Launch vehicles
Rockets designed to carry payloads from Earth's surface into orbit or beyond, overcoming gravity and atmospheric drag through staged combustion.
A launch vehicle is a rocket that accelerates a payload to orbital velocity — roughly 7.8 km/s at low Earth orbit — fast enough that the curve of its fall matches the curve of the Earth. The hard part is the tyranny of the rocket equation: propellant must itself be lifted, so fuel mass compounds exponentially with velocity target. Staging discards empty tanks mid-flight to shed dead weight. Most orbital rockets are expendable; reusability is the central cost lever, since hardware is expensive and propellant is cheap. Engine reliability and performance (specific impulse, thrust-to-weight) directly determine what a vehicle can lift and at what cost per kilogram.
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The $1.75 trillion ask
SpaceX's IPO prospectus seeks the largest raise in history — about $75 billion at a valuation north of $1.75 trillion — priced at roughly 94 times revenue on a company still losing billions a year.
Starship's new engines fly
Starship's third-generation vehicle flew for the first time on May 22, lofting 44 tonnes of dummy satellites on the maiden flight of the Raptor 3 engine — then its booster failed the burn home and crashed into the sea.
The data center that left Earth
Starcloud put a single Nvidia H100 in orbit, trained a small language model on it in space, and is now raising money to fly 88,000 more.
The $4-billion launch Congress wouldn't kill
The White House budget called the Moon rocket SLS 'grossly expensive' at $4 billion a flight and moved to cancel it; Congress refused, and the rocket it tried to kill still launches the next crew to lunar orbit.
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