"An Outstanding Week for SpaceX": Starship, a Google satellite, and the ISS crew have reached orbit

Shares of Elon Musk's space company, SpaceX, rose 6.5% on Friday, October 2, after its rockets successfully launched a crew to the International Space Station and placed a Google satellite into orbit.

“What an outstanding week for SpaceX! We launched our entire fleet of spacecraft: Starship, Dragon, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy,” Senior Vice President John Edwards wrote on the social media platform X.

The company launched four astronauts as part of NASA's Crew-13 mission from the Space Force Station at Cape Canaveral in Florida. In addition, as part of the joint Transporter-18 mission for small satellites, SpaceX launched a prototype of Google’s Project Suncatcher spacecraft.

This experimental project aims to test whether artificial intelligence computations can be scaled up in space. Now that the satellite is in orbit, Google will investigate how its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) “withstand the physical stresses of spaceflight, as well as the extreme levels of radiation and temperature in space,” according to a blog post by the tech giant.

Also this week, SpaceX launched Starship—its largest and most powerful rocket—into low Earth orbit for the first time and deployed all 26 Starlink V3 satellites on board, despite the failure of one engine during the ascent. Starlink is SpaceX’s most important business, and a fully operational Starship is crucial to the company’s plans to expand network capacity and reduce the cost of launching each satellite into orbit, explains Yahoo Finance.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor