reveals its plans to become “the first public cloud operator to run workloads in outer space.” The orbital Crusoe Cloud deployment will be powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs and AI accelerators in strategic partner Starcloud’s AI data center satellites.

Why have AI data centers in space?

Crusoe and Starcloud share an energy-first vision of an AI data center infrastructure that leverages solar power in space. The rays of energy-rich light emitted by the sun are unencumbered by the Earth’s atmosphere in the Starcloud’s orbit. Thus, companies that establish these kinds of resources in space can enjoy “almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy.”

Estimates suggest space-based solar-powered data centers will benefit from 10x lower energy costs (including launch cost) vs those on Earth.

As you can see in our embedded image, space allows for massive solar panel arrays, with no concerns about land use. Moreover, operating such systems puts no strain on the Earth’s energy grid. However, we would be interested to learn more about GPU cooling in space-based data centers, given that there is no air for the Earth-like traditional convection of heat, but also very little heat. Nvidia claims Starcloud will use the vacuum of deep space as "an infinite heat sink."

Crusoe and Starcloud

Crusoe has a long history of co-locating its compute infrastructure near novel energy sources. Thus, GPUs in space are just a logical step for the company, albeit quite a large one. Cully Cavness, co-founder, president and COO of Crusoe, sai,d "By partnering with Starcloud, we will extend our energy-first approach from Earth to the next frontier: outer space."

Starcloud is a Redmond-based Nvidia Inception program backed company. It is focused on building data centers in space, scalable to gigawatt capacities, making it a natural fit for Crusoe’s ambitions.

“Having Crusoe as the foundational cloud provider on our platform is a perfect alignment of vision and execution,” said Philip Johnston, CEO of Starcloud. “Crusoe's expertise in building rugged, efficient, and scalable computing solutions makes them the ideal partner to pioneer this new era.” Johnston also underlined the possibilities of unlocking cloud computing power in space for research, discovery, and innovation.

The partners seem to have even more ambitious plans, going forward, with regard to scaling. However, at this stage, it is rather premature to talk of plans more astronomical than those already sketched out from now until early 2027.

Space data center timescales

Starcloud will be the first to launch Nvidia H100s into space in November 2025. Crusoe will deploy its Crusoe Cloud service on a Starcloud satellite scheduled to launch in late 2026. Subsequently, Crusoe plans to offer limited GPU capacity from space by early 2027, thus “pioneering a new paradigm for AI factories.”

A recent episode of EarthSky highlights the growing risk of satellites, from the increasingly crowded skies, falling to Earth. Key points covered in the video, embedded below, are that there are now around 20,000 objects tracked orbiting the Earth. Of these, 12,000 are working satellites, including 8,000 that form SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. In 2025, we are seeing a “couple of satellite re-entries a day,” with things only going to get worse, while several companies/nations have plans for thousands more satellites.

Host Dave Adalian ruminated on the topic of overcrowded skies with Jonathan McDowell, currently staff scientist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Adalian put it to McDowell that a spate of social media posts showing Starlink satellites burning in the skies shows there is a growing risk from satellite debris. The storied astrophysicist didn’t brush off the host’s concerns as unfounded and agreed, “it's getting pretty busy up there.” He measuredly explained that the risks today, especially from Starlink satellites, are low. However, McDowell called for some kind of global regulation and coordination to keep us Earth dwellers safe.

How crowded is LEO?

As noted, there are currently have about 12,000 satellites up in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), around 8,000 of which are Starlink.

Other than these, there are a growing number of satellites from Western firms like Amazon. Jeff Bezos’ rockets have put ~100 into space, with thousands more planned. Another Western firm, ESpace, is reportedly yet to get its satellite roster into double figures, but has posted filings indicating it wants several hundred thousand satellites in LEO.

Then there are nations like China, which want an independent communications system in orbit. One Chinese company has already launched over 100 satellites. It is thought China is likely to contribute tens of thousands more to the skies in due course.

In the same or similar orbit, McDowell notes there are also about “a million centimeter-sized fragments” that are not tracked.

Why are satellites failing / falling?

