Launch, orbit, and the new economics of getting off-world.
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.
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.
Sir Peter Beck's reputation was built on saying no to more mass, more money, and more ambition than a rocket needed. Now he owns the satellite constellation that spent five billion dollars finding out what happens when nobody says no.
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.
The AI1 satellite is a real engineering answer to a real grid problem. Whether it ever deploys comes down to the oldest number in energy: cost per kilowatt-hour, delivered.
