What's New

SpaceX is now targeting Starship's thirteenth flight test as early as Thursday, July 23, after the July 16 attempt aborted automatically when some Super Heavy Raptor engines did not start. Elon Musk stated two Raptors would be removed and replaced to be confident of a good flight. Flight 13 remains the first attempt to deploy 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites on Starship (~20 minutes of activation/connection tests before reentry), with Super Heavy boostback/landing objectives and ship heat-shield imaging.

SpaceX stood down from Starship's thirteenth flight test attempt at Starbase after a late hold during the countdown. The mission would have been the first attempt to deploy real next-generation Starlink V3 satellites on Starship (20 planned, with ~20 minutes of activation/connection tests before reentry). Official briefings detailed V3 capability: six 400-gigabit space lasers per satellite forming a petabit laser mesh, with Elon Musk stating Starlink V3 will increase space-based bandwidth by roughly two orders of magnitude. Flight will retarget after recovery.

xAI launched Automations on grok.com and in the Grok iOS/Android apps: describe a job once and Grok runs it on a schedule (once, daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly, yearly) or when an email matches filters. Each run opens a full conversation with run history; notifications via email and/or app. Scheduled automations are available to everyone; email triggers require SuperGrok. Creatable from chat or templates; connectors and skills supported.

xAI open-sourced Grok Build, its coding agent and terminal UI, at github.com/xai-org/grok-build. Published source covers the agent loop (context assembly, response parsing, tool dispatch), tools, TUI (rendering, plan review, inline diffs), and the extension system (skills, plugins, hooks, MCP servers, subagents). Supports fully local-first use: compile, point at local inference, configure via config.toml. Usage limits were also reset for all users at announcement.

Starlink unveiled its next-generation V5 home kit: smaller form factor, lighter weight, and greater power efficiency than V4, with speeds up to 375+ Mbps for streaming, video calling, and gaming. Currently available in select areas, with wider rollout as production ramps. Elon Musk publicly urged customers to order the V5 terminal.

The FAA closed its oversight of the SpaceX-led mishap investigation into Super Heavy return issues on Flight 12 (May 22), accepting findings and corrective actions. No reports of public injury or property damage. Clearance removes a key regulatory gate for Starship Flight 13, still targeting as early as July 16 from Starbase with V3 vehicles and the first functional Starlink V3 satellite payload.

SpaceX announced Starship's thirteenth flight test is preparing to launch as early as Thursday, July 16 (90-minute window opening 5:45 p.m. CT). Flight aims to complete objectives from Flight 12 (first V3 vehicles) while, for the first time, carrying next-generation Starlink V3 satellites: planned deployment of 20 satellites with solar arrays, antennas, and laser links; six camera-equipped sats to image the heat shield. Super Heavy V3 hardware/software upgrades address Flight 12 stage-separation flip and boostback re-light issues; ship propulsion changes address the prior engine-out. Objectives include boostback + landing burn offshore, in-space Raptor relight, and controlled Indian Ocean splashdown.

SpaceX conducted a full-duration static fire of all 33 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy V3 booster at Starbase, after moving the booster to the pad for testing ahead of Flight 13.

Booster B1067 flew its 36th mission, launching 29 Starlink satellites from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral. The first stage landed on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas, extending its record as the most-flown orbital-class booster.

xAI launched Grok 4.5, its smartest model for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, trained alongside Cursor on tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs. Served at ~80 tokens/s with roughly 2× token efficiency vs. leading peers; priced at $2/$6 per million input/output tokens. Default model in Grok Build; available in Cursor and the SpaceXAI API (model: grok-4.5). Strong results on real-world software-engineering benchmarks (DeepSWE, SWE Marathon, Terminal Bench).

xAI launched Voice Agent Builder in beta: a no-code platform for production voice agents on Grok Voice (telephony, knowledge retrieval, tools, guardrails, MCP, observability) at $0.05/min. On July 6, 21 new multilingual flagship voices joined the original five across the Voice Agent API, TTS API, and Builder.

Starship performed a full-duration single-engine static fire test at Starbase. The test exercised Raptor engine and vehicle systems on the ground ahead of the next integrated flight.

Falcon 9 launched 24 @Starlink satellites from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Successful deployment confirmed.

Falcon 9 launched the Starfall Demo mission from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral. The first Starfall reentry vehicle was deployed — a demonstrator designed for affordable, routine access to microgravity for scientific research and in-space manufacturing. The spacecraft will perform controlled flight and splash down in the Pacific. Booster B1078 flew its 29th mission and landed on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas.

Developers can now use Grok via SuperGrok and X subscriptions directly inside T3code, extending agentic coding workflows.

xAI introduced /goal for Grok Build, enabling long-running autonomous agent execution with live progress checklists. Supports teams of specialized agents (implementors, skeptics, code reviewers, planners) working toward user-defined goals. Grok also integrated with Interactive Brokers for portfolio research and analysis.

Falcon 9 launched 24 @Starlink satellites from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Deployment confirmed; mission part of sustained high-cadence constellation expansion.

Falcon 9 launched the @NRO_gov NROL-179 mission from pad 4E (SLC-4E) in California. First stage successfully landed on Landing Zone 4 at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Grok models are now available on Databricks Agent Bricks, allowing enterprises to bring the latest SpaceXAI models to their data for building capable AI agents.

xAI released Grok Imagine Video 1.5 broadly at grok.com/imagine, with an API for developers. The model took the top spot on the public Image-to-Video Arena leaderboard (a +52 Elo jump) and adds native synchronized audio. A new Fast mode roughly doubles generation speed — producing a 6-second 720p clip in about 25 seconds — and the rollout adds Projects to organize generations and the ability to run multiple prompts in parallel.