According to the astrophysicist being interviewed, a commercial satellite will work as intended for a median of about five years. Then they are retired, and their orbits are lowered. Eventually, the atmosphere drags them in the rest of the way, before they re-enter “at an unpredictable location.” The bad thing is, they can and do sometimes drop debris over a populous area…

Kessler Syndrome

In the 70s, scientist Don Kessler warned that too many satellites in a similar orbit could cause a chain reaction of collisions and debris, causing further collisions. McDowell said that with all the mega constellations planned, and an unexpected big radiation event (for example), things “could get bad very quickly.” Moreover, there is a risk of this chain reaction being sparked by old space-age debris falling from higher orbits.

Starlink satellites are probably safer than some others

Romantics believe that love can conquer all, transcending time, space, and reason. But earlier this week, there was a highly unusual romance scam case where ‘space’ entered the picture, quite literally. CBS News reports that an elderly woman in Japan was conned by a man posing as a stranded astronaut. After building the relationship, the scammer cheated the victim out of a million yen (~$6,700) to fund his "need of oxygen."

The woman, an octogenarian who lives in Japan's northern Hokkaido island, first met her ‘astronaut’ suitor online in July, according to reports. Perhaps he was posing as a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) employee. As the relationship developed and their online communications increased, love blossomed and, of course, a bond of trust was formed. Sadly, the self-described astronaut was what local police describe as a 'romance scammer.'

Astronaut beau "under attack and in need of oxygen"

The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) has just released the “largest look ever into the deep universe.” Even more importantly, it has made the data publicly available and accessible “in an easily searchable format.” Possibly the star attraction from this massive 1.5TB of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data is the interactive viewer, where you can gawp at stunning space imagery encompassing nearly 800,000 galaxies. At the same site, you can find the complete set of NIRCam and MIRI mosaics and tiles, plus a full photometric catalog.

The COSMOS-Web program is a NASA-backed project with the support of scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). With this significant data release, the public at large is getting access to the largest view deep into the universe they will have ever seen.

According to the press release announcement, the published survey maps 0.54 degrees of the sky, or “about the area of three full moons,” with the NIRCam (near infrared imaging), and a 0.2 square degree area with MIRI (mid-infrared imaging).

To help Joe Public make sense of this 1.5TB data deluge, COSMOS-Web has thoughtfully provided a full aperture and model-based photometric catalog. Using this reference, those interested can observe “photometry, structural measurements, redshifts, and physical parameters for nearly 800,000 galaxies.” More excitingly for amateur astrophysics enthusiasts, the researchers claim that the new JWST imaging, combined with previous COSMOS data, “opens many unexplored scientific avenues.”

Before you head on over to the linked resources, it might be useful to familiarize yourself with some of the terms and units used by COSMOS-Web. If we want to look more closely at the JWST NIRCam mosaics, for example, you will see that the newly surveyed area is mapped into 20 zones with reference codes. Each of the mosaics is available in four NIRCam filters (F115W, F150W, F277W, F444W). In terms of scale, mosaics are available in both 30mas and 60mas. ‘Mas’ is short for milliarcseconds, a unit of angular measurement commonly used in astronomy.

Axiom Space is an American company specializing in space missions and the only commercial entity whose modules are connected to the International Space Station. According to Focus Taiwan, the company recently visited Taiwan to pitch an intriguing idea to produce certain semiconductor materials in space. Axiom believes that the unique conditions of a low-Earth orbit (LEO) environment could enable the production of ultra-pure materials.

Dr. Koichi Wakata, Axiom Space's Asia-Pacific Chief Technology Officer and a former ISS commander from Japan, emphasized the potential of microgravity and vacuum environments to improve semiconductor manufacturing. These conditions, he explained, enable defect-free crystal growth, resulting in higher-quality materials that are difficult to produce on Earth due to gravity and atmospheric impurities.

Divya Panchanathan, Axiom's global head of semiconductor commercialization, elaborated that Earth's gravity causes imperfections in crystal structures, while LEO's microgravity allows for more uniform growth. Additionally, the vacuum of space facilitates containerless processing, minimizing contamination and enabling the production of larger, higher-performing crystals for semiconductors.

Axiom proposed partnering with Taiwanese companies to conduct initial experiments aboard the ISS, with plans to transition manufacturing to Axiom's commercial station after 2030. The company envisions a scalable process in which successful experiments lead to full-scale production in dedicated space modules.

