Except NG has one small issue. It's similar to Starship in that it's in beta testing. In fact I would say it's early beta and Starship is mid beta. Add to it that BO has no track record for launching doodley squat.

Ok NG has a second problem. It blew up its own launch platform.

txags92 said:

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techno-ag said:

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txags92 said:

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will25u said:

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BREAKING 🚨: NASA has picked Blue Origin to build and launch its Mars Telecommunications Network orbiter under a contract worth up to $700 million

The spacecraft will orbit Mars and relay science data, imagery, and navigation for missions on and around the planet pic.twitter.com/AJH6D7AAQW

— Latest in space (@latestinspace) September 1, 2026

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Did SpaceX even bid? Can't imagine how they would lose to Blue Origin when BO doesn't even have a rocket to launch and has commitments to lunar missions it can't complete right now.

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Government loves competition.

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Believe me, I know. But they typically look at whether your company has the resources to handle the new contract requirements on top of your existing commitments. BO has shown nothing to indicate that they have those resources. But if SpaceX is truly pivoting to data centers and AI, they may not have even bid for this one, though with Mars involved, I would think that is unlikely.

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SpaceX will at some point pivot back to going for Mars. They will want their own satellite network there, and they are going forward with their own network they're calling Marslink.

BO's network will be instantly obsolete.

TexAgs91 said:

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txags92 said:

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techno-ag said:

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txags92 said:

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will25u said:

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BREAKING 🚨: NASA has picked Blue Origin to build and launch its Mars Telecommunications Network orbiter under a contract worth up to $700 million

The spacecraft will orbit Mars and relay science data, imagery, and navigation for missions on and around the planet pic.twitter.com/AJH6D7AAQW

— Latest in space (@latestinspace) September 1, 2026

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Did SpaceX even bid? Can't imagine how they would lose to Blue Origin when BO doesn't even have a rocket to launch and has commitments to lunar missions it can't complete right now.

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Government loves competition.

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Believe me, I know. But they typically look at whether your company has the resources to handle the new contract requirements on top of your existing commitments. BO has shown nothing to indicate that they have those resources. But if SpaceX is truly pivoting to data centers and AI, they may not have even bid for this one, though with Mars involved, I would think that is unlikely.

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SpaceX will at some point pivot back to going for Mars. They will want their own satellite network there, and they are going forward with their own network they're calling Marslink.

BO's network will be instantly obsolete.

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Yeah, I was kind of thinking SpaceX will likely do their own thing on Mars regardless of what NASA comes up with.

Louisianans still happy. Still posting memes.

Louisiana built the Saturn V stages that put men on the Moon. We just never lit one off here.

Michoud made the first stage. Barged it out. Florida got the launch. We been in the space business this whole time and never heard the rumble.

SpaceX would be the first orbital launch… pic.twitter.com/c35jS2oJXa

— CajunCybertruck (@CajunCybertruck) September 1, 2026

TexAgs91 said:

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txags92 said:

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techno-ag said:

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txags92 said:

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will25u said:

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BREAKING 🚨: NASA has picked Blue Origin to build and launch its Mars Telecommunications Network orbiter under a contract worth up to $700 million

The spacecraft will orbit Mars and relay science data, imagery, and navigation for missions on and around the planet pic.twitter.com/AJH6D7AAQW

— Latest in space (@latestinspace) September 1, 2026

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Did SpaceX even bid? Can't imagine how they would lose to Blue Origin when BO doesn't even have a rocket to launch and has commitments to lunar missions it can't complete right now.

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Government loves competition.

---

Believe me, I know. But they typically look at whether your company has the resources to handle the new contract requirements on top of your existing commitments. BO has shown nothing to indicate that they have those resources. But if SpaceX is truly pivoting to data centers and AI, they may not have even bid for this one, though with Mars involved, I would think that is unlikely.

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SpaceX will at some point pivot back to going for Mars. They will want their own satellite network there, and they are going forward with their own network they're calling Marslink.

BO's network will be instantly obsolete.

