橙子Joyce

SpaceX（Nasdaq: SPCX） plans to launch 29 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral on Monday using a Falcon 9 rocket booster that has previously flown 17 missions.

The launch is scheduled for 10:49 a.m. Eastern Time. If all goes well, the B1085 booster will land about eight minutes later on the company’s unmanned recovery ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Per SpaceX’s standards, the 18th flight is routine operations. Another booster, B1067, just completed a record 36th flight last month.

This kind of routinization is the foundation of SpaceX’s commercial model. By reusing rockets instead of discarding them after a single use, the company can carry out launches more frequently while reducing the cost of each mission.

NASA proved reuse is feasible, but it did not achieve low cost or rapid turnaround.

Reusable spacecraft are not a new concept.

NASA’s Space Shuttles and their solid rocket boosters repeatedly flew missions over three decades, with the Space Shuttle Endeavour completing 39 missions on its own—more than any Falcon 9 booster has flown so far.

The problem was that shuttle maintenance was always expensive and took a long time.

NASA initially envisioned a turnaround time of two weeks, but it was never achieved in fewer than 55 days, and a later NASA analysis estimated the cost per launch at about $1.5 billion. Today, the cost of a single Falcon 9 launch is about $74 million.

Flight-proven hardware is now the norm.

In recent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SpaceX said it has completed about 650 orbital launches, with more than 540 using flight-proven Falcon rockets. For years, building brand-new boosters for each mission has long ceased to be the company’s standard operating model.

The result is a launch cadence unmatched. The Starlink mission launched from California on Saturday was the 92nd flight of the Falcon 9 in 2026, and Monday’s mission will be the 93rd. By comparison, Europe has conducted only 334 space launches in total since 1970.

Kalshi traders predict SpaceX will complete 156 launches this year.

China is now trying to land SpaceX’s rockets, which it has already been reusing.

On August 8, according to Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter, Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 25-year-old Wall Street rising AI “stock god” and a former OpenAI researcher, returned to the investment stage just days after his hedge fund was on the verge of collapse. He splashed out $400 million to back a privately held company supported by Sequoia Capital. The latest disclosure today is that the private company is Source Foundry, a chip-manufacturing startup. The fund previously invested $100 million in Source Foundry; after adding another $400 million, its total investment in Source Foundry reaches $500 million.

The investment, completed on Tuesday, is the first sign of how Leopold is putting the pieces back together after his Situational Awareness fund nearly fell apart last week when many Wall Street lenders issued intensive margin calls.

Source Foundry is a stealthy chip-manufacturing startup founded in 2025 in San Francisco by Stanford materials scientists Abdulmalik Obaid (CEO) and Joe Burg. Focusing on developing simpler, lower-cost, and faster semiconductor lithography, manufacturing processes, and tools, it aims to challenge ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines—addressing the enormous gap between the exponential growth in AI computing demand and the linear expansion of traditional chip production capacity—thereby reshaping how advanced AI chips are produced.