News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
'Lucky number 13' SpaceX's Starship ends test flight with intact splashdown
Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. As SpaceX prepares to bring its massive Starship rocket to Florida launch pads and support NASA's Artemis moon program, the company's 13th flight from Texas marked a largely successful debut of Starship's Version 3 design, culminating in the ship's first intact splashdown in the Indian Ocean. "Lucky number 13. Hell of a flight for Starship," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the webcast. "Really great day for Version 3." For the first time, SpaceX landed Starship mostly intact in the Indian Ocean, a major milestone. The ship touched down under engine power, tipped over while still slightly burning and then bobbed gently in the water. There was no explosion or major fire. Onboard cameras continued streaming views from the ship, while SpaceX's overhead cameras showed that most of the hexagonal heatshield tiles remained attached. The 13th Starship test flight had launched at 6:51 p.m. ET. July 24 from its Starbase, Texas launch pad. While the ascent went well, only eight out of the 13 Super Heavy booster engines needed for landing ignited. The result was a harder splashdown than intended for the booster in the Gulf of America, also known as the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the Starship continued to coast through space fulfilling planned goals such as deploying 20 Starlink V3 satellites and relighting a single engine in space. The 20 Starlink V3 satellites were a demonstration test of the latest version of the company's internet satellites. SpaceX said teams were able to make contact with all 20 before they reentered the atmosphere shortly into the flight. SpaceX said that once operational, future Starship launches will have the capacity to deliver 60 of these V3 Starlink satellites to orbit -- a massive increase in the 29 typically delivered on current Falcon 9 launches. The liftoff came a week after four of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster failed to start, causing a rare post-ignition abort. The cause: issues with the engine's turbopumps, according to SpaceX. This prompted teams to replace six of the engines out of caution. SpaceX eventually plans to land and reuse both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship. The Version 3 Super Heavy has experienced engines issues on both the May 22 and July 24 flight, but the V3 Starship has proven to be a step in the right direction for SpaceX's ambitions. Starship coming to Florida While Starship is planning to launch from Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A and Launch Complex 37 in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the future, it is still undergoing these test flights from Starbase. While this 13th test flight went well, it remains to be seen just how soon the massive rocket arrives in Florida. SpaceX has previously stated the first launch from Pad 39 could happen as soon as the end of the year, as work on that pad is nearing completion. Beyond launching Starlink satellites and advancing SpaceX's long-term deep-space goals, Starship is also expected to carry future payloads for NASA and the Space Force. Starship also plays a key role in NASA's Artemis moon program. SpaceX is developing the Starship Human Landing System, or HLS, which could carry astronauts to the lunar surface as early as Artemis IV. Before then, a modified Starship V3 is expected to dock with Orion in Earth orbit during the 2027 Artemis III mission. For this mission, NASA said that a docking system will be installed at the nose of the Starship. While the test will evaluate Orion's docking with the Starship, the crew will not enter. Brooke Edwards is a Space Reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at [email protected] or on X: @brookeofstars. This article originally appeared on Florida Today: 'Lucky number 13' SpaceX's Starship ends test flight with intact splashdown
'Lucky number 13' SpaceX's Starship ends test flight with intact splashdown
As SpaceX prepares to bring its massive Starship rocket to Florida launch pads and support NASA's Artemis moon program, the company's 13 flight from Texas marked a largely successful debut of Starship's Version 3 design, culminating in the ship's first intact splashdown in the Indian Ocean. "Lucky number 13. Hell of a flight for Starship," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the webcast. "Really great day for Version 3." For the first time, SpaceX landed Starship mostly intact in the Indian Ocean, a major milestone. The ship touched down under engine power, tipped over while still slightly burning and then bobbed gently in the water. There was no explosion or major fire. Onboard cameras continued streaming views from the ship, while SpaceX's overhead cameras showed that most of the hexagonal heatshield tiles remained attached. The 13 Starship test flight had launched at 6:51 p.m. ET. July 24 from its Starbase, Texas launch pad. While the ascent went well, only eight out of the 13 Super Heavy booster engines needed for landing ignited. The result was a harder splashdown than intended for the booster in the Gulf of America, also known as the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the Starship continued to coast through space fulfilling planned goals such as deploying 20 Starlink V3 satellites and relighting a single engine in space. The 20 Starlink V3 satellites were a demonstration test of the latest version of the company's internet satellites. SpaceX said teams were able to make contact with all 20 before they reentered the atmosphere shortly into the flight. SpaceX said that once operational, future Starship launches will have the capacity to deliver 60 of these V3 Starlink satellites to orbit -- a massive increase in the 29 typically delivered on current Falcon 9 launches. The liftoff came a week after four of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster failed to start, causing a rare post-ignition abort. The cause: issues with the engine's turbopumps, according to SpaceX. This prompted teams to replace six of the engines out of caution. SpaceX eventually plans to land and reuse both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship. The Version 3 Super Heavy has experienced engines issues on both the May 22 and July 24 flight, but the V3 Starship has proven to be a step in the right direction for SpaceX's ambitions. Starship coming to Florida While Starship is planning to launch from Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A and Launch Complex 37 in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the future, it is still undergoing these test flights from Starbase. While this 13th test flight went well, it remains to be seen just how soon the massive rocket arrives in Florida. SpaceX has previously stated the first launch from Pad 39 could happen as soon as the end of the year, as work on that pad is nearing completion. Beyond launching Starlink satellites and advancing SpaceX's long-term deep-space goals, Starship is also expected to carry future payloads for NASA and the Space Force. Starship also plays a key role in NASA's Artemis moon program. SpaceX is developing the Starship Human Landing System, or HLS, which could carry astronauts to the lunar surface as early as Artemis IV. Before then, a modified Starship V3 is expected to dock with Orion in Earth orbit during the 2027 Artemis III mission. For this mission, NASA said that a docking system will be installed at the nose of the Starship. While the test will evaluate Orion's docking with the Starship, the crew will not enter. Brooke Edwards is a Space Reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at [email protected] or on X: @brookeofstars.
'Lucky number 13' SpaceX's Starship ends test flight with intact splashdown
As SpaceX prepares to bring its massive Starship rocket to Florida launch pads and support NASA's Artemis moon program, the company's 13 flight from Texas marked a largely successful debut of Starship's Version 3 design, culminating in the ship's first intact splashdown in the Indian Ocean. "Lucky number 13. Hell of a flight for Starship," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the webcast. "Really great day for Version 3." For the first time, SpaceX landed Starship mostly intact in the Indian Ocean, a major milestone. The ship touched down under engine power, tipped over while still slightly burning and then bobbed gently in the water. There was no explosion or major fire. Onboard cameras continued streaming views from the ship, while SpaceX's overhead cameras showed that most of the hexagonal heatshield tiles remained attached. The 13 Starship test flight had launched at 6:51 p.m. ET. July 24 from its Starbase, Texas launch pad. While the ascent went well, only eight out of the 13 Super Heavy booster engines needed for landing ignited. The result was a harder splashdown than intended for the booster in the Gulf of America, also known as the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the Starship continued to coast through space fulfilling planned goals such as deploying 20 Starlink V3 satellites and relighting a single engine in space. The 20 Starlink V3 satellites were a demonstration test of the latest version of the company's internet satellites. SpaceX said teams were able to make contact with all 20 before they reentered the atmosphere shortly into the flight. SpaceX said that once operational, future Starship launches will have the capacity to deliver 60 of these V3 Starlink satellites to orbit -- a massive increase in the 29 typically delivered on current Falcon 9 launches. The liftoff came a week after four of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster failed to start, causing a rare post-ignition abort. The cause: issues with the engine's turbopumps, according to SpaceX. This prompted teams to replace six of the engines out of caution. SpaceX eventually plans to land and reuse both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship. The Version 3 Super Heavy has experienced engines issues on both the May 22 and July 24 flight, but the V3 Starship has proven to be a step in the right direction for SpaceX's ambitions. Starship coming to Florida While Starship is planning to launch from Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A and Launch Complex 37 in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the future, it is still undergoing these test flights from Starbase. While this 13th test flight went well, it remains to be seen just how soon the massive rocket arrives in Florida. SpaceX has previously stated the first launch from Pad 39 could happen as soon as the end of the year, as work on that pad is nearing completion. Beyond launching Starlink satellites and advancing SpaceX's long-term deep-space goals, Starship is also expected to carry future payloads for NASA and the Space Force. Starship also plays a key role in NASA's Artemis moon program. SpaceX is developing the Starship Human Landing System, or HLS, which could carry astronauts to the lunar surface as early as Artemis IV. Before then, a modified Starship V3 is expected to dock with Orion in Earth orbit during the 2027 Artemis III mission. For this mission, NASA said that a docking system will be installed at the nose of the Starship. While the test will evaluate Orion's docking with the Starship, the crew will not enter. Brooke Edwards is a Space Reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at [email protected] or on X: @brookeofstars.
'Lucky number 13' SpaceX's Starship ends test flight with intact splashdown
As SpaceX prepares to bring its massive Starship rocket to Florida launch pads and support NASA's Artemis moon program, the company's 13 flight from Texas marked a largely successful debut of Starship's Version 3 design, culminating in the ship's first intact splashdown in the Indian Ocean. "Lucky number 13. Hell of a flight for Starship," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the webcast. "Really great day for Version 3." For the first time, SpaceX landed Starship mostly intact in the Indian Ocean, a major milestone. The ship touched down under engine power, tipped over while still slightly burning and then bobbed gently in the water. There was no explosion or major fire. Onboard cameras continued streaming views from the ship, while SpaceX's overhead cameras showed that most of the hexagonal heatshield tiles remained attached. The 13 Starship test flight had launched at 6:51 p.m. ET. July 24 from its Starbase, Texas launch pad. While the ascent went well, only eight out of the 13 Super Heavy booster engines needed for landing ignited. The result was a harder splashdown than intended for the booster in the Gulf of America, also known as the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the Starship continued to coast through space fulfilling planned goals such as deploying 20 Starlink V3 satellites and relighting a single engine in space. The 20 Starlink V3 satellites were a demonstration test of the latest version of the company's internet satellites. SpaceX said teams were able to make contact with all 20 before they reentered the atmosphere shortly into the flight. SpaceX said that once operational, future Starship launches will have the capacity to deliver 60 of these V3 Starlink satellites to orbit -- a massive increase in the 29 typically delivered on current Falcon 9 launches. The liftoff came a week after four of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster failed to start, causing a rare post-ignition abort. The cause: issues with the engine's turbopumps, according to SpaceX. This prompted teams to replace six of the engines out of caution. SpaceX eventually plans to land and reuse both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship. The Version 3 Super Heavy has experienced engines issues on both the May 22 and July 24 flight, but the V3 Starship has proven to be a step in the right direction for SpaceX's ambitions. Starship coming to Florida While Starship is planning to launch from Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A and Launch Complex 37 in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the future, it is still undergoing these test flights from Starbase. While this 13th test flight went well, it remains to be seen just how soon the massive rocket arrives in Florida. SpaceX has previously stated the first launch from Pad 39 could happen as soon as the end of the year, as work on that pad is nearing completion. Beyond launching Starlink satellites and advancing SpaceX's long-term deep-space goals, Starship is also expected to carry future payloads for NASA and the Space Force. Starship also plays a key role in NASA's Artemis moon program. SpaceX is developing the Starship Human Landing System, or HLS, which could carry astronauts to the lunar surface as early as Artemis IV. Before then, a modified Starship V3 is expected to dock with Orion in Earth orbit during the 2027 Artemis III mission. For this mission, NASA said that a docking system will be installed at the nose of the Starship. While the test will evaluate Orion's docking with the Starship, the crew will not enter. Brooke Edwards is a Space Reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at [email protected] or on X: @brookeofstars.
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 with efficiency, safety improvements
Anthropic PBC today rolled out a large language model called Claude Opus 5 to its chatbot service and developer platform. The company says that the LLM approaches the output quality of its top-end Mythos 5 algorithm in many areas, but costs significantly less. Anthropic hasn't made Mythos 5 publicly available. The company instead sells access to a scaled-down version of the LLM called Fable 5 that shares many of its features, but poses a smaller cybersecurity risk. Anthropic compared Fable 5 to Opus 5 across 13 benchmarks. It says that the latter algorithm scored higher on 8 of the tests despite costing about 50% less. Opus 5's edge was particularly pronounced across two benchmarks called Frontier-Bench and AutomationBench. The former test comprises 74 tasks spanning fields such as physics, chemistry and cryptography. Opus 5 performed 9.7% better than Fable 5. It achieved a 8.5% higher score on AutomationBench, which includes a set of knowledge work tasks. One of the contributors to Opus 5's performance is that it verifies its work. The Frontier-Bench benchmark required the model to generate a three-dimensional machine part schematic. Opus 5 had no way to view the drawing, which made verifying its accuracy impossible. The model addressed the challenge by writing a "computer vision pipeline to pull the geometry from the raw pixels." Opus 5's output verification feature also lends itself to biology research. According to Anthropic, the model outperformed an earlier LLM called Opus 4.8 across all its internal life sciences benchmarks. Opus 5 proved particularly adept at automated protein research, an important field that was the focus of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Anthropic says that Opus 5 is its safest model to date by multiple measures. Compared to its predecessors, the LLM is less prone to deceptive behavior and errors that are difficult to reverse. Anthropic has not made its flagship Mythos 5 publicly available over concerns that it could be used by hackers to launch cyberattacks. The model can not only find vulnerabilities but also develop workflows for exploiting them. By contrast, Opus 5 scored zero on an internal Anthropic benchmark that evaluates LLMs' ability to exploit vulnerabilities. The company has equipped the LLM with more relaxed guardrails than Fable 5. Customers can use Opus 5 to search code for security issues, but it blocks vulnerability scan methods that are commonly used by hackers. Anthropic estimates that its guardrails will activate 85% less frequency than for Fable 5. Opus 5 is now the default model in the top-end Max tier of the Claude chatbot service. It's also available in the mid-range Pro plan. Developers can connect Opus 5 to their software via Anthropic's application programming interface. As part of today's update, the API received a feature that makes it possible to interrupt an LLM mid-workflow and change the tools that it uses. Another new capability can reroute prompts that are blocked by Anthropic's safety guardrails to a different model.
SpaceX Launches Starship On Another Test Flight, This Time With The Most Advanced Starlinks
SpaceX's mammoth Starship rocket blasted off Friday on another test flight stretching halfway around the world, this time releasing 20 of the most advanced Starlinks. Towering 407 feet (124 meters), Starship soared from the company's base at the southern tip of Texas. NASA monitored the space-skimming flight, a critical step toward using the Starship as a lunar lander for moon crews. The hourlong journey ended with a splashdown so soft that the spacecraft remained afloat in the Indian Ocean as the SpaceX webcast drew to a close, drawing cheers from employees back at the launch site. Elon Musk's SpaceX had replaced six of the 33 engines on the first-stage booster after they failed to ignite last week, resulting in a last-second launch abort. The previous Starship flight in May also experienced engine trouble, which prevented the booster from making a controlled return. This time, all of the engines fired at liftoff, but not enough of them lit back up for the booster's return, causing it to descend too fast and slam into the Gulf of Mexico. The spacecraft continued soaring eastward, popping out the Starlinks one by one 124 miles (200 kilometers) up before reentering. It was the 13th flight of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, and the second this year of the new version dubbed V3. Like the previous demo, neither the booster nor spacecraft was meant to be saved, instead plunging into the sea. The stainless steel, retro-looking spacecraft hovered upright over the Indian Ocean before lowering into the water, more than 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) from where the flight began. It was the best reentry yet, according to SpaceX, with the intact booster floating amid just a few flames. Previous flights ended with the spacecraft engulfed in flames and exploding at splashdown -- or rupturing in midair.
SpaceX launches Starship on another test flight, this time with the most advanced Starlinks
Towering 407 feet (124 metres), Starship soared from the company's base at the southern tip of Texas. NASA monitored the flight, a critical step toward using the Starship as a lunar lander for moon crews. Elon Musk's SpaceX replaced six of the 33 engines on the first-stage booster after they failed to ignite last week, resulting in a last-second launch abort. The previous Starship flight in May also experienced engine trouble, which prevented the booster from making a controlled return. It was the 13th flight of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, and the second this year of the new version dubbed V3. Like the previous demo that climbed as high as 125 miles (200 kilometres), neither the booster nor spacecraft was being saved, instead ditching into the sea. The booster was bound for the Gulf of Mexico and the stainless steel, retro-looking spacecraft for the Indian Ocean more than 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometres) from where the hourlong flight began. The Starlinks had a job to do before reentering over the Indian Ocean. Their solo-flying time was expected to be no more than 20 minutes. Once deployed in space from the Starship's Pez-like dispenser, the Starlinks were going to extend their solar wings and antennas and attempt to communicate via lasers with older Starlink models already in orbit. With more than 10,000 Starlinks currently providing internet, SpaceX boasts the world's largest satellite constellation. Six of the newly launched Starlinks carried cameras to photograph Starship's heat shield. The heat shield was also equipped with sensors to measure the extreme pressure placed on the spacecraft during launch. Most of the heat shield's thermal tiles were black, but some were deliberately painted white to simulate missing tiles, part of an experiment to test the shield's robustness. SpaceX wants to make sure Starship's heat shield can withstand the heat of entry before trying to return it to the Starbase launch pad near the Texas-Mexico border. The company already has used a pair of giant mechanical arms at the pad to capture a Starship booster. The company plans to do the same with the actual spacecraft, which is designed to be totally reusable. NASA needs Starship to wrap up testing and reach orbit soon so the Artemis III astronauts -- three Americans and one Italian -- can practice docking their capsule with it next year. Starship is also the vehicle with which Musk intends to build a city on Mars. He's already booking tourist trips to Mars, as well as the moon. The latest test flight was delayed first by the July 16 launch abort, then again on Thursday (July 24, 2026) by thick clouds from Tropical Storm Bertha.
