6 comments

• Jeff Wright

  August 13, 2026 at 4:51 pm

  Norge Bank’s interest in SpaceX is the best bit of news all year. Folks in that part of the world understand infrastructure the way China does.

  I think they see opportunities for JMOB/Sea Base as well as Starship facilities.

  With Sea Launch kaputnik, and Europe rockets toys–they get to show the world that they can think as big as Elon.

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• Jeff Wright

  August 14, 2026 at 6:53 am

  Predicting solar eruptions
  https://phys.org/news/2026-08-ai-hidden-solar-eruptions-hours.html

  HTP production
  https://phys.org/news/2026-08-layered-nano-biohybrid-sunlight-air.html

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• Blair Ivey

  August 14, 2026 at 5:01 pm

  “Astronomers propose a new type of astrophysical object, a black hole star, to explain an object they have found in the early universe”

  A plausible theory; but why didn’t the matter all go into the black hole?

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• Jeff Wright

  August 16, 2026 at 2:35 am

  The war on A.I.
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BvlGs25tCxI&ra=m

  The war on landlines
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C3U0mpxNjis&pp=ugUHEgVlbi1VUw%3D%3D&ra=m

  Elon should have looked at server farms propping up old malls to offset hostility.

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• Richard M

  August 17, 2026 at 6:22 am

  This morning (Monday) we have yet another article about the growing panic over launch availability, this time from Eric Berger at Ars:
  https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/theres-a-huge-launch-crunch-right-now-and-it-will-probably-get-worse/

  This might not be such a severe issue if even one of the new medium/heavy U.S. launchers had actually kept to its anticipated development schedule, but as the saying goes, rockets are hard. Even SpaceX needed a decade to get a real cadence going.

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  • Edward

    August 17, 2026 at 10:53 am

    From Richard M’s linked article:

    With a growing number of constellations big and small, there is a huge and growing demand signal.

    I had been worried that there would not be enough customers for Starship, but it seems that I need not have been.

    This is because of an inescapable reality: Without SpaceX, the Western launch market would have been completely screwed over the last half-decade.

    Without SpaceX, the Western launch market would not have existed like this. SpaceX is the company that showed the investors that commercial space can be built at a low cost. Two professors at the end of the last century showed that small satellites (cubesats) can be built and launched at low cost, and they also contributed greatly to the growth of commercial space.

    But there are growing concerns that SpaceX will largely focus on its own payloads—Starlink v3 satellites and orbital data centers—because of their potential to drive far greater profits. The Starship rocket’s PEZ satellite dispenser, optimized for Starlink, is an indication of the company’s priorities.

    Does Berger mean focus and priorities similar to Blue Origin’s owner’s LEO constellation?

    Every company has a focus or priority that differs from almost all of their customers, but this does not usually harm those customers. The PEZ dispenser is already not the only delivery method that SpaceX is committed to. Starlab will have to have a clamshell nosecone for delivery, and that is a method that a large number of customers would find suitable for their own payloads.

    Then there is the discussion of profits. Is that the priority of SpaceX or is the development of space in general their priority? We have already seen SpaceX bail out competitors that have lost their other launch vehicles (“Most immediately impacted was OneWeb, which lost some satellites already in Soyuz launch processing and eventually had to turn to a direct competitor, SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket, to complete its constellation.“). Musk founded SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) to explore space, not to make a fortune. The fortune was just a byproduct, created because space is an excellent place to do business.

    This was the biggest problem that I had with the SpaceX IPO, it would put pressure on the company from the SEC to focus less on exploration and more on next quarter’s profits. Among the SEC’s prime directives is that publicly traded companies prioritize their investors, not the future, not exploration (except as far as it benefits the investors), and not altruism. Fortunately, Musk remains the majority shareholder, and he has the most control over the company.

    As the impending launch crisis comes to the industry, questions have begun to swirl about whether the federal government might intervene to keep the Falcon rockets flying. After all, NASA financially supported the development of the Falcon 9 and its launch pads to some degree through the Commercial Cargo program. And the US military has leverage over SpaceX through the National Security Space Launch Program.

    And now we know a major problem with accepting government contracts. The government can tell you how to run your company. Or at least Eric Berger thinks it can.

    Others have suggested that the US government could step in and nationalize SpaceX. That could be done if the US Congress passes a law stating that assured access to space is essential to national defense.

    Which ignores the coming Starship, which makes the Falcons obsolete for many of its current uses. It also ignores that other companies are also available for national defense uses, which make SpaceX and the Falcons less essential. This is yet another problem with accepting government contracts, as it makes government dependent upon the companies doing business with it, so it may believe that it should have control over those companies. So, what are the upsides to government contracts?

    Yeah, I don’t know, either.

    Demand has outstripped supply, and that will probably continue for some time.

    Which tells us that SpaceX is not charging enough for a launch. Yet another sign that SpaceX’s priority is not profit but is expansion of the entire space industry.

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