SpaceX
Every Cosmic Herald story on SpaceX — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Missions
Roman Space Telescope Launches Toward L2, Kicking Off a Dark-Universe Survey 1,000 Times Faster Than Hubble
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on a Falcon Heavy Aug. 30, 2026, beginning a three-month cruise to L2 where its 300-megapixel camera will survey the sky 1,000x faster than Hubble in search of dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets.
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Commercial
SpaceX Unveils $100 Billion 'Starbase Louisiana,' Aiming to Build the Biggest Launch Site on Earth
SpaceX and Louisiana officials announced a $100 billion Gulf Coast spaceport with ten launch pads and, per Elon Musk, more than 30 Starship flights a day once built out.
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Military Space
Space Force Spreads $60 Million Across Five Companies to Keep Its New Satellite Network From Having a Single Point of Failure
Amazon, Lockheed, Northrop, Rocket Lab, and York each pocket roughly $12M to prove their satellites can talk to a backbone SpaceX is building — and to each other.
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Commercial
SpaceX Sets Falcon 9 Turnaround Record With Twin Launches 38.5 Minutes Apart
SpaceX launched two Falcon 9 rockets from opposite U.S. coasts just 38.5 minutes apart on Aug. 15, 2026, setting a new back-to-back cadence record with a Globalstar replenishment mission from Florida and the classified USSF-366 flight from California.
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Military Space
All 12 Golden Dome Interceptor Contractors Clear First Design Milestone — But a Funding Cliff Looms
SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and ten other contenders have passed Gate 1 of the Pentagon's space-based interceptor competition, but officials warn the $185 billion Golden Dome missile shield could stall as soon as October without new funding.
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Commercial
Blue Origin Pins New Glenn Pad Explosion on a BE-4 Oxygen Valve
Blue Origin says a single malfunctioning main oxygen valve on a BE-4 engine destroyed New Glenn and 48 Amazon Leo satellites in May, with fixed hardware due late August and flights targeted before year's end.
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Military Space
Space Force Splits $615 Million Among Rocket Lab and Two Others to Track Airborne Threats From Orbit
Space Systems Command handed Rocket Lab $397 million to build orbital jet-tracking satellites for launch on its still-unflown Neutron rocket, part of a $615 million multi-vendor push to watch the skies from space instead of AWACS planes.
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Missions
A Dead SpaceX Rocket Stage Just Struck the Moon Near Einstein Crater — and the VLT Watched It Happen
A spent Falcon 9 upper stage from January 2025's Blue Ghost/Hakuto-R launch slammed into the Moon's far side near Einstein crater on August 5, 2026, and ESO's VLT caught sodium and lithium flashing in the debris plume.
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NASA & Agencies
NASA Unveils Crew-13 Lineup as Station Preps for a Busy Stretch of Spacewalks and Science
NASA introduced the four-person SpaceX Crew-13 team at Johnson Space Center on August 3, 2026, ahead of a mid-September Dragon launch, while Expedition 75 gears up for an August 7 spacewalk to prep a new solar array platform.
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Military Space
SpaceX Launches Classified NROL-95 Spy Satellite for the NRO
A veteran Falcon 9 booster flying its seventh mission delivered a secret NRO payload to orbit before sticking a pre-dawn landing at Cape Canaveral's Landing Zone 2.
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Military Space
SpaceX Lands $1.6 Billion Space Force Deal to Launch 18 Rockets for Airborne-Threat Tracking Satellites
Space Systems Command awarded SpaceX two task orders worth $1.6 billion for 18 Falcon 9 launches by end of 2027, carrying satellites meant to track airborne threats and feed targeting data to U.S. forces in near-real time.
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Commercial
Starship Flight 13 Deploys First Operational Starlinks, but Booster Splashdown Gets Rough
SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 delivered 20 production Starlink satellites and an in-space Raptor relight, but Super Heavy limped to a hard splashdown on just five of 13 engines.