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Yeah, a half dozen unmanned Starships to Mars, loaded full with V3 Starlink type satellites and SpaceX immediately dominates the space.

Starship is going to radically transform Starlink

A single Starship launch is designed to deploy up to 60 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites at once, adding more than 60 Tbps of downlink capacity to the network

That is more than 20× the capacity added by a current Falcon 9… pic.twitter.com/JGDXsu419R

— X Freeze (@XFreeze) September 2, 2026

Quote:

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That is more than 20x the capacity added by a current Falcon 9 Starlink launch

Each V3 satellite is designed for 1,024 Gbps of downlink capacity... over 10x a V2 satellite

Falcon 9 built Starlink into the largest satellite constellation ever created

Starship takes that network to an entirely different scale

More capacity per launch
Faster capacity deployment
Multi-gigabit Starlink speeds
Massive capacity growth around the world
Far more network infrastructure deployed with every mission

This goes far beyond simply launching more satellites

Starship gives SpaceX the ability to deploy internet infrastructure in orbit at industrial scale

Flight 13 already completed the first V3 deployment test

And Flight 14 is going to push that transition even further

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Quote:

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Matching the payload capacity of ONE Starship V3 flight would take 200+ Falcon 1 launches

That's hundreds of rockets, hundreds of separate launches and an enormous amount of time just to move what one Starship is designed to carry

Orbital AI at serious scale needs a vehicle like Starship
And SpaceX now has exactly that

Starship V3 is designed to carry 100+ tons to orbit per flight with full reusability

That means:
Huge batches of compute satellites launched at once
Massive power and networking hardware deployed in a single mission
Starlink connectivity + laser links for moving massive amounts of high-bandwidth data across the orbital network and back to Earth
Rapid reuse for continuous scaling
Direct access to enormous amounts of solar energy in orbit
Orbital infrastructure expanding launch after launch

This is where Starship changes everything

Orbital AI stops being limited by how little mass we can get to space and starts becoming infrastructure humanity can build at enormous scale

And it's happening much sooner than most people realize

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Mathguy64 said:

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Except NG has one small issue. It's similar to Starship in that it's in beta testing. In fact I would say it's early beta and Starship is mid beta. Add to it that BO has no track record for launching doodley squat.

Ok NG has a second problem. It blew up its own launch platform.

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Starship is leaving beta and moving to function on the next launch. Flight 14, assuming it does continue orbital will carry and deploy operational Starlink V3 to a functional orbit.

It may not be optimized for reuse, but it will be operational.

That will be minimum 2 years on NG, and accelerating. At the very best, progress on NG can resume at the end of the year

edit... NG can carry about 99,000 lbs to LEO. Call it 50 tons. Starship can carry more than double that to LEO, and with on orbit refueling, it's trans lunar and trans Mars capacity is exactly the same! So my comment that New Glenn will be 2 years minimum behind once Starship becomes orbital (and therefore capable of moving cargo to orbit), that will be 2 years behind with a rocket that is only a fraction of the capacity with only it's first stage reusable. So at best it's comparable to Falcon Heavy.

We've seen billionaires and their affect on the world.

We're going to see the what a trillionaire's affect on the world will be... Tesla, Cybercab, SpaceXai, Terrafab, Neurolink, Starlink, millions of humanoid robots, 30 rocket flights/day, orbital data center, moon base, city on Mars.

Hold on to your butts

Created a visualization of various orbital planes for Starship and subsequent RTLS opportunities, ideally trying to help people who keep misunderstanding how the ground track moves and thus showing the limited number of return windows for all three launch sites. pic.twitter.com/TKFdwloDF8

— TheSpaceEngineer (@mcrs987) September 4, 2026

Several US companies elected not to participate in Macron's space summit, after the administration warned not to go for policy reasons. It's cute that the Euro's think they are still somehow relevant in space policy.

The space summit is in South Texas. Its priorities are maximizing the rate of increase of intelligence in orbit. All attendees get stock if they stay for long enough.

— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) September 5, 2026

BREAKING: For the first time in history, a space launch from continental Europe has successfully reached orbit.@isaraerospace, the German space company, launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Spaceport in Norway today. pic.twitter.com/SRYMA9OXim

— Atoms Not Bits (@AtomsNotBits) September 5, 2026

will25u said:

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BREAKING: For the first time in history, a space launch from continental Europe has successfully reached orbit.@isaraerospace, the German space company, launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Spaceport in Norway today. pic.twitter.com/SRYMA9OXim

— Atoms Not Bits (@AtomsNotBits) September 5, 2026

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Elon encourages everybody to excel.

PJYoung said:

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Created a visualization of various orbital planes for Starship and subsequent RTLS opportunities, ideally trying to help people who keep misunderstanding how the ground track moves and thus showing the limited number of return windows for all three launch sites. pic.twitter.com/TKFdwloDF8

— TheSpaceEngineer (@mcrs987) September 4, 2026

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Finally someone gets it right!

techno-ag said:

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will25u said:

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BREAKING: For the first time in history, a space launch from continental Europe has successfully reached orbit.@isaraerospace, the German space company, launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Spaceport in Norway today. pic.twitter.com/SRYMA9OXim

— Atoms Not Bits (@AtomsNotBits) September 5, 2026

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Elon encourages everybody to excel.

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I'm no expert, but there sure are a lot of things that look similar to SpaceX equipment and technology in that short clip

Wimp detected in South Dakota SURF experiment;

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The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment was run by an international team of 250 scientists and engineers from 38 institutions. At its centre is an underground tank at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the state of South Dakota, in the United States, which holds ultra-pure liquid xenon, surrounded by hundreds of light sensors.

The theory that the experiment was testing is this: if a hypothetical dark matter particle called a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) reacts with the nucleus of a xenon atom, it would produce two flashes of light at a specific energy level.

After reviewing 220 days of data collected between March 2023 and April 2024, the LZ team discovered one such event on June 16, 2023.

Sam Eriksen, the lead of the study and a senior research associate at the University of Bristol, presented the findings on Tuesday at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan.

"We understand our detectors and the backgrounds so well," Eriksen explained in a press release, "that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important".

Rick Gaitskell, the LZ spokesperson and a physicist at Brown University, said scientists "don't want to get ahead" of themselves.

"We are not claiming to have seen dark matter," he added.

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More. Pretty cool.

Looks interesting if legit.

A lunar construction company just came out of stealth mode: Lunar Forge.

Laser-sintering regolith into structural material, aimed at fission-reactor housing and shielding. Their first demo is targeted for 2027.https://t.co/aRV1J5JXsg

— Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) September 7, 2026

Color me skeptical but I hope so. Also skeptical of this but I think it is more likely to work vs. the regolith welder.

Stoke has unveiled their new Nova Block 2 design on their website! 🔥

Here are key changes in the Block 2 upgrade.

Stage 1: massively stretched tankage, 14 Methalox FFSC Zenith engines (double that of Block 1 Pathfinder), SuperHeavy V3 style hot staging truss, 1,700,000 lbf… pic.twitter.com/XlyJLfqGfc

— Truthful🛰️ (@Truthful_ast) September 8, 2026

Stoke has a lot of VC money invested in them, and I really hope their actively cooled heat shield works well.

Next Monday!

Flight 14 date has been set! pic.twitter.com/yphOkiIOf3

— Avid Space (@LabPadre) September 8, 2026

Just watched a pretty good short starship documentary on my United flight. Not sure if it was something made specifically for United or if it's an available elsewhere.

Jock 07 said:

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Just watched a pretty good short starship documentary on my United flight. Not sure if it was something made specifically for United or if it's an available elsewhere.

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Was it one of these?

Yup, the second one.

The most beautiful nebula in my eyes, the Butterfly Nebula 🦋 pic.twitter.com/RzLYJoAO52

— The Astronomy Guy (@astrooalert) September 7, 2026