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SpaceX isn't a launch company anymore.

SpaceX is famous for launching, and landing, its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and sending astronauts to space aboard its Dragon crew capsule. Recently, however, the company has been transitioning into an artificial intelligence (AI) outfit — and that journey is now mostly complete.

"Our AI revenue will exceed all other SpaceX revenue probably in September — like, next month — and will significantly exceed all other SpaceX revenue in in the fourth quarter," company founder and CEO Elon Musk said during an address to employees that the company posted on X today (Aug. 11). "So, AI has become an extremely important part of SpaceX's future."

Illustration of an electromagnetic mass driver on the moon, which SpaceX plans to use to launch AI satellites into space. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Earlier this year, SpaceX bought xAI, a startup that Musk founded in 2023. xAI created the chatbot Grok and also operates a powerful supercomputer cluster in Tennessee called Colossus.

But that was just the beginning. Musk laid out just how deeply SpaceX is diving into AI during his 29-minute talk, which came a week after SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call as a public company.

"Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX; I'd say five years for sure," Musk said. "And the value of SpaceX will be some astronomical number."

Astronomical is right. According to Musk, the company aims to get 10 gigawatts of AI compute up and running by the end of next year. That's a big jump from its current 1.4 GW, which SpaceX sells to tech companies and AI labs.

"The value per watt is probably going to be 30 to $50, which means if we bring 10 gigawatts of AI online by the end of next year, it will be 300 to $500 billion a year in revenue," he said. "Big numbers."

And those numbers will get even bigger over time, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX just announced plans to build a gigantic complex in Texas called Terafab, a joint operation with Tesla that will manufacture advanced semiconductor chips for a wide range of applications. And the company aims to launch a million of its "Starmind" AI satellites to low Earth orbit in the coming years using its fully reusable Starship megarocket, which is still in development.

Over the longer haul, the company plans to establish factories on the moon that will build these off-Earth data centers. The satellites will be launched into space from the lunar surface via electromagnetic mass drivers — basically, high-powered rail guns.

SpaceX envisions Starmind and its other AI efforts as returning almost unimaginable profits down the road. For example, in paperwork the company filed just before its record-breaking IPO, SpaceX identified an eventual "total addressable market" of $28.5 trillion, nearly $23 trillion of it in the AI field.

For some perspective: The gross domestic product of the entire United States last year was about $30.8 trillion.

"The future is fundamentally AI and robots," Musk said during his address to employees. "Assuming civilization continues to progress, I think that AI will probably — the amount of digital intelligence will probably be more than a trillion times the amount of biological intelligence."

He also said he's not just in this for the money.

"It's important that we have an AI that cares about humanity, that fosters humanity and helps take us to other planets and other star systems," Musk said.

"This is why I think it's essential that SpaceX succeed not just with AI hardware but also with AI software," he added. "I think an AI that is sort of SpaceX's baby will be a very good AI. I think SpaceX is a collection of some of the very best humans on Earth, both in capability and morality and goodness."

He urged SpaceX employees to aid the company's AI efforts in any way that they can, stressing that success could lead to some amazing vacations.

"One of the nice benefits of this also is that anyone at SpaceX who wants to go to the moon or Mars will be able to go in the future," he said. "You have my word."

Editor’s note: The original headline of this story read “in 2027,” which was incorrect, given that SpaceX aims to get 10 GW online by the end of that year. It was corrected at 8:20 p.m. ET on Aug. 11.

Astronomers have released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever created, offering a sweeping new view of nearly 4 billion celestial objects across roughly three-quarters of the sky.

The new map, created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys team, contains a staggering 5.6 trillion pixels and combines more than 263,000 telescope exposures collected over more than a decade. The observations span visible and near-infrared wavelengths, providing an enormous portrait of stars, galaxies and other cosmic phenomena across the sky, according to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab. (You can explore the full data here.)

"It's part of the fabric of astronomy research now," David Schlegel, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said in the statement. "When you're working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you're looking at."

The latest 2D cosmic map represents the culmination of 13 years of observations and data processing. The Legacy Imaging Surveys were originally designed to help DESI determine where to point its thousands of robotic optical fibers, essentially creating the 2D foundation for DESI's much larger effort to map the universe in three dimensions.

Installed on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, DESI measures the spectra of galaxies and quasars. By determining their redshifts — how much their light has been stretched as the universe expands — astronomers can calculate their distances and transform a flat view of the sky into a 3D map of the cosmos.

DESI began its main survey in 2021 with the goal of tracing how the universe has expanded over billions of years and, in turn, helping scientists better understand dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon thought to be driving that expansion.

The project has since far surpassed its original targets. By April 2026, DESI had mapped more than 47 million galaxies and quasars, creating the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe to date. Previous DESI results have also provided intriguing evidence that dark energy may evolve over time rather than remain constant, as predicted by the standard model of cosmology.

