Space | The Verge

Google is sending an AI satellite into space next week

2026-09-24T10:54:18-04:00

Google is getting ready to launch a satellite with its AI processors to test how well they perform in space, as reported earlier by The New York Times. The move is part of Google's Project Suncatcher, the company's experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers into orbit.

The satellite, equipped with Google's Tensor Processing Units, will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on October 1st, allowing it to harness the power of the sun in low Earth orbit. As noted by Google, the goal of the mission is to measure how well its TPUs "handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Europe has its first commercial orbital rocket

2026-09-08T09:38:35-04:00

German company Isar Aerospace has successfully launched Europe's first entirely commercial orbital rocket. It attempted to achieve the feat last March, but that lasted all of 30 seconds before the vehicle crashed into the sea and exploded. This time the company managed to get the two-stage Spectrum into low Earth orbit from a Norwegian spaceport.

CEO and Co-Founder Daniel Metzler said in a press release:

"Today, Isar Aerospace opened space from Continental Europe. Launch continues to be the largest bottleneck for the global space industry and from today on, there is a true alternative for commercial and institutional customers … Europe no …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches to study dark matter and dark energy

2026-08-31T05:48:46-04:00

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope blasts off. | Photo: NASA / John Kraus

After funding struggles and a name change, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been successfully launched. It will now make a three-month, one-million-mile journey to its orbit at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2) beyond the Moon.

From this vantage point, Roman will conduct an unprecedented survey of the universe. Its field of view is 100 times larger than Hubble's and, according to NASA, it can survey the sky 1,000 times faster using its 300-megapixel infrared camera. Roman also has a Coronagraph system that can block and mask glare from stars, allowing it to directly image exoplanets, even smaller, older, and colder planets …

Read the full story at The Verge.

NASA gives up on trying to rescue the Swift telescope

2026-08-20T09:04:37-04:00

Plans to rescue NASA's Swift Observatory satellite from falling into Earth's atmosphere are seemingly dead in the water. The agency and Katalyst Space announced yesterday that the Link spacecraft will no longer capture or boost the Swift telescope to a higher altitude due to an ongoing "attitude control issue," but will instead conduct rendezvous and proximity operations to collect data for future space exploration.

"We knew this was a high-risk, high-reward mission - a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun's activity," said NASA astrophysics director Shawn Domagal-Goldman. "We were all hoping f …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Space mirrors could ruin astronomy — and your eyes

2026-08-07T15:26:39-04:00

Solar energy, at any time of day or night - that's the dream of space mirror projects. Futurists have been imagining satellite mirrors that could reflect the sun's light onto the Earth's surface for over a century. Russian scientists experimented with the concept in the '90s with the Znamya project. The idea is to put a large mirror in orbit and angle it such that sunlight can be reflected onto a specific geographical area for illumination or the generation of solar power.

Now, the California-based company Reflect Orbital wants to try this idea again, launching a test satellite named Eärendil-1 as a precursor to a fleet of up to 50,000 spa …

Read the full story at The Verge.

SpaceX is barely Space and mostly X

2026-08-06T08:42:50-04:00

Privatize the profit, socialize the losses? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX, Elon Musk's healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we're calling the whole thing SpaceX.

Look, what we have here, by revenue, is primarily a telecom company and a company that rents compute, according to SpaceX's first quarterly earnings statement as a public company. The space sector of the business didn't break a billion dollars this quarter and contributed only a touch over 10 percent of the company's revenue. SpaceX remains its own biggest customer. There just aren't enough other people who want its rockets. And, I dunno, maybe if the rockets …

Read the full story at The Verge.

SpaceX is coming for T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon

2026-08-05T03:09:52-04:00

SpaceX is preparing to build a terrestrial mobile network to "acquire quite a few" of the customers now subscribed to T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. The message to compete head-to-head with the US carriers was delivered by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell and CEO Elon Musk during the Q&A section of the company's first earnings call.

"The spectrum that we purchased from EchoStar does have terrestrial components, so we definitely intend to build out the terrestrial component," said Shotwell. "You will have not only the capacity from the satellites themselves, but you will have a buildout of the terrestrial, basically the hardware and systems ne …

Read the full story at The Verge.

SpaceX made more revenue as an AI company than a space company

2026-08-04T17:42:17-04:00

SpaceX's AI revenue grew more than three times to $2.6 billion from the year before, mostly because of deals that the company made to provide compute to other AI companies, according to SpaceX's quarterly earnings. The AI division, which the company said in its documents to go public was the source of most of its value, lost $1.5 billion this quarter, slightly less than in the same quarter last year.

SpaceX made deals with Anthropic in May and Google in June to provide compute to the other two AI companies, putting it in competition with other neoclouds such as CoreWeave. The increased presence in AI is also driving the company to spend mor …

Read the full story at The Verge.

NASA’s Curiosity rover found a ‘sea of polygons’ on Mars

2026-07-30T13:20:06-04:00

The latest discovery from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is a field of honeycomb-shaped polygons covering a Martian valley called Valle Grande. As Gizmodo reports, Curiosity has snapped pictures of the unusual terrain texture before, called polygonal fractures, each about 1.5 to 3 inches wide, but NASA says it's previously only found them in small patches, "nothing on the scale discovered in Valle Grande."

Curiosity captured a 360-degree panorama of the "sea of polygons" on June 19th and 20th (Martian sols 4,930 and 4,931) that shows the texture spreading out in all directions. Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada says the Curiosity team "measur …

Read the full story at The Verge.

AI’s finally expensive enough to make Wall Street nervous

2026-07-28T19:37:03-04:00

Working hard, or bear-ly working? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

It's earnings season, and investors got an unpleasant surprise from Google: an increase on its spending estimate, to as much as $205 billion - from the last quarter's projection of up to $190 billion. Even the lower end of Google's new projected range - $195 billion - is much more than the company had previously forecast as its top end spending. Now, look, I recognize that there's an impulse to say things like "What's $15 billion between friends?" but from an investor's perspective, Google has essentially said that it can't accurately forecast its costs, which is a scary thing. Plus, Google is spending more money than it's making. And Google …

Read the full story at The Verge.