SpaceX
Every Cosmic Herald story on SpaceX — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Commercial
AST SpaceMobile's Block 2 BlueBirds Are in Orbit — and the Race for Direct-to-Cell Just Got Real
SpaceX lofted three Block 2 BlueBird satellites for AST SpaceMobile, expanding a constellation built on the audacious premise that your existing phone can talk directly to orbit.
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Commercial
ElevationSpace Banks $40 Million to Chase the Factory-in-Orbit Dream
Japanese startup ElevationSpace closed a $40M Series B, pushing total funding to $63.5M as it builds a reentry-capable platform for manufacturing and research in microgravity.
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Commercial
An Austrian Propulsion Startup Just Landed €6.3 Million From Europe's Sovereign Space Push
Gate Space, a Vienna-born satellite propulsion firm, secured €6.3M from the European Innovation Council — the only space company in a 38-firm cohort — as Europe doubles down on homegrown launch and in-orbit capabilities.
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Commercial
SpaceX Flies Its First Falcon 9 as a Public Company. Almost Nothing Changed.
Two days after a record-setting Nasdaq debut that valued it near $2.1 trillion, SpaceX launched Starlink 17-54 from Vandenberg — its first Falcon 9 as a publicly traded company, and a routine flight that says a lot about why the IPO happened.
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Commercial
Ariane 6 Just Lifted the Heaviest Payload in European Launch History. It Was Full of Amazon Satellites.
On June 17, an Ariane 64 rocket lifted 36 Amazon Leo broadband satellites to orbit — the heaviest payload ever lofted by an Ariane rocket, and the debut of upgraded P160C solid boosters that give the vehicle a 10% thrust increase. Europe's commercial heavy lifter is finding its stride.
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Commercial
Relativity Space Wants to Build a Mars Orbiter — And It's Not Waiting for NASA to Ask
Relativity Space announces plans to privately develop a Mars orbiter, signaling that commercial ambitions in deep space are no longer theoretical.
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Commercial
The Upper Stage Problem: Why Reusable Second Stages Are Harder Than They Look
Recovering and reusing first stages was the revolution. But upper stages — which must survive orbital velocities and reentry — are a fundamentally harder problem, and the industry's three main bets are taking very different approaches.
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Commercial
Low Earth orbit has a garbage problem. Here's who's trying to clean it up.
There are roughly 27,000 tracked pieces of debris in orbit, and hundreds of thousands more too small to track. Two companies — Astroscale and ClearSpace — are building the first commercial debris removal spacecraft. The engineering is harder than it sounds.
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Commercial
Private companies are landing on the Moon. Here's what the scoreboard actually looks like.
NASA's CLPS program has funded multiple private lunar landers with mixed results. Intuitive Machines stuck the landing sideways; Astrobotic's Peregrine did not reach the surface. A clearer picture of commercial lunar capability is forming, and it's more complicated than press releases suggest.
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Commercial
People keep saying we'll manufacture things in space. Here's what's actually happening.
The promise of manufacturing in microgravity has been discussed for decades — purer crystals, exotic alloys, biological structures that can't be made on Earth. In 2026, that promise is starting to become a real, if small, industry. This is what's actually coming off the production line.
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Commercial
Rocket Lab is building a reusable rocket. Why Neutron is harder than it looks.
Rocket Lab has built a successful small launch business on the back of its expendable Electron rocket. Now it's attempting something far more difficult: a medium-lift reusable launch vehicle called Neutron, aimed directly at SpaceX's market.
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Commercial
Space tourism in 2026: who's actually going, and what it costs them
A few years after the first wave of commercial passengers reached space, the market has settled into something more defined. The flights are still rare and the prices are still very high, but the customer base has grown beyond billionaires and the competitive dynamics are shifting.