Axiom executives never disclosed which crystals they were referring to, but from the context, they are most likely single-crystal materials (e.g., silicon, gallium nitride, gallium arsenide, etc.), which are used in semiconductor manufacturing as foundational substrates upon which chips are built. Compound semiconductors (such as GaN or GaAs) and other next-generation materials can be especially sensitive to impurities and defects introduced by gravity and environmental factors on Earth. In microgravity, the melt and any dopants can distribute more uniformly, potentially leading to higher-quality wafers.

However, there are practical considerations associated with the production of anything in space. Launching materials to space and maintaining an orbital facility are extremely expensive. At present, it costs around $3,000 to launch a kilogram into space (one silicon wafer weighs 100 to 150 grams and costs $100 to $200), but the use of Falcon Heavy is expected to reduce the cost to $2,000 per kilogram and below. Even if the wafers are of higher quality, the price of producing them off-planet might outweigh the gains, at least with current launch costs. Over decades, manufacturers have optimized Earth-based crystal growth, and for the most part, chipmakers are happy with the balance of quality and price. Hence, for now, it hardly makes sense to make wafers in low-Earth orbit.

Perhaps, once the microelectronics industry moves to sub-angstrom process technologies, it will need ultra-pure wafers, which might justify their production in low-Earth orbit. However, companies specializing in making silicon, GaN, or GaAs ingots, as well as their suppliers, would need to develop appropriate technologies. Still, even in this case, it is more likely that the wafers will be made on Earth, albeit in 'modified' environments.

Interestingly, Axiom identified additional industries that could benefit from space-based manufacturing beyond semiconductors. These include biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and the 3D printing of artificial organs.

Dr. Gilles Bailet and his team at James Watt School of Engineering at the University of Glasgow received a patent for a prototype 3D printer that has been tested to work in zero gravity. Aside from that, this system is also designed to work in the vacuum of space, allowing for its use outside of spacecraft and space stations. According to the University of Glasgow, the research team has taken the kit on three test flights that allowed for more than 90 22-second periods of weightlessness, allowing them to test how it works in microgravity.

3D printers were first used in orbit in 2014, which allowed the astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) to print plastic parts and tools as required. Just last year, the European Space Agency launched a metal 3D printer and is currently testing it on the ISS to see how microgravity affects printing metal parts. However, all this equipment is designed to be used within the ISS’s modules, which are pressurized at around the same level as here on Earth.

“Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is capable of producing remarkably complex materials quickly and at low cost,” Dr. Bailet said. “However, what works well here on Earth is often less robust in the vacuum of space, and 3D printing has never been done outside of the pressurized modules of the International Space Station. The filaments in conventional 3D printers often break or ham in microgravity and in vacuum, which is a problem that needs to be solved before they can be reliably used in space.”

Instead of using the typical filament used in most Earth-bound 3D printers, Dr. Bailet and his team created a granular material that can easily be drawn into the 3D printer’s feedstock tank and into the nozzle faster than other materials. Using this kind of material will also prevent filament breaks or jamming, allowing it to work more reliably and require less supervision.

Aside from producing tools and spacecraft parts in orbit, the team also envisioned printing other objects that could deliver groundbreaking advancements on land. This includes the space reflectors, which could gather solar energy in orbit and reflect it onto a ground station, allowing for a 24-hour solar power plant. Dr. Bailet also talked about using it to produce pharmaceutical products that are far more effective than what we have right now.

“Crystals grown in space are often larger and more well-ordered than those made on Earth, so orbital chemical factories could produce new or improved drugs for delivery back to the surface,” says Dr. Bailet. “It has been suggested, for example, that insulin grown in space could be nine times more effective, allowing diabetic people to inject it once every three days instead of three times a day, as they often have to do today.”

If proven effective, this 3D printer could allow astronauts to start printing larger objects outside of the ISS. This could revolutionize space travel, as fragile and bulky objects could be printed in space instead of being put on giant rockets and blasted up from the surface. If and when we go back to the moon, this tech will simplify moon-bound manufacturing, and we might soon be launching rockets toward Mars from our natural satellite instead.

In a collaboration with Hewlett Packard, Kioxia (Formerly Toshiba Memory Corporation) now has its M.2 and SAS SSDs in use on the International Space Station as a part of the Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2) program. The HPE Edgeline EL4000 will be using eight 1TB XG6 M.2 SSDs and the HPE DL360 Gen10 server will have a combination of four 960GB RM5 2.5-inch and four M6 2.5-inch SSDs with an impressive 30.72TB storage space.

