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A NASA safety panel says filling a Starship for the Moon could take around 22 flights. Elon Musk says 6 to 8. That is not a rounding error — it is two different futures for what deep-space flight costs. The most important number in the Mars business this week was not a valuation or a launch date. It was a count of gas-station runs. On Thursday, October 22, NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel held its quarterly public meeting, and panel member Charlie Precourt — a former NA

A new rotor airfoil out of NASA Ames did something counterintuitive — it got thinner and sharper — and in simulation it stretched a single Mars flight from 0.7 kilometers to as much as 18.7. Ingenuity was never supposed to last. NASA's helicopter arrived on Mars in 2021 as a technology demonstration, planned for up to five flights. It flew 72 times before rotor damage ended its mission in January 2024 — and every serious Mars plan since has had to answer the question of what

On an earnings call, not a launch pad, SpaceX confirmed next month it will try to catch both halves of Starship — and told investors how often it plans to fly once it can. On October 10 this was still a hope: Flight 15, maybe four to six weeks out, maybe a ship catch. On Tuesday, October 20, it became a commitment made in front of investors. Opening SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call, Elon Musk put it plainly: "For Flight 15, which we expect to happen next month, we're goin

Four volunteers have spent a full year inside a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat in Houston, living as if they were on Mars — and on October 31, they finally get to come home from a planet they never left. The most important Mars mission of the past year did not launch. It did not need to. On October 19, 2025, four volunteers walked into Mars Dune Alpha, NASA's 3D-printed simulated Mars habitat at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and closed the door. On October 19, 2026,

At 3:41 p.m. ET today (Oct 19), Japan's H3 rocket lifted off from Tanegashima right on schedule — and a little over an hour later, the MMX spacecraft separated clean and is on its way to Mars' moon Phobos. This morning's launch-day preview ended on a caution: a scheduled launch is a promise, not a result. The promise held. The most powerful variant of Japan's H3 — the H3-24L, flying as flight F10 from the LA-Y2 pad at Tanegashima Space Center — carried JAXA's Martian Moons eX

Ten years after Elon Musk unveiled his Mars ship, Starship finally reached orbit — and still watched the 2026 Mars window close. The lesson is not about rockets. It is about building a business on a calendar you do not control. On September 28, 2016, Musk unveiled the Interplanetary Transport System, a giant spaceship meant to carry people to Mars. On September 28, 2026 — ten years and a day later — its stainless-steel descendant, Starship, reached orbit for the first time on

Space startups raised a record $20.8 billion in a single quarter, nearly triple the quarter before — and the money is flowing to factories, rockets, and heavy hardware, not apps and promises. The number is hard to wave away. According to Seraphim Space's latest quarterly index, reported this week by Reuters, space startups attracted $20.8 billion in the third quarter — nearly triple the $7.4 billion raised in the second quarter, more than double the previous all-time peak, an

Perseverance has now driven farther than any vehicle on another world — and it did it in less than half the time of the rover it passed, by driving itself. The record fell on an ordinary drive. On October 11, on its 2,006th Martian day, NASA's Perseverance rover rolled 299.6 feet across the surface. That short leg pushed its lifetime total to 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometres) — past the 28.06 miles logged by Opportunity between 2004 and 2018, and past every lunar rover as well.

While NASA's own Mars sample plan sits stranded on the surface, a Japanese spacecraft launching Monday will go to Mars' largest moon, scoop up its soil, and fly it home — with American hardware doing the digging. The most important Mars launch of 2026 will not leave from Texas or Florida. It leaves from an island spaceport in southern Japan — and NASA spends this afternoon explaining why American fingerprints are all over it. At 4 p.m. EDT today, October 15, NASA holds a tele

Every founder asks who will buy. Mars founders have to ask it in order — because the first customer of a new world is never the person who eventually lives there. Ask a room of space fans who the customer for Mars is and most will point at the end of the story: settlers, tourists, researchers in habitats, kids born under a pink sky. They are not wrong. They are just last. No new market in history has started with its final customer. Aviation did not start with holiday flights

Mars is not far away on a calendar. It is far away on a schedule — and the schedule only opens about once every 26 months. This month, you can watch it open. Every Mars mission you have ever heard of left Earth inside a narrow band of weeks. Not because launch providers like deadlines, but because the solar system imposes one. Earth circles the Sun in about 365 days; Mars takes about 687. The faster planet keeps lapping the slower one, and the two only line up in the geometry

The FAA just opened a review of a Starship cadence more than eighteen times today's limit — and cadence, not any single rocket, is what makes Mars affordable. Read the number twice, because it changes the business. SpaceX is proposing up to 456 Starship launches and 912 landings a year from Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas. The Federal Aviation Administration said this week it will prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement for the proposal, opening a scoping period w

Every Mars plan is, underneath, a freight quote. And freight is priced by the kilo. Here is what a kilogram has cost, what it costs now, and what has to be true before Mars cargo is a business instead of a budget line. Ask a shipping company what anything costs and the answer starts with weight. Mars is no different — it is just the longest route in the business, and for most of history the rate card was absurd. The curve: sixty-five years of falling freight A 2026 Cambridge

A student-built gel experiment rode a cargo flight this morning — aimed at one of the hardest gates on the road to Mars. The most important Mars launch of the week was not a Mars launch. At 6:33 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, October 13, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on NASA's CRS-35 mission. The booster, flying for the eighth time, returned about eight minutes later to Landing Zone 40, with sonic booms rolling across th

You do not need to build rockets to steal the way a rocket company thinks. In fact, the smaller your business is, the more the lessons matter — because a coffee shop, a repair shop, or a one-person online store cannot afford to waste money the way a giant corporation can. SpaceX did not start by asking how rockets had always been priced. It started by asking what a rocket is actually made of — metal, fuel, electronics — and why the finished machine cost so much more than the

A tube about the size of a stick of chalk may hold the most important answer in science — and right now, nobody has a funded ride to go get it. In July 2024, NASA's Perseverance rover sealed a core called Sapphire Canyon, drilled from a rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls on the edge of an ancient river valley in Jezero Crater. The rock carries leopard-like spots. On Earth, similar patterns can form through chemistry associated with microbial activity. Members of the Perseverance sc

Every frontier has a first generation — the people who believed before there was proof. They are not an audience waiting to be entertained. They are a market waiting to be recognized. There is a moment in every big build when the believers outnumber the evidence. Mars is in that moment now. No one has landed there. No ticket has been sold, no hotel booked, no cargo delivered. And yet the belief is already an economy: people watch cargo ships dock at dawn, argue about radiatio

No customer has ever bought a ticket to Mars. So who is writing the checks that are building the road there? Follow the capital stack. Every Mars headline is secretly a finance story. A rocket rises, and underneath it sit four different kinds of money, stacked in layers, each with its own motive. Understand the stack and you understand why Mars is moving now — after decades of paper studies — and who gets paid along the way. This is the pillar piece for The Money: the map we

The next Starship flight is the one where the economics of Mars change forever. Elon Musk has a habit of attaching dates to the future and letting the future negotiate. But what he said Saturday, in a virtual interview at the X Takeover fan event at Giga Texas, deserves to be taken seriously even by the skeptics: Starship Flight 15 is "hopefully" four to six weeks out, and the headline goal is to catch the upper-stage ship with the tower's arms — both stages recovered, both s