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.
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.