Meta's $10 Billion Anthropic Deal Could Change the AI Story. How to Play META Stock Here.
Meta Platforms (META) has spent years pouring tens of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence (AI). Investors have largely accepted those investments because advertising profits have remained exceptionally strong, but one question has lingered over the stock: When will Meta actually make money from its AI infrastructure? That question is becoming much more important after reports surfaced that Anthropic is discussing a compute-leasing agreement with Meta that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years. If completed, the arrangement would represent one of the first major examples of Meta generating direct revenue from the massive AI data centers it has been building. More News from Barchart Meta will report its second-quarter earnings on July 29. As always, investors will likely be looking for signs that the company's enormous AI investments are beginning to create entirely new revenue streams rather than simply supporting its advertising business. Meta Platforms Stock Still Looks Reasonably Valued Despite the rebound in July, Meta Platforms' valuation remains relatively reasonable compared with many AI leaders. META stock currently trades at roughly 21 times trailing earnings and about 21.4 times forward earnings, below its five-year average multiple of around 26 times. Meta also carries a PEG ratio near 1.07 times, suggesting expected earnings growth largely offsets its current valuation. After falling roughly 15% during the first half of the year, Meta has recovered sharply. Shares are now down 8% year-to-date (YTD) after rallying this month, with investors embracing the company's evolving AI strategy. If Meta succeeds in generating recurring revenue from AI infrastructure, today's valuation could prove more attractive than it initially appears. Meta's AI Investments Are Starting to Change the Narrative Investors have spent much of the year questioning Meta's aggressive spending plans. Management expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion in capital expenditures during 2026, almost double the roughly $72 billion invested last year. That level of spending initially pressured META stock as investors wondered whether returns would justify the enormous investment.
Anthropic launches upgraded Opus 5 AI model
The San Francisco-based lab said the new Claude AI model was well suited for daily office and computer programming tasks. Anthropic product leader Dianne Penn stated in an interview with Reuters that the release, more efficient than May's Opus 4.8, demonstrated a rapid pace of development. During testing, Opus 5 demonstrated fewer abilities to exploit cyber vulnerabilities than Anthropic's leading AI, resulting in less restrictive safeguards than Fable 5's. Opus 5 was also less susceptible to being tricked into misuse than Anthropic's other current models, the startup said. Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that a U.S. federal judge had granted final approval to a $1.5 billion class-action settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and hundreds of thousands of authors and copyright holders whose books were used to train the company's large language models.
