Other storylines are also worth watching this year that didn't make the Top 20. Will SpaceX's Starship begin launching Starlink satellites? Will United Launch Alliance finally get its Vulcan rocket flying at a higher cadence? Will Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket be certified by the US Space Force? I'm looking forward to learning the answers to these questions, and more.
SpaceX's insider share sale was priced at $421 a share, Bloomberg reported Friday, which would mark a sharp jump in valuation from earlier secondary transactions. That is likely to lift the carrying value of Google's long-standing investment in Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company. Alphabet, Google's parent, has been an investor in SpaceX since at least 2015, when it joined Fidelity Investments in a $1 billion funding round for a combined stake of about 10% at the time, Bloomberg has reported.
Alphabet, parent company of Google, has been one of the best-performing stocks of the year, up nearly 70%, and now has a market capitalization of $3.8 trillion. The company also happened to make what could turn out to be one of the most lucrative startup investments of all time, which could finally bear fruit next year. In 2015, Google invested around $900 million in SpaceX for a stake of around 7% in Elon Musk's space company, which was then valued at $12 billion.
SpaceX and Elon Musk are once again being called on to rescue spacefarers - this time, the Chinese crew of Shenzhou-20, delayed on China's Tiangong space station after suspected space debris damage. The three-person crew including Chen Dong, Chen Zhongui, and Wang Jie, arrived in April and were supposed to return in November after a handover with the Shenzhou-21 crew. That return has been postponed while engineers assess potential damage from what reports describe as "a tiny piece of space debris."
The space agency's decision to reopen the contract for the Artemis mission moon lander renews competition between SpaceX, which had previously won the award, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space startup. But it also sets off a competition between Texas and Washington, the two companies' respective home states. Politicians have long fought over American space spending, as Fast Company has previously explained. But it's not clear where they stand, at least for now.
Rockets roar. Photographer Andrew McCarthy captured the moment that a SpaceX Starship roared into space from its launchpad in Texas. Photographing the fiery plumes of the 33 Raptor engines that power the Starship Super Heavy booster proved a technical feat but also required luck. "We can study wind patterns, look at past launches, but ultimately, each one will behave slightly differently due to the chaos of the event," McCarthy says.
We are in a race against China so we need the best companies to operate at a speed that gets us to the Moon FIRST," Duffy wrote. "SpaceX has the contract to build the HLS which will get U.S. astronauts there on Artemis III. But, competition and innovation are the keys to our dominance in space so [NASA] is opening up HLS production to Blue Origin and other great American companies.
Duffy also cites "maybe others" getting involved. This refers to a third option. In recent weeks, officials from traditional space companies have been telling Duffy and the chief of staff at the Department of Transportation, Pete Meachum, that they can build an Apollo Lunar Module-like lander within 30 months. Amit Kshatriya, NASA's associate administrator, favors this government-led approach, sources said.
Because after another turbulent morning of closely following the rough-and-tumble contest to become the next NASA administrator, I sure could use one. What has happened now? Why, it was only SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is NASA's most important contractor, referring to the interim head of the space agency, Sean Duffy, as "Sean Dummy," and suggesting he was trying to kill NASA. Musk later added, "The person responsible for America's space program can't have a 2 digit IQ."
As could be seen in the video shared by SpaceX, Starship's Super Heavy booster, which is nearly 400 feet tall, smoothly returned to Earth and hovered above the Gulf of America for a few seconds before it went for its soft water landing. The booster's picture-perfect maneuver before splashing down all but capped a near-flawless mission for Starship, which is about to enter its V3 era with Flight 12.
