United Airlines recently completed a successful test flight with Starlink Wi-Fi on an Embraer E-175 regional jet. The 90-minute round-trip flight took off from and landed back at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.
Starbase, Texas, is now officially its own city, a big moment connected to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. On May 3, 2025, people in what used to be called Boca Chica, a small South Texas community near the Mexican border, voted strongly to become Starbase. Out of 283 eligible voters, 212 said yes and only 6 said no—a formality since most residents are SpaceX workers or their families.
Photo credit: Andy Jassy
Amazon successfully launched 27 satellites today for its Project Kuiper, a plan to rival SpaceX’s Starlink. This event happened in Cape Canaveral, Florida, using a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, previously delayed from April 9 due to inclement weather.
The SpaceX Fram2 mission is a historic private astronaut flight that lifted off at 9:46 PM EDT from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This mission marks the first time humans have embarked on a crewed spaceflight over Earth’s poles, flying in a polar orbit at an altitude of approximately 425-450 kilometers (249-264 miles).
A SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying the four astronauts of NASA’s Crew-10 mission successfully docked with the ISS at 12:04 am ET while the spacecraft were flying approximately 260 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. The capsule, named Endurance, autonomously docked to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module.
SpaceX Crew-10, consisting of mission commander Anne McClain, mission pilot Nichole Ayers, and mission specialists Takuya Onishi of JAXA as well as Kirill Peskov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex-39A at 7:03 p.m. EDT on a Falcon 9 rocket.
United Airlines announced today that it has installed SpaceX’s Starlink on its first regional aircraft and their plans to outfit over 40 regional aircraft each month beginning in May through the end of 2025. It only takes about 8 hours for installation, excluding any de-installation of existing equipment, testing or aircraft modification, which is approximately 10 times faster than installing non-Starlink equipment.
The T-Mobile Starlink beta is now free for all users with compatible devices across most major US carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, until July. This service uses special satellites designed for Direct-to-Cell capabilities as they orbit the Earth 200+ miles up in space and travel at over 17,000 miles per hour to deliver cell phone signals.
Apple’s iOS 18.3 update adds Starlink Direct to Cell support, which means those in the beta program can now stay connected with texting via satellite from virtually anywhere, even areas with no service. You read that right, Direct to Cell is limited to just texting for now, but T-Mobile plans on working with SpaceX to support data and voice in the future.