SpaceX Starship launches on 13th test flight
By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here Engines were switched and a tropical storm had moved along, so SpaceX was able to launch the Starship and Super Heavy rocket on its 13th suborbital test mission on Friday night. The heavy-lift rocket lifted off at 6:51 p.m. EDT from SpaceX's Texas launch site Starbase with a successful booster separation that sent the upper stage Starship on its way halfway around the Earth. The Super Heavy booster was able to have more of a controlled landing than the 12th flight, but still came into a landing in the Gulf with higher velocity than planned crashing into the waters as opposed to hovering above it. The launch came after a one-day delay because of poor weather as Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall farther up the Texas Gulf Coast. The rocket had previously attempted to launch on July 16, but had issues with some of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster. An automatic launch abort was triggered just as the countdown clock hit zero. SpaceX then opted to replace six of the engines. The flight is the latest in Elon Musk's company's attempts to drive toward a goal of beginning operational missions from Florida potentially before the end of the year. The flight plan looks to send the Starship upper stage more than halfway around the world to land with a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia. The launch comes just more than two months since the 12th test flight that was the first for the new Version 3 of the rocket. That mission suffered an uncontrolled landing of its booster in the Gulf that ultimately led to the rocket's grounding by the Federal Aviation Administration, which was lifted earlier this month. "There have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight," SpaceX stated on a mission update on its website. The company said that on the 12th flight after the booster separation, the engine setup and flip maneuver caused it to be off by about 90 degrees, which led to its failure and ultimate crash into the Gulf. Five of its 33 Raptor engines had issues as they tried to relight and that caused a planned "boostback burn" to end early. "The startup sequence has been modified to be more robust to timing variability and more reliably flip in the desired direction, which is done to increase overall performance," SpaceX stated. "The Super Heavy on this upcoming flight has hardware modifications to improve re-light reliability along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment." While the booster failed to make a controlled return on Flight 12, the upper stage achieved its goals of getting to the landing site in the Indian Ocean, although minus one of the three Raptor vacuum engines, which was lost about 40 seconds after stage separation. "The vehicle was able to demonstrate its engine out capability and reach its planned suborbital trajectory," SpaceX stated. "Several hardware and operational modifications have been made to address the interconnected causes with additional reliability improvements planned in upcoming versions of the Raptor engine." Something new on this mission will be the deployment of real Starlink satellites during flight. Previous Starship test flights have tried out simulators deployed during the suborbital missions. These large V3 satellites, which are too big for launches on SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets, will have a test run during which they will attempt to extend their solar array and antennas, and connect to the existing Starlink satellite constellation using high-capacity lasers. The Starlink satellites' lives will be short-lived, though, as they follow the Starship upper stage after deployment for an eventual reentry into the Earth's atmosphere to crash down over the Indian Ocean about 20 minutes after their deployment. Six of the 20 satellites also have cameras on board to scan Starship's heat shield, which continues to be modified for the rocket's ultimate operational configuration. Those flights are slated to take place in Florida where SpaceX continues to build out three Starship launch towers. The first is at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39-A while two more are in the works at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 37. The Space Force in late 2025 indicated it was prepared to support the first Starship launch on the Space Coast by mid 2026 while SpaceX has stated it would still try to launch before the end of the year. SpaceX also is nearing completion of its Gigabay manufacturing site at KSC where it will build out future Starship upper stages and Super Heavy boosters, part of a $1.8 billion investment in Space Coast operations. The first flights from KSC, though, will feature rockets shipped over from Texas until Florida's Gigabay is up and running. SpaceX ultimately is aiming for as many as 120 flights a year from across the three launch pads in Florida, a number that has raised criticism for its impact on commercial airspace. Also of concern has been its sonic boom potential during booster landings and upper stage Starship return-to-launch-site flights that would bring it across Central Florida similar to how the space shuttle used to land back at KSC. The rocket is the most powerful to ever launch to space with nearly 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, nearly doubling the power of NASA's Space Launch System rocket. Starship's first test flight came in April 2023 and progress seemed to be on a good trajectory with the company managing to capture its first Super Heavy booster back at the launch tower using its swiveling "chopsticks" arms on its fifth-ever launch in October 2024. Flights in early 2025, though, ended in a series of failures including two in which the Starship upper stage disintegrated in a fiery cascade of debris across the skies visible from Florida and the Caribbean. It ended 2025, though, with two successful test flights using Version 2 of Starship followed by more than a seven-month lull before the first launch of Version 3 in May of this year. NASA is eagerly awaiting operational Starship flights as a version of the rocket is tasked to become a moon lander as part of the Artemis program. The Artemis III mission planned for mid 2027 is seeking to test out a crewed Orion spacecraft's ability to dock with a pathfinder version of Starship as well as Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK2 lander. Blue Origin, though, has to get its Canaveral launch site rebuilt after a New Glenn rocket exploded on the pad during a test hot fire earlier this year.