Among the nearly four billion objects in the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys' map is Messier 96 (NGC 3368), a majestic spiral galaxy nestled in the constellation Leo approximately 35 million light-years from Earth.  (Image credit: DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE & KPNO/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA)

DESI isn't the only project finding new ways to map the cosmos. Earlier this year, astronomers with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) created a different kind of 3D map using faint Lyman-alpha emission from hydrogen between galaxies. That effort illuminated previously hidden structures dating to between 9 billion and 11 billion years ago, when the universe was experiencing a peak in star formation.

The new Legacy Imaging Surveys map, meanwhile, will have uses well beyond DESI. Previous versions of the dataset have already been referenced in more than 1,800 scientific papers, while the latest release could help astronomers search for rare objects and phenomena, study galaxy evolution and train artificial intelligence systems to analyze the enormous volumes of data expected from next-generation observatories.

"Explorations of our universe always start with images of the night sky. The DESI Imaging Legacy Surveys are just one step in this venerable human tradition," Arjun Dey, co-lead of the Legacy Imaging Surveys and an astronomer at NSF NOIRLab, said in the statement. "For our team, these data are fundamental to the investigation of the expansion history of the universe and the formation of our galaxy. But the skies belong to everyone, and this survey gives everyone the chance to marvel at their wonders."

Astronomers have nearly doubled the number of known cosmic X-ray sources, offering the most comprehensive public view yet of the universe's hottest and most energetic objects.

The second major public data release from the German-led eROSITA X-ray telescope contains a catalog of nearly 2 million X-ray-emitting objects, including supermassive black holes, galaxy clusters, stars and other extreme cosmic phenomena. The unprecedented dataset — called DR2 — will help astronomers investigate how black holes grow, galaxies evolve and the universe's largest structures formed, according to a statement from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

"DR2 is the best inventory of the X-ray sky we have to date and opens the door to robust statistical studies of cosmic populations," Miriam E. Ramos-Ceja, Ground Segment Manager of the eROSITA instrument and lead author of the DR2 publication said in the statement.

The new release combines observations collected during eROSITA's first three all-sky scans over 556 days, allowing astronomers to detect increasingly faint X-ray sources that previous surveys missed.

Of the nearly 2 million detections, more than 1.9 million are point-like sources, most of them active supermassive black holes feeding at the centers of distant galaxies or stars within the Milky Way. These black holes offer astronomers a window into how galaxies grow and evolve over cosmic time, while the stellar sources help researchers better understand everything from stellar activity to the life cycles of stars.

Another roughly 64,000 sources are extended objects, including massive galaxy clusters, nearby galaxies and the glowing remnants of exploded stars (also known as supernovas). Galaxy clusters are especially valuable because they trace the universe's largest structures, helping scientists investigate the influence of dark matter and dark energy on the evolution of the cosmos.

Unlike visible light, X-rays reveal some of the universe's most energetic environments. Material spiraling toward a black hole can be heated to millions of degrees before crossing the event horizon, while neutron stars, supernova remnants and the enormous reservoirs of hot gas filling galaxy clusters also emit strongly in X-rays.

The size of the catalog gives astronomers a powerful new dataset for studying the high-energy universe. With nearly 2 million sources observed under the same conditions, astronomers can study how supermassive black holes have grown over billions of years, map the distribution of galaxy clusters to better understand the large-scale structure of the universe, and search for rare or unusual objects that may otherwise have gone unnoticed. Large, uniform surveys also make it easier to compare different classes of objects and identify long-term trends that smaller observations cannot reveal.

A full version of the western X-ray sky from eROSITA. (Image credit: MPE, J. Sanders)

This animation shows a representation of the active galactic nuclei (AGN) identified in the DR2 catalogue. Each dot shows a single object, where the distance from the three-dimensional center increases with the source's redshift, or how far away it is from us.  (Image credit: MPE/J. Sanders)

The release also includes optical and infrared counterparts for many of the X-ray sources, helping astronomers determine whether each object is a nearby star, a distant galaxy, an active supermassive black hole or another type of high-energy phenomenon. In the portion of the catalog where counterparts have been identified, about 88% are distant galaxies hosting actively feeding supermassive black holes, according to the statement.

"X-ray detection is only the first step," Mara Salvato, eROSITA spokesperson and chair of the follow-up working group, said in the statement. "By linking X-ray sources to their counterparts at other wavelengths, we can work out what these objects are, where they sit on the cosmic distance ladder, and build clean, well-defined samples on an unprecedented scale."

Although eROSITA stopped collecting scientific observations in early 2022, the mission completed enough sky scans beforehand to support additional public data releases. Researchers say the next Data Release 3 (DR3) is planned for 2028.

The eROSITA-DE DR2 catalogue is available to view online.

Season 4 of Paramount+'s "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is off to a roaring start with episodes already airing centered around primeval dinosaurs, a haunted starship, and a hedonistic pleasure planet.

This week's chapter, titled "A Case of Chiaroscuro", airs on Aug. 13 and takes another bold swing, featuring a wartime film noir-style tale with tense galactic politics at its core.

