NASA Landing!

Yesterday marked the 8th successful landing of a Mars mission and the 5th rover landing by the United States the only country to successfully land a rover on the red planet. This rover's goal is to find ancient signs of life on Mars. It landed at ancient river delta near the Jezero Crater. The rover's name is Perseverance and it is carrying a special instrument to try something that has never been tried before. 

So what is Perseverance carrying you might wonder? It is carrying a mini-helicopter nicknamed Ingenuity that if successful in its mission would be the first powered flight on another planet! It is designed to be more of a proof of concept than it is to really find anything. It can only travel or 90 seconds per flight and only go roughly 50 meters before it turns back. If this does work out though like they hope this could open up an entirely new area of study as a rover could go in one direction and a mini-helicopter could go in another to gather more data much faster. 

SpaceX Funding

While Tesla is Elon Musk's big wealth generator now SpaceX is rapidly catching up. Yesterday it was announced that SpaceX had raised another $850 million at a price, of ironically enough for Musk, $420 a share! This fundraising brought the value of SpaceX to now over $74 BILLION! SpaceX is really firing on cylinders with how well everything is going. Between this fundraising round, the huge strides they have been making in the Starship program, the Starlink satellite constellation they are building out and launching all the rockets and cargo into space they have its hard to find something that is not going right for this company. They have been winning contracts, booking customers, and developing at a unprecedented rate! 

SpaceX is really showing all the people that thought governments were the only ones able to design, build, and launch rockets how wrong they were! They continue to produce and at the end of the day that's what matters most to the government. In a results driven business SpaceX has the results other companies would drool over! 

Axiom Funding

Earlier this year Axiom made news as the first company to contract with SpaceX to fly an entirely private crew to the International Space Station. The entire crew from the piolet to the commander to the passengers will all be private astronauts. To further this vision that Axiom has they successfully raised $130 million in new financing to raise the value of Axiom to well over $1 billion! Part of this money will be spent on them further developing their own space station. The first of the modules will actually be attached to the ISS until the ISS is decommissioned which at that point it will detach and form the base of their own space station! The goal they have with their space station is to further serve both national and private astronauts in low earth orbit!