The Money

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

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

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

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 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

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