Tomas follows the new economics of getting to orbit, the Moon, and beyond. He covered three launch programs before deciding the interesting story was always the budget, not the rocket.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches Sunday on a Falcon Heavy. Follow the money and it is the cheapest way NASA has found to build a great observatory — which is exactly why it almost didn't survive the budget.
LandSpace became the third company anywhere to set an orbital-class first stage back down intact. It is also reportedly burning something like $240 million a year, and the entire case for the landing is a number it hasn't hit yet.
Two Falcon 9s, opposite coasts, half an hour apart. The number that matters isn't the clock on the doubleheader — it's what a launch costs once you can do it that often.
Space-domain awareness used to mean a handful of exquisite government satellites. Astranis is betting the whole business flips when the watcher costs a tenth as much and rolls off a broadband assembly line.
A risky maneuver engineers nicknamed the Big Bang found a year of science in the difference between two ways of running 49-year-old hardware. The reason it's worth doing is that the replacement costs infinity.
AST SpaceMobile can put broadband on an ordinary phone from orbit. The engineering is real. Whether the spreadsheet closes before the cash does is a separate, harder question.
A proposed FAA rule would let the agency waive 13 environmental laws for rocket launches. Read it as a spreadsheet: it lifts a cost off the launch companies' books and moves it onto the wildlife refuge next door.
Starship Flight 13 is set to carry 20 Starlink V3 satellites — the first real payload on a test vehicle. They are too big for Falcon 9, and that is the whole business case.
The Moon Base Program is a bet that cheap, repeatable deliveries beat one perfect mission. The math only closes if the landing rate climbs faster than the price.
Every kilogram of landing gear a rocket carries is a kilogram of payload it doesn't. The Long March 10B moved the landing gear onto a boat — and the budget for a Moon landing is the reason why.
City Labs' BOHR reached orbit this week carrying a tritium battery decades old in principle. What's actually new is a piece of paper — and the paper may be worth more than the payload.
The Iridium deal isn't about rockets. It's about a subscription business, a defense contract, and a block of spectrum that no booster can put into orbit.
Its new disc-shaped capsule can return 1,000 kilograms from space, many times what today's vehicles manage. The wager isn't the rocket. It's that bringing cargo home is finally getting cheap enough to build factories in orbit.
A startup's robot is about to grab a satellite that was never built to be grabbed. If it works, the real product isn't a rescued telescope — it's a price for keeping things in orbit alive.
Artemis III now flies to Earth orbit to rehearse two rival landers without touching the Moon. The astronauts are the headline. The story is a roughly $10 billion bet on competition — and the contender that just lost its only launch pad.
The largest IPO in history prices Thursday and trades Friday at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Strip away Mars, and what you are actually buying is a dish on a roof — and a booster that lost an engine last week.
The prospectus asks for $1.75 trillion and points at a rocket. Read the segments and the rocket is the loss leader — the company is an internet provider that happens to fly its own delivery trucks.
Starship V3 made a fiery splash in the Indian Ocean and Elon Musk called it epic. The number that matters is dollars per kilogram to the lunar south pole — and that number is still doing the heavy lifting NASA's renderings won't.