We connected with three of "Strange New Worlds'" brightest stars — Anson Mount (Captain Christopher Pike), Rebecca Romijn (Lt. Cmdr Una Chin-Riley), and Carol Kane (Commander Pelia) — to hear about this penultimate season's boundary-pushing vision delivered by executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, and learn more about that Muppet episode called “Level-Five Transporter Accident” that's coming later this month on Aug. 20.

A scene from "Strange New Worlds"' season 4, "The Griffin Incident" (Image credit: Paramount)

"We're all in agreement that season 4 and season 5 are the strongest seasons of the whole series," Romijn tells Space. "I think the producers had more time to prepare for season 4, and every episode felt incredible on the page. Every episode felt like a really fun challenge. We just had a blast.

"The writers think so outside the box, and I can't believe they come up with the things they come up with," continues Romijn. "Every time a writer asks, 'What haven’t you done that you’d like to do?' I can't even think as outside the box as our writers. I leave it up to them."

Mount echoes those sentiments and finds the sci-fi series to be fully engaged.

"It just feels like the bolts were tight," Mount adds. "We've built this incredible machine and we were able to take bigger leaps and have more fun. Even curve balls that came in season 1 and season 2. I grew tired of going to Akiva and Henry and saying, 'Are you sure about this?' And then those ended up being the episodes that really pop. So I stopped asking questions and trusted them. Also, I think the sense of consequence was heightened at the same time."

Carol Kane as Commander Pelia in "Strange New Worlds" season 4 (Image credit: Paramount+)

Even though Carol Kane's ancient Lanthanite character, Pelia, didn't arrive until the second season, even she senses a major shift in the show's momentum.

"I feel like as we went on people were more and more willing to take risks at every level, from the writing to the acting to the cinematography to the directing and the wardrobe," Kane notes. "It was like, what the hell. Let's roll them dice. I feel that was a wonderful freedom."

As fans eagerly anticipate the Muppet episode (they won’t be disappointed!), the trio all admitted that the Pelia puppet with its wild tangle of blonde hair was the one most of the cast wanted to take home with them.

Sadly, none of the actors were allowed to actually keep their Muppets, though if folks saw the price tag on those puppets they’d quickly understand why.

"We were already working on another episode," Mount explains when the surreal time arrived to record their particular puppets' dialogue. "It was really wild going into the recording booth and trying to do an interpretation of someone else’s interpretation of your character."

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 4 is now streaming on Paramount+.

A newly found Mars meteorite is revealing the secrets of a previously hidden time period of Red Planet geological history.

The 1.27-billion-year-old space rock, called Northwest Africa (NWA) 13441, was discovered in Algeria in 2019 — but its age was not confirmed until recently. Now scientists say the meteorite helps answer questions about a huge gap in the Martian geologic record: a span of time between 600 million years ago and 2.4 billion years ago.

This vast timespan has no known examples of meteorites containing igneous (solid magma) shergottites, which are the most abundant type of Martian meteorites, chunks of the Red Planet that were blasted away by impacts, ejected into space and eventually fell to Earth. The only meteorites known from this time range, roughly 1.3 billion to 1.4 billion years ago, are rarer types known as chassignites and nahklites. As such, the newly analyzed meteorite is opening new insights already about this time period.

"The characteristics of this meteorite were entirely surprising," stated Boston College Earth and environmental sciences professor Ethan Baxter, co-author of a study published Aug. 1 in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. "No other Martian meteorite like this has an age of 1.27 billion years old."

NWA 13441 was surprising to researchers in two ways. The first was its composition — while it is a shergottite, the space rock also contains isotopes (element types) of a rare-Earth metal called neodymium. Neodymium is usually found in chrondrites — another kind of meteorite made up of unmelted rocks — and chondrites were common in the solar system when it was formed 4.56 billion years ago.

This blended composition of shergottite and chrondrite suggests deeper parts of Mars have remained relatively untouched since the planet was formed, Baxter stated. That finding aligns with what scientists already know about Mars, which likely formed only five million years after the solar system was formed. (Mars also has no plate tectonics, making it different from Earth and which allows the earliest bits of it to remain undisturbed by the types of geologic processes that take place on our planet.)

A different Mars meteorite found in Northwest Africa, known as 7635. It is a shergottite believed to be around 2.5 billion years old. (Image credit: Mohammed Hmani)

Peering deeper at the chondrites added a second surprise: the composition of the isotopes, or element types, are helping establish "new boundaries on the processes that happened in the very early solar system as Mars formed," the authors stated. The paper's abstract added this information suggests the meteorite may have come from a "previously unsampled" reservoir on the Red Planet lying between "enriched and depleted shergottite sources."

Scientists hope that more analysis of this meteorite will reveal "magmatic and volcanic activity on Mars," Seal said in the same statement. Next up will be looking at the meteorite's isotopes to figure out its connection to other meteorites formed early in Martian history.