SpaceX launches 13th Starship test, briefly deploys first upgraded Starlinks
WASHINGTON, July 24 : SpaceX's Starship rocket lifted off from Texas on Friday and briefly put its first 20 upgraded Starlink internet satellites into suborbital space, the company's 13th test mission as it aims to begin routine service by the end of the year. The roughly 400-foot-tall (122-metre-tall) Starship rocket system blasted off around 6:50 p.m. ET from SpaceX's Starbase company town in Texas. During the mission, the rocket launched 20 of Starlink's V3 satellites, a much more powerful version with greater bandwidth and internet speeds. They briefly connected with SpaceX's existing network of some 10,000 orbiting satellites. Then, as planned, they followed the ship's suborbital trajectory into Earth's atmosphere and burned up. As the craft flew over a shadowed Earth, a camera fixed to the rocket and streamed live by SpaceX showed thunderstorms with flashes of lightning in the background 118 miles (190 km) below. A crowd of SpaceX engineers in SpaceX's Hawthorne, California, facilities could be heard on the livestream cheering at the rocket's mission milestones, at one point chanting "USA." The flight featured a new version of the rocket crucial to the company's plans. Those include expanding the Starlink satellite internet service, landing humans on the moon for NASA by 2028 and eventually deploying thousands of artificial intelligence-processing satellites in orbit. The roughly hour-long mission concluded with Starship's reentry through Earth's atmosphere with seemingly minimal scarring on its heat shield. This was an improvement from prior tests and a step toward CEO Elon Musk's goal for the rocket to fly and return as routinely as an airplane. The roughly 14-story-tall ship reignited its onboard engines to flip itself upright and splashed down in the Indian Ocean, simulating how it should return on land in Texas in a real mission. Earlier in the flight, as Starship approached 16,400 miles per hour (26,400 kph) some 10 minutes into its flight, its Super Heavy first-stage booster was unable to ace its return to Earth and hit the Gulf of Mexico harder than expected, SpaceX said. Five engines failed to relight and slow the descent, according to a graphic on the livestream. In a similar May test, four engines failed to relight and the booster also hit the Gulf hard. "We were targeting a softer splashdown, and as you saw it came in with quite a bit of velocity still," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during the Friday test's livestream. By the end of 2026, SpaceX hopes to use the giant Starship rocket to expand its Starlink network with the V3 satellites, adding enough capacity that regular cell phones can connect directly to satellites for service outside normal cellular coverage areas.
SpaceX Starship launches on 13th test flight
By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here Engines were switched and a tropical storm had moved along, so SpaceX was able to launch the Starship and Super Heavy rocket on its 13th suborbital test mission on Friday night. The heavy-lift rocket lifted off at 6:51 p.m. EDT from SpaceX's Texas launch site Starbase with a successful booster separation that sent the upper stage Starship on its way halfway around the Earth. The Super Heavy booster was able to have more of a controlled landing than the 12th flight, but still came into a landing in the Gulf with higher velocity than planned crashing into the waters as opposed to hovering above it. The launch came after a one-day delay because of poor weather as Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall farther up the Texas Gulf Coast. The rocket had previously attempted to launch on July 16, but had issues with some of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster. An automatic launch abort was triggered just as the countdown clock hit zero. SpaceX then opted to replace six of the engines. The flight is the latest in Elon Musk's company's attempts to drive toward a goal of beginning operational missions from Florida potentially before the end of the year. The flight plan looks to send the Starship upper stage more than halfway around the world to land with a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia. The launch comes just more than two months since the 12th test flight that was the first for the new Version 3 of the rocket. That mission suffered an uncontrolled landing of its booster in the Gulf that ultimately led to the rocket's grounding by the Federal Aviation Administration, which was lifted earlier this month. "There have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight," SpaceX stated on a mission update on its website. The company said that on the 12th flight after the booster separation, the engine setup and flip maneuver caused it to be off by about 90 degrees, which led to its failure and ultimate crash into the Gulf. Five of its 33 Raptor engines had issues as they tried to relight and that caused a planned "boostback burn" to end early. "The startup sequence has been modified to be more robust to timing variability and more reliably flip in the desired direction, which is done to increase overall performance," SpaceX stated. "The Super Heavy on this upcoming flight has hardware modifications to improve re-light reliability along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment." While the booster failed to make a controlled return on Flight 12, the upper stage achieved its goals of getting to the landing site in the Indian Ocean, although minus one of the three Raptor vacuum engines, which was lost about 40 seconds after stage separation. "The vehicle was able to demonstrate its engine out capability and reach its planned suborbital trajectory," SpaceX stated. "Several hardware and operational modifications have been made to address the interconnected causes with additional reliability improvements planned in upcoming versions of the Raptor engine." Something new on this mission will be