#SpaceX denied fast index entry by S&P 500. S&P Global said on Thursday it was not changing the requirements for entry into its major indices, dealing a setback to Elon Musk’s SpaceX by effectively ruling out a swift entry for the world’s biggest-ever IPO into the benchmark S&P 500 index.

Musk has rewritten the IPO playbook for ⁠SpaceX in many ways from planning to give retail investors a bigger role in allocations to pushing for early index inclusion, and structuring governance to preserve strong founder ​control.

The company is raising US$75 billion and targeting a $1.75-trillion valuation that would place it among the top 10 most valuable U.S.-listed firms, even as only a fraction of its shares are available for trading.

But S&P said “exceptions to the financial viability, seasoning, and IWF (investable weight factor) requirements should not be granted solely based on market capitalization.”

To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged.

SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025, even as revenue rose 33 per cent to $18.67 billion.

Investor consultations

S&P had consulted with investors about shortening the time a megacap company must be publicly listed before joining its indexes, waiving minimum float requirements and removing its profitability requirement.

The S&P 500 is Wall Street’s most widely followed benchmark. Passive S&P 500 index funds with trillions of dollars in assets would have been forced to buy up SpaceX shares had rules been changed to admit it to the index.

“It speaks highly of the credibility of S&P Dow Jones Indices to be rules-based and make sure there’s profitability before entrance to the index,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth.

“Making exceptions because companies are so large and have been private so long yet are still not profitable, didn’t make a great deal of sense.”

Nasdaq has already made changes that will make it easier for SpaceX, Anthropic and other newly listed megacaps to join its Nasdaq 100 index.

Nasdaq 100 index funds will be forced to buy a sizeable portion of publicly available SpaceX shares when the company joins that index.

Exchange operators have ramped up efforts to boost initial public listings as richly valued technology firms such as SpaceX and AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI edge closer to public offerings, amid growing concerns over a steady decline in the number of U.S.-listed companies.

S&P Global said it would modify entry rules for its broader S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Index, creating a pathway for SpaceX to join those less widely followed indexes.

SpaceX has also already become eligible for inclusion in both the Russell U.S. Equity Indexes and the FTSE Global Equity Index Series under the newly announced fast-entry rules from the index provider FTSE Russell.

Noel Randewich, Pritam Biswas and Shivansh Tiwary, Reuters

#NASA declares its Mars Maven spacecraft dead after six months of silence. The space agency confirmed Wednesday that the mission had ended after more than a decade of observations.

Launched in 2013 to study the red planet’s atmosphere from orbit, Maven mysteriously fell silent in early December after passing behind Mars. Data indicated the spacecraft went into a fast spin, which disrupted its orbit and drained the onboard batteries.

A review board convened by NASA earlier this year concluded that the spacecraft is useless and unable to be recovered. An investigation continues into what caused the problem.

Besides studying Martian weather and observing a stray interstellar comet last year, Maven helped relay information from NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on the surface.

Maven’s lead scientist, Shannon Curry of the University of Colorado Boulder, said the spacecraft made a number of “amazing discoveries.”

Maven “has truly advanced our understanding of the Martian atmosphere and evolution,” she said in a statement.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

#China's #Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew returns to Earth

Blue Origin’s New Glenn #rocket exploded in a massive fireball while undergoing a test on a Florida launchpad Thursday evening, according to video footage taken of the event.

#NASA lays out moon base plans with landers, buggies and drones at the top of the list. The space agency outlined the first phase of its moon base plans on Tuesday, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four U.S. companies.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will provide a pair of landers to deliver moon buggies to the lunar surface, at a spot near the moon’s south pole. These so-called lunar terrain vehicles will be built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost. Firefly Aerospace, which landed successfully on the moon last year, will deliver the first drones to the moon.

All this hardware is ideally supposed to arrive before the first Artemis astronauts land on the moon, planned for as early as 2028.

During April’s Artemis II mission, four astronauts flew around the moon, traveling deeper into space than the Apollo moon crews did during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For next year’s Artemis III, another team of astronauts will practice docking NASA’s Orion capsule in orbit around Earth with the lunar landers being developed for crews by Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

NASA is targeting Artemis III for mid-2027, with a landing by two astronauts following as soon as 2028. The moon base’s second phase, from 2029 into the early 2030s, will start building up the permanent infrastructure, including a power grid. As for when the base will be ready to support astronauts for extended periods in specialized permanent habitats, that’s expected sometime in the 2030s, during the third phase.

“Then we’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, we’re permanently here and we’re not giving it up,’” said NASA’s moon base program executive Carlos Garcia-Galan.

Garcia-Galan envisions a moon base sprawling over hundreds of square miles, with a perimeter marked by drones, dubbed MoonFall, stationed at the corners.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said these territory markers are meant to be respectful of other countries’ spacecraft and equipment that might be nearby. He expects reciprocity in the matter.

