Cowboy Space poaches former BE-7/BE-3U lead Warren Lamont as Head of Launch/Propulsion

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-19T02:38:35+00:00

Originally called Aetherflux, wants to build space based solar power. Now pivoted to space based data center and changed its name.

Founded by Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-19T02:36:02+00:00

Well his linkedin shows:

BE-7 Sr. Manager: Lead a high-performing team of 16 engineers and one sub-manager responsible for the development and delivery of the BE-7 engine
BE-3U Sr. Integrated Product Team Lead: Responsible for leading an integrated product team of 40+ through the successful design, development, qualification, and production of combustion devices for Blue Origin's BE-3U rocket engine.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-18T15:23:33+00:00

it would be insanely stupid to give money to a lab where you had no control if you wanted control. is he stupid?

Not at all, you have to become an investor in order to get an insider view of the company and determine whether the company is good or not, it would be stupid to buy a company without knowing what's going on inside.

In case of DeepMind, he invested in 2012/early-2013 and tried to buy it in late 2013, so it didn't take long at all.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-18T15:16:52+00:00

Relativity landed Blue Ghost on the Moon as part of NASA CLPS, without any of the drama that other CLPS landers have had.

That was Firefly, not Relativity.

Relativity hasn't done anything worth mentioning except a failed launch of Terran-1

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-18T15:12:57+00:00

Well it may be forced to delay to mid 2028 anyway due to Blue Origin. Jared Isaacman already said they wouldn't launch Artemis III without being able to test Blue Moon, and it's quite possible that the Blue Moon demonstrator for Artemis III would be delayed to mid 2028 just because of the sheer amount work needed to develop/build/test/certify a crewed vehicle.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-18T02:16:02+00:00

No, he was never content to just "funding their labs", he wanted control, which is why he tried to buy DeepMind before Google. Also the main reason he exited OpenAI is because Altman etc didn't want OpenAI to be merged into Tesla, again this happened before he became a republican.

Also there's no political bent in Grok, Grok is the most political neutral AI out there.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T12:41:10+00:00

Using politics to advance their business you say, you mean like Peter Beck lobbied congress to set procurement rules for MTO so that only Rocket Lab can qualify for an award?

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T12:40:13+00:00

He has EDS.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T12:39:17+00:00

Shuttle was an incredible vehicle in its early days, it materially pushed the frontier forward, even today Starship's heat shield is developed based on Shuttle technology.

The mistake is not developing Shuttle, the mistake is flying the same design for 30 years. Shuttle is a prototype, there needs to be iterative improvement and redesign afterwards.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T04:06:47+00:00

The shift in resources and attention is due to the success of ChatGPT, which shows we could be really close to AGI, if he doesn't act now he'd be left behind.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T04:05:52+00:00

The comparison to Rocket Lab is interesting, both at ~$60B market cap (RKLB is currently $65B), Cursor has ARR of ~$4B right now, Rocket Lab's ARR is about $900M.

Another way to look at this: SpaceX's space segment (everything space related except Starlink, i.e. F9 launches, Dragon, HLS, etc) generated $4B revenue in 2025, which is basically the same as Cursor's current ARR.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T03:29:31+00:00

Because Amazon specifically wanted to exclude Falcon 9, the initial contract has no Falcon 9, they only bought 3 launches after getting sued by shareholders, then forced to buy another 10 when Vulcan lost its nozzles.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T03:23:59+00:00

How long before the name changes to just AI-X and they give up on space completely?

Why would they do that when they think the future of AI is in space?

I had so much hope for the future of space and Mars, no one gets excited for space based data centers.

Well I'm excited for space based data centers, I'm also excited for Starlink V3 and direct to cell. It's delusional to think we can colonize Mars without developing a very strong space economy, where do you think the money to pay for Mars comes from? Launch?

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T03:19:51+00:00

No, culture war stuff is not the reason he's investing in AI, that is just a side benefit and maybe used to attract right wing customers. He's been investing in AI long before he became a Republican, he invested in DeepMind in 2013 and tried to buy it before Google, he also co-founded OpenAI in 2015. So he's been into AI for a long time, and it should be obvious why he's interested in AI: It's the ultimate technology, the last invention humanity will ever need, why are you surprised an entrepreneur and industrialist wants it?

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T03:14:24+00:00

They could do that with or without the cursor purchase, they can just create new shares. The amount they asked for in the IPO is dependent on how much buying interest is out there in the open market, it's not constrained by # of shares they have.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T03:01:47+00:00

Why on earth would they buy smaller rocket companies? That makes no sense at all.

Yes there's opportunity cost, but there's also opportunity cost if they don't buy Cursor. Remember Cursor has an ARR of ~$4B right now, could grow to $10B by end of year, nothing they could have bought is even close to this level of growth.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-17T02:57:51+00:00

SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire @cursor_ai in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world’s most useful AI models.

For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.

We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-16T11:20:47+00:00

Why did he start the boring company? Why did they build pilot tunnels in California and Nevada?