the deployment of real Starlink satellites during flight. Previous Starship test flights have tried out simulators deployed during the suborbital missions. These large V3 satellites, which are too big for launches on SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets, will have a test run during which they will attempt to extend their solar array and antennas, and connect to the existing Starlink satellite constellation using high-capacity lasers. The Starlink satellites' lives will be short-lived, though, as they follow the Starship upper stage after deployment for an eventual reentry into the Earth's atmosphere to crash down over the Indian Ocean about 20 minutes after their deployment. Six of the 20 satellites also have cameras on board to scan Starship's heat shield, which continues to be modified for the rocket's ultimate operational configuration. Those flights are slated to take place in Florida where SpaceX continues to build out three Starship launch towers. The first is at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39-A while two more are in the works at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 37. The Space Force in late 2025 indicated it was prepared to support the first Starship launch on the Space Coast by mid 2026 while SpaceX has stated it would still try to launch before the end of the year. SpaceX also is nearing completion of its Gigabay manufacturing site at KSC where it will build out future Starship upper stages and Super Heavy boosters, part of a $1.8 billion investment in Space Coast operations. The first flights from KSC, though, will feature rockets shipped over from Texas until Florida's Gigabay is up and running. SpaceX ultimately is aiming for as many as 120 flights a year from across the three launch pads in Florida, a number that has raised criticism for its impact on commercial airspace. Also of concern has been its sonic boom potential during booster landings and upper stage Starship return-to-launch-site flights that would bring it across Central Florida similar to how the space shuttle used to land back at KSC. The rocket is the most powerful to ever launch to space with nearly 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, nearly doubling the power of NASA's Space Launch System rocket. Starship's first test flight came in April 2023 and progress seemed to be on a good trajectory with the company managing to capture its first Super Heavy booster back at the launch tower using its swiveling "chopsticks" arms on its fifth-ever launch in October 2024. Flights in early 2025, though, ended in a series of failures including two in which the Starship upper stage disintegrated in a fiery cascade of debris across the skies visible from Florida and the Caribbean. It ended 2025, though, with two successful test flights using Version 2 of Starship followed by more than a seven-month lull before the first launch of Version 3 in May of this year. NASA is eagerly awaiting operational Starship flights as a version of the rocket is tasked to become a moon lander as part of the Artemis program. The Artemis III mission planned for mid 2027 is seeking to test out a crewed Orion spacecraft's ability to dock with a pathfinder version of Starship as well as Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK2 lander. Blue Origin, though, has to get its Canaveral launch site rebuilt after a New Glenn rocket exploded on the pad during a test hot fire earlier this year.
SpaceX launches major Starship test in post-IPO spotlight
The fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster aim for multiple missions, including NASA moon landings by 2028, requiring refuelling and safety milestones yet to be achieved. SpaceX's mammoth Starship launched on its first major test flight since the company's blockbuster initial public offering, a high-stakes mission to test technology vital to Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk's ambitions. Starship, perched atop its Super Heavy booster, lifted off from the company's Starbase facility in South Texas at 5.51pm local time on July 24 (6.51am Singapore time on July 25). The rocket is carrying upgraded Starlink satellites that are intended to burn up later in the atmosphere as part of the roughly hour-long test mission. Starship is central to Musk's goal of expanding SpaceX's Starlink communications network, sending humans to the moon and beyond and putting data centres in space. But it has faced an unstable development path marred by explosive setbacks, malfunctions and delays. A selloff of SpaceX's shares partly fuelled by earlier mission delays demonstrates how certain investors are sensitive to the type of risks that are baked into SpaceX's fly-fail-fix development strategy. Shares closed 3 per cent lower on July 24 in regular US trading and are down about 25 per cent over the last month - well below their US$135 IPO price. SpaceX is going all-in on Starship. The company has stopped taking reservations from satellite operators for dedicated rides to orbit beyond 2028 on its Falcon rockets, the backbone of the launch industry for years, Bloomberg reported on July 23. The Starship test is the rocket's 13th flight. At liftoff, the Super Heavy booster ignited 33 Raptor engines, sending Starship on its way to space, where it will reach near orbital speeds. The booster then separated from Starship and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, with the company opting to skip the dramatic midair catch they nailed during a 2024 mission. While in space, Starship will attempt a number of tests, including relighting one of its engines and deploying 20 Starlink satellites. These satellites will extend their solar arrays and attempt to connect to the broader Starlink network using laser-based communications. About 20 minutes after deployment, the satellites should fall back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere. About an hour after liftoff, Starship is scheduled to splash down in the Indian Ocean. Musk's company has