The goal of the moon base is to encourage a lunar economy while conducting scientific research and laying the foundation for a Mars expedition, Isaacman stressed.

“For those waiting patiently, the grand return is close at hand and we will not slow down,” Isaacman said. “We are really just getting started.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

The #internet was ‘too expensive’ too . Every new infrastructure platform can look uneconomic at first. Early systems are often bespoke, supply chains immature and scaling doesn’t yet exist. The result: cost structures can appear daunting, if not irrational, when judged by the standards of those more traditional models.

#WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force plans to add 2,800 active-duty personnel and 2,000 civilian employees in fiscal year 2027 as it looks to nearly double the size of the service by the end of the decade, the service’s top officer told lawmakers this week.

Gen. Chance #Saltzman, chief of space operations, said the personnel increase is intended to put the service on a path from roughly 10,000 active-duty Guardians today to about 20,000 by 2030.

The expansion comes as the #Pentagon sharply increases spending on military space programs, including missile defense satellites, launch systems, cyber protection and communications networks.

During Department of the Air Force posture hearings this week before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, lawmakers broadly backed the Space Force’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget of about $71 billion, more than double the enacted 2026 level. Some legislators questioned whether the personnel buildup could move even faster.

Saltzman said the service’s growth rate is constrained by training capacity and the pace at which new operational units can be established.

“We can’t bring them all on at once, because our training pipeline has to be able to support that, and quite frankly, the squadrons that we need to stand up aren’t ready yet,” Saltzman told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“So it’s about synchronizing it all over the next four or five years,” he said.

Despite taking on responsibilities including missile warning, satellite operations, launch oversight and space domain awareness — the monitoring of objects and threats in orbit — the service has remained comparatively small.

Saltzman said growing mission demands are now forcing the service to expand more rapidly.

“The new missions that have been given to the Space Force are going to require something on the order of about 40 new squadrons,” he said. “That represents an increase of about 2800 guardians and another 2,000 civilians, just to do the work of the new missions being added to address threats and continue to provide the support to the joint force.”

Many of the new positions are expected to focus on technical specialties including cyber operations, engineering, intelligence, acquisitions and satellite operations.

Saltzman also tied the increase to the Space Force’s growing emphasis on “space control,” a term used to describe protecting U.S. satellites and countering adversary systems if necessary. The Pentagon’s 2027 budget proposal includes large increases for missile-tracking satellite networks, military communications systems and launch infrastructure.

He said procurement growth alone would require the creation of 10 additional program offices to oversee acquisitions and deliver new systems into operation.

The civilian hiring push comes after the service lost nearly 14% of its civilian workforce in 2025 during Pentagon-wide personnel reductions tied to the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, initiative. Space Force officials said roughly 780 civilian employees departed, affecting areas including acquisitions and contracting where the military relies heavily on technical civilian expertise.

To compete for specialized talent, the Space Force is also considering broader use of “direct commissioning” authorities, which would allow experienced cyber and technical professionals to enter military service at higher officer ranks rather than beginning at entry-level positions — similarly to how physicians enter the military medical corps as captains, majors or lieutenant colonels.

“Cyber is critical,” he said. “In fact, it’s indistinguishable from space operations. If you can’t control the networks that distribute the data, you can’t do the space missions.”

The service is expanding internal training pipelines while also recruiting from the private sector, Saltzman said.

“So if you join the Space Force, and you have cyber credibility … we might bring you in as a captain or a major.”

#SpaceX delayed a critical test of its massive Starship rocket on Thursday after troubleshooting various problems just before liftoff. Ground equipment problem scrubs #Starship launch attempt

#SpaceX reveals plans for what could be the biggest-ever initial public offering. NEW YORK — Elon Musk announced plans Wednesday for one of the biggest stock sales ever by taking public a space company that is currently losing billions of dollars year.

A filing shows that his SpaceX lost US$2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year, too.

The prospectus did not put a dollar figure on the amount Musk hopes to raise, but various reports have put it at $75 billion or so. An offering of that size would easily surpass the current title holder, Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that went public seven years ago and raised $26 billion.

SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has said the money will help finance projects to put people on the moon and Mars in its quest to make humans an intergalactic species as they face existential threats that could wipe out civilization.

“We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs,” the filing states.

The prospectus reads in part like a Hollywood fantasy version of the future, detailing in one section how part of Musk’s compensation will be granted only if he maintains “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”

Short of that, the stock sale alone could make Musk, a major owner who founded SpaceX in 2002, the world’s first trillionaire. Forbes currently puts his net worth at $839 billion.

In addition to making reusable rockets to hurl astronauts into orbit, SpaceX has other businesses, some successful, some struggling — and with plenty of questions marks.

The document shows that Starlink, the world’s largest satellite communications company, is a big source of cash for the company, generating $4.4 billion in operating income last year. The business uses 10,000 satellites in low orbit to provide internet service to 10 million people in 150 countries and territories.