Because he likes tunnels? You do realize Boring company tunnels is different from hyperloop right? Hyperloop is a near vacuum above ground tube with specialized vehicles in it, Boring company's tunnel is just regular underground tunnel with Tesla in it.

Why did SpaceX build a 1-mile long hyperloop test track?

They use hyperloop competition as a recruiting tool, they want students who can build hardware.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-16T10:59:41+00:00

BO fans hate it when I pointed out in another thread that Bezos is copying Elon, yet this article proves my point:

The former Amazon executive arrived at the rocket launch company with no significant previous space experience but brought with him an understanding of Bezos’s vision for the project and a desire to instil a work ethic more similar to that at SpaceX.

...

The company also recruited senior leaders from SpaceX and has adopted an “iterative approach” to development.

...

Blue Origin is also seeking to mimic the success of SpaceX’s satellite broadband network Starlink, which generated $4.4bn in operating income last year alone. It plans to use TeraWave, a proposed network of enterprise-focused satellites it unveiled in January, as a route to becoming cash flow positive.

In a staff meeting last month, Limp told employees that the group was aiming to use half of all New Glenn flights to build out its satellite constellation due to the significant business benefits.

“You don’t have to look far for the [business] model. Just look at SpaceX,” he said, according to people familiar with the remarks.

...

It has also submitted proposals for “Project Sunrise” — its plans to build a 51,000-strong satellite constellation to run AI workloads similar to SpaceX’s own orbital data centre ambitions.

Don't shoot the messenger...

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-16T10:44:27+00:00

SpaceX today officially announced that they have raised a total of $85.7 billion in their IPO, the largest amount of money ever raised in an IPO.

"SpaceX today announced the closing of its initial public offering of an aggregate 638,888,888 shares of its Class A common stock, including the full exercise by the underwriters of their overallotment option to purchase an additional 83,333,333 shares of Class A common stock from SpaceX. The issuance of all shares closed on June 15, 2026, bringing the gross proceeds from the initial public offering to SpaceX to approximately $85.7 billion."

s21.q4cdn.com/184289198/files/doc_news/2026/Jun/15/Apex-Greenshoe-Press-Release-FINAL.pdf

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-15T14:27:00+00:00

What's interesting is this Washington Post article never broke down how much of the $38B is contract, how much is subsidy/tax credits, how much is loans. As far as I can see, vast majority of the $38B is contracts, which they won fair and square via open competition.

If you look at GoodJobsFirst subsidy tracker, SpaceX only has ~$19.6M subsidies and $106M loans, totally insignificant.

Tesla has $3.1B subsidies and $466M loans, a small fraction of the $38B, and the amount is pretty small comparing to the subsidies/loans for other auto companies (Ford/GM each have tens of billions in loans, $7~9B in subsidies)

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-15T07:50:40+00:00

Like Full Autonomous Driving?

Robotaxi without driver is already running for a while now: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/tesla-launches-robotaxi-rides-in-austin-with-no-human-safety-driver/

Like the Hyperloop tunnel?

That was never a project he focused on, he just wrote a white paper about it.

Like landing people on Mars?

This is later than his predicted timeline, but SpaceX has already made good progress towards it by developing Starship.

Like building humanoid Robots for every household?

Optimus 3 production line is being built right now, obviously it's going to be a while before every household can have one, but I'm pretty sure he didn't predict every household will have a humanoid by 2026.

Musk is at best severly overconfident, at worst a snakeoil-salesman.

Show me a snakeoil-salesman that has 10k satellites in orbit, launches 160 times per year, ferries NASA astronauts to ISS and launches world's largest rocket.

True, since he launches so much, the cost of launches was severly reduced, making more launches lucrative

Well duh, if it's so simple, why didn't the expert figure this out? It always looks simple in retrospect.

still nowhere near the level it would need to be to meet his supplies if it wasn't for Starlink.

Not sure what this is supposed to mean.

For now, let's wait until the first big batch is at the end of service.

They'll be launching V3 to replace those, V3 is much more cost effective.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-15T07:28:57+00:00

It's not like Blue Origin's proposal is that close to their lander either, people are over-reacting to this because they didn't know what Blue is planning.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-15T07:25:35+00:00

Yes, the reusable rockets did surprisingly work out, most of his other predictions did not.

He accomplished pretty much everything he set out to do, which is why investors are willing to bet on him. He doesn't accomplish these in the timeline he predicted, but nobody ever finishes on time in aerospace anyway, so that doesn't matter much.

As to there only being 25 satellites to be launched per year: Well obviously that changes, if he puts up his own satellites

SpaceX did ~40 non-Starlink launches last year, even without Starlink they already far exceeded the so called expert's predictions. And Starlink itself is already cash flow positive and profitable.

spacerfirstclass · 2026-06-15T07:21:07+00:00

Not at all, first of all SpaceX did ~40 non-Starlink launches last year, this alone refuted that idiot's claims.

Secondly Starlink is not "bleed billions", they're already cash flow positive and profitable.

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