Elon Musk officially announced today the formation of X.AI, an artificial intelligence company that will attempt to understand the true nature of the universe and reality. This company, separate from Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX, aims to make use of innovative techniques as well as analyses including Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope from Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida at 17:12 CEST on July 1. This mission aims to study the dark universe, or more specifically dark matter and dark energy. To date, researchers have not yet been able to detect either of them directly, only inferring their presence from the effects they have on the universe at large.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched the Ax-2 mission from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The private astronaut crew includes Commander Peggy Whitson, Pilot John Shoffner, and Mission Specialists Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi from the Saudi Space Commission (SSC).
Blue Origin has been selected as the second NASA Artemis lunar lander provider and the $3.4-billion contract includes a crewed demonstration mission to the Moon’s surface in 2029. When the Artemis V mission launches, NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket will transport four astronauts to lunar orbit aboard the Orion spacecraft.
SpaceX has teamed up with Vast to launch Haven-1, the world’s first commercial space station, on a Falcon 9 rocket to low-Earth orbit by August 2025. The launch will be promptly followed by Vast-1, the first human spaceflight mission to Haven-1 on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft where a four-person crew will dock with the space station for up to 30 days while orbiting Earth.
The SpaceX Starship launch went off as planned, but minutes later, it exploded at approximately 8:33 a.m. local time. Approximately at just over three minutes into flight near the Gulf of Mexico, the first stage Super Heavy booster and second Stage starship vehicle were not able to separate as planned.
Watch out SpaceX, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) rocket successfully completed a vertical landing test at sea in in Haiyang, East China’s Shandong Province. The prototype managed to fly at an altitude of over 1,000 meters (3,281 feet) before descending into a smooth hover. It then decelerated using engine reverse thrust and touched down steadily with a landing precision of under 10 meters (33 feet).
AstroLab is set to launch its FLEX Rover on the upcoming SpaceX Moon mission aboard Starship as soon as mid-2026. The Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover has a maximum combined rover and cargo mass of over two tons, while being nearly three times the mass of its largest predecessor.