Among the struggling businesses are two Musk units that were recently acquired by SpaceX — his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and his artificial intelligence business, xAI. Those purchases were blasted by some SpaceX investors as bailouts because they are big money losers.

An #asteroid discovered days ago will narrowly miss Earth. An asteroid roughly the size of one to two school buses will fly by Earth Monday, coming as close as 91,593 kilometres (56,913 miles), according to the European Space Agency — equivalent to about one quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon.

Astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Tucson, Arizona, discovered the asteroid on May 10 and named it 2026JH2. The object belongs to a class of asteroids called Apollo, which orbit the sun on trajectories that intersect with Earth’s own orbit around the sun.

At its closest pass, 2026JH2 will be about 24 per cent of the average distance between Earth and the moon, and about two and a half times the distance at which hundreds of geosynchronous satellites orbit, providing services such as telecommunications and weather forecasts. The close pass is expected to occur on Monday just before 6 p.m. ET, according to NASA’s JPL Small-Body Database.

Despite the proximity, the space rock poses no danger, according to Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the inventor of the Torino Scale, a tool for categorizing potential collisions of space objects with Earth.

“2026JH2 will pass safely by the Earth,” he said in an email. “This is actually a rather normal occurrence, car-sized objects pass between the Earth and the Moon every week. At the size of a school bus, these pass through our neighbourhood several times per year. We are only recently developing surveys that are sensitive enough to see them,” he added, noting that before these surveys, objects of this kind would simply zoom by completely unnoticed.
Exact size unknown

The asteroid originates from the asteroid belt, an area between Mars and Jupiter, Binzel explained. “Occasional collisions in the asteroid belt, plus gravitational tugs by Jupiter, can send small asteroids into Earth’s vicinity. This fact has been known for many decades and many thousands of asteroids that can pass near the Earth are already known.”

Even though astronomers have directly observed the object hurtling toward Earth, its exact size is unknown. The uncertainty is due to the fact that when an optical telescope sees a new object, the only information it gathers is the object’s luminosity in visible light. There is no way to know how much light the object absorbs or reflects, according to Patrick Michel, an astrophysicist and director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France.

“Thus, at the same luminosity, an object can be bigger and darker, or smaller and more reflective,” he said in an email. “To know the size, we would need observations in the infrared, because the luminosity in the infrared is directly proportional to the size. But such observations are more difficult to do from the Earth and are not used to discover new objects.”

Based on assumptions about how much light is reflected, 2026JH2 is currently estimated to be between 15 and 30 metres (50 and 100 feet) in diametre. At the smaller end of that range, Michel said, it would be similar in size to a bolide, or fireball, that exploded in the atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, shattering windows and injuring 1,000 people. At the highest end of the range, it would be closer in size to an object that exploded near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia in 1908, which pulverized large swaths of forest. Unlike both of these objects, however, 2026JH2 will not even enter the atmosphere, so there is no risk it will explode.

Although the distance at which the asteroid will pass seems very close, it is still “far enough that there is absolutely nothing to worry about,” Michel said. But he noted that predicting 2026JH2’s future trajectory is difficult, and we can’t rule out that it might eventually be on a collision course with Earth. “The good news is that so far, no asteroid that we know of poses a risk for the timescale of our predictions, which is about a century on average,” he added.
Waiting for Apophis

An object at least 10 times bigger than 2026JH2, called Apophis, will pass much closer to Earth, at a projected 32,000 kilometres (20,000 miles), on April 13, 2029, “Yet, we are not worried at all, and on the contrary very excited,” Michel said. “Such a close approach of such a big object occurs only once in a few thousands of years and its light will even be visible with the naked eye in the night sky across Europe, Africa and part of the middle East.”

By contrast, during its closest approach, 2026JH2 will only be detectable with small telescopes at dark sites, but it will remain 100 times too faint to be seen by the human eye, according to Jean-Luc Margot, a professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Part of the reason we don’t have more detailed information about the asteroid, he added in an email, is that our planetary radar capabilities are currently degraded. “The Arecibo telescope collapsed in 2020 and NASA’s Goldstone antenna is down for major repairs for an extended period of time. Without radar data, we are less capable of assessing the impact risk and we are more vulnerable to the impact hazard.”

A partial livestream of the close pass will be provided by the Virtual Telescope Project using telescopes in Italy, starting at 3:45 p.m. ET, and lasting until the object is no longer visible from that location.

So far, astronomers have observed only about 1 per cent of the near-Earth asteroids in the same size range as 2026JH2, Margot said, and therefore “it’s not surprising that this object was discovered only a few days before its closest approach to Earth, when it became bright enough to be picked up by asteroid detection surveys.”

He added that it’s concerning that we do not have complete knowledge about the population of near-Earth objects but noted that space agencies are now actively funding discovery surveys to improve our inventory of potentially hazardous asteroids.

Jacopo Prisco, CNN