Elon Musk

The powerhouse commercial launch provider we know today has come a long way since it opened its doors in 2002. On this day back in 2008, on its fourth attempt, SpaceX launched Ratsat into space on its Falcon 1 rocket.

It’s hard to believe that SpaceX has only just started launching people to space, but that’s practically the case with just four crewed missions under their belt since last year. DM-2, Crew-1, and Crew-2 missions for NASA saw the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft send humans to the International Space Station. The journey inside Dragon wasn’t also the destination as it was for Inspiration4.

What changes when the experience in Dragon is tested by ordinary people for whom the SpaceX spacecraft is also the endpoint in space? SpaceX founder Elon Musk has weighed in with some early suggestions that range from cooking methods to waste management.

Beyond sharing a photo of his new dog Floki, talking about UFOs, and stressing the importance of reusable rockets on Twitter this week, Elon has also shared new features, including Starlink, that will be coming to the Crew Dragon capsule.

The Inspiration4 crew successfully splashed down in the Atlantic following their nearly three days orbiting the Earth. In a great conclusion to the mission, Elon Musk shared that he would be donating $50 million dollars to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital—pushing the fundraising campaign past its $200 million goal.

SpaceX plans to start catching their Starship Super Heavy booster have raised eyebrows. Those Starship catch attempts should start with Booster 5, the second Super Heavy booster to launch, Elon confirmed in a tweet this week. Along with this, news about Starlink satellite’s laser interconnects and development at Starbase.

A recent Jigsaw report raised concerns over the growing number of government-engineered internet outages across the world. With over 850 government-engineered internet outages in the past decade, citizens of affected nations are desperate for a solution. SpaceX Starlink and similar satellite internet services could potentially help overcome these outages in ways that legacy connectivity cannot.

A surprise to those focused on Astra’s orbital launch attempt today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and the crew of Inspiration4 took to the skies for a flyover of Starbase this afternoon.

Six internal emails were leaked this week that share statements from United Launch Alliance Vice President Robbie Sabathier to a lobbyist about NASA’s “incompetent” leaders and favoritism towards SpaceX.

The emails leaked from the ULA employee also contain wild speculation that contracts awarded to SpaceX by NASA were tied to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s inferred support for former President Trump.

This week, SpaceX has continued their work at Starbase, 34 more OneWeb satellites were launched into orbit, and SLS has gained its Orion mass simulator.

This week, Tesla has been a mainstay of the news. Their AI day served as a recruitment tool as they unveiled their Dojo super-computer and a Tesla robot.

While Blue Origin continues to attack SpaceX’s award of the Human Lander System contract for Artemis, SpaceX remains hard at work towards the first orbital launch from their “non-existent” spaceport. More so, Elon has criticized Bezos for holding back the Artemis program in the very ways that Bezos has previously spoken against.

NASA has been working on a new generation of Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMU), the big white space suits you see on spacewalks, for their Artemis Program. Elon Musk offered his help with xEMU development to make sure it would hit its 2024 deadline.

This week SpaceX has made massive progress towards launching their Super Heavy rocket. Last week the booster was a mere tube in the build site, but now it has had the engines installed and been stacked with Starship 20; now laden with tiles.

This week, SpaceX has added the final section to the orbital Starship launch tower, integrated the orbital launch table, and completed a great deal of work on their first Superheavy booster slated for flight, booster 4.

While the news this week primarily focused on Blue Origin’s flight to space on Tuesday, SpaceX has continued to work towards the first flight of Starship Super Heavy. This week, Super Heavy had its first static fire, while Starship may see some slight design changes moving forward.

This week on Twitter, Elon addressed some major planned improvements to the constellation of Starlink internet satellites, and the advantages Starlink has over traditional internet connections.

The Wall Street Journal has been able to confirm that Elon Musk has bought a ticket on Virgin Galactic. Although Musk himself hasn’t said anything.

Today we witnessed history as the first fully crewed flight of Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane VSS Unity. This was one of the final test flights before Galactic begin flying paying customers next year.

While the focus in space this week has been on Virgin Galactic, Elon still shared many notable pieces of information about SpaceX on Twitter.