On its third straight up day, SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) rose about 4.8% to close near $201.80, lifting its market capitalization to roughly $2.65 trillion and pushing it past Amazon to become the fifth-most-valuable public company in the world. The stock has now climbed more than 50% across its first three trading sessions since pricing at $135.

xAI released the Agent Dashboard for Grok Build — a single-screen view to run many coding sessions in parallel, peek at output, reply inline, and dispatch new agents via `grok dashboard` or `/dashboard`. Separately, Grok and X Premium subscribers can now use Grok models (including grok-build-0.1) inside Warp, the agentic terminal IDE used by nearly one million developers.

Falcon 9 launched 24 Starlink satellites (Group 17-54) to low-Earth orbit from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base — SpaceX's first Falcon 9 mission since beginning public trading on Nasdaq (SPCX). Booster B1093 flew its 14th mission and landed on the droneship 'Of Course I Still Love You'. SpaceX confirmed successful satellite deployment; the mission also pushed SpaceX past its 1,500th Starlink satellite launched in 2026, underscoring the year's record deployment cadence.

On Monday — the first full trading session after Friday's debut — SpaceX shares (Nasdaq: SPCX) climbed another 20%, adding roughly $31 to close near $192.50. Volume was about 244 million shares. The stock had closed its debut Friday near $161 after pricing at $135.

SpaceXAI and eToro announced that Tori — eToro's investing AI agent for 40+ million registered users across 75 countries — now uses SpaceXAI text models to embed real-time market sentiment from X directly into its workflow, reading live signals as markets shift.

After pricing at $135, SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) opened at $150 and closed its first trading day up roughly 19% near $161, climbing above $166 in after-hours. The offering raised about $75 billion on more than 555 million shares — the largest IPO ever — putting SpaceX's first-day market capitalization above $2.1 trillion, among the most valuable listed companies in the world.

xAI completed training of Grok V9-Medium, a 1.5-trillion-parameter model — three times the 0.5T v8-small production model — with fine-tuning and reinforcement learning focused on software engineering. It was trained on large volumes of real-world developer-workflow (Cursor) data and deeply optimized for NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs; Musk said it is 'much better at coding.' Public release is expected in mid-June 2026, distinct from the larger Grok 5 still in training.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share and began trading under ticker SPCX. Official posts stated 'Teams are go for launch'. Elon Musk delivered remarks ahead of the debut, noting that SpaceX was founded to make life multiplanetary and has expanded that mission with Starlink and AI solutions, 'taking the fiction out of science fiction.'

Falcon 9 launched 24 Starlink satellites (Group 17-44) to low-Earth orbit from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The first stage successfully landed on the droneship 'Of Course I Still Love You'.

xAI launched the built-in Grok Build Plugin Marketplace in beta. Developers can browse, install, and update plugins directly from the terminal in Grok Build without leaving the environment. Initial plugins bundle skills, slash commands, agents, hooks, MCP servers, and LSPs for MongoDB (data exploration and vector search), Vercel (deployment and sandboxes), Sentry (error detection, stack trace analysis, and alerts), Cloudflare, and Chrome DevTools.

Booster B1067 (the fleet leader) flew its 35th mission, launching 29 Starlink satellites from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The first stage successfully landed on the droneship 'A Shortfall of Gravitas', setting a new record for the most flights and landings of any single orbital-class booster.

xAI released Grok Imagine 1.5 preview, Composer 2.5 (fast model excelling at long-running tasks, now in Grok Build), and Grok Voice powering Vapi for natural TTS/STT. Integrations announced with Cloudflare AI Gateway and Gopuff 'Go' AI shopping assistant (co-developed with SpaceXAI using Grok models).

Debut of Starship/Super Heavy V3 (Raptor 3 engines) from new Pad 2 at Starbase. 20 Starlink V3 simulators + 2 modified Starlink imagers deployed; 4K onboard video streamed via Starlink. Ship completed reentry, stress-test maneuvers, and splashdown on 2 engines in Indian Ocean. Booster performed partial boostback and hard splashdown in Gulf per test objectives.

Super Heavy booster caught by launch tower 'chopsticks' on first attempt – a major step toward rapid reusability.

xAI's Memphis cluster reaches initial 100k H100 GPUs in record time (122 days from groundbreaking), with rapid scaling roadmap toward hundreds of thousands of GPUs.

Flagship model trained on Colossus-scale compute delivers significant gains in reasoning, science, and math benchmarks.

Super Heavy booster successfully caught on return to launch site during IFT-8. Vehicle featured V3 upgrades including revised grid fins and catch points. Upper stage experienced anomaly after separation.

Grok 4 launched as the most capable model at the time, with native tool use, real-time search, and training on ~200k GPU Colossus cluster. Grok 4 Heavy introduces multi-agent system (multiple AIs collaborating on complex tasks).

Continued integrated flight tests (through at least Flight 12 by mid-2026) with repeated booster catches, V3 vehicle iterations, payload demonstrations, and engine/hot-staging refinements. Starlink V3 satellites planned for Starship deployment.

Hundreds of Direct-to-Cell satellites deployed. Service operational across multiple continents, providing 4G coverage to unmodified phones in remote areas. Video calling and texting demonstrated; major carrier partnerships advancing.

Additional buildings and power capacity added to the Memphis supercluster. Plans and early work for on-site solar generation to support growing GPU count toward hundreds of thousands.

Rapid releases including Grok 4.1/4.20/4.3 series, Grok Imagine image/video models, Grok Build coding tools on API, voice integrations, and Composer updates. Focus on reasoning, tool use, and developer access.

Continued emphasis on synergies: space provides abundant solar power and orbital real estate for AI compute at scales difficult on Earth; AI accelerates space systems autonomy, manufacturing, and scientific return.