This is effectively an upgrade to the HPE SBC-2, which was launched in 2021, abd delivered to the station via Northrup Grumman's 20th re-supply mission rocket. Kioxia SSDs is a sponsor of the SBC-2 program and also had its SSDs used in this system last year.

This computer is the first in-space commercial edge computing and AI-enabled system to be used on the ISS. The primary objective is to have advanced computing and reduce dependency on mission control on Earth. With such systems, the astronauts can process data on the ISS rather than having to send the raw data back to Earth and wait for it to be analyzed and sent back. Hence having such an array of SSDs, including a set of four 30.72TB drives is crucial.

Primary Use of the SBC-2 Computers

The SBC-2 will used for multiple workloads, but is already used for making progress in health, image processing, natural disaster recovery, 3D printing, 5G, AI and other applications. Hence, it's no surprise that flash-based SSDs are preferred over traditional HDDs, especially with the PM6 series having up to a 30.72TB storage capacity variant.

HPE worked with NASA on its previous Spaceborne computer with the same intent to process data on-site. Therefore, there's no surprise HPE is used in its SBC-2 program. 

As space exploration continues to advance, the need to have reliable and quicker on-site computers and storage. Hence it's no surprise that space agencies like NASA would collaborate with HP Enterprise to have purpose-built systems to work on the station and have it routinely maintained and upgraded.

A $50 million contract for a next-generation processor for use in space has been awarded to Microchip Technology Inc. of Chandler, Arizona. The firm, which makes embedded microcontrollers and Arm-based 32bit systems, will design and deliver the HPSC (High-Performance Spaceflight Computing) processor over three years.

The new processor is expected to provide at least 100 times the computational capacity of current spaceflight computers. While this may sound like a boast, the current state of space computing means it’s definitely not out of reach. NASA’s Orion reusable capsule uses a Honeywell flight computer originally built for use in Boeing 787 airliners — a system that was 12 years old at the time of its launch in 2014. The point of spaceflight computers is not that they are particularly fast, but that they are reliable and fault-tolerant.

The Hubble space Telescope’s original DF-224 computer, built in the 1980s, was a triple-CPU design 18in square that weighed 110lbs. It was augmented with a 16MHz Intel 386 in 1993, and the whole thing was replaced by a single 25MHz Intel 486 in 2000, while the world was being wowed by the Pentium 4. The Mars rovers, by contrast, carry IBM processors not dissimilar to the Apple G3 (though nobody ever radiation-hardened a Powerbook).

“Our current spaceflight computers were developed almost 30 years ago,” said Wesley Powell, NASA’s principal technologist for advanced avionics. “While they have served past missions well, future NASA missions demand significantly increased onboard computing capabilities and reliability. The new computing processor will provide the advances required in performance, fault tolerance, and flexibility to meet these future mission needs.”

It might not be a big name in the processor world right now, but Microchip Technology has expertise that could come in useful in the hostile environment of outer space. Its PolarFire FPGA (field-programmable gate array) is radiation tolerant, and recently achieved MIL-STD-883 Class B certification, a battery of environmental, mechanical and electrical tests that act as a stepping stone toward the certifications necessary for use in space.

Founded in 1989, the company was once the microelectronics division of General Instrument, but was spun off and went public in 1993. Along the way it has acquired many other companies, including Microsemi, an aerospace and defense semiconductor manufacturer, and New Zealand’s Tekron International, which makes precision timing and GPS devices.

Microchip will be contributing significant R&D to the deal. “We are pleased that NASA selected Microchip as its partner to develop the next-generation space-qualified compute processor platform,” said Babak Samimi, corporate vice president for Microchip’s communications business unit. 

“We are making a joint investment with NASA on a new trusted and transformative compute platform. It will deliver comprehensive Ethernet networking, advanced artificial intelligence/machine learning processing and connectivity support while offering unprecedented performance gain, fault-tolerance, and security architecture at low power consumption. We will foster an industry-wide ecosystem of single board computer partners anchored on the HPSC processor and Microchip’s complementary space-qualified total system solutions to benefit a new generation of mission-critical edge compute designs optimized for size, weight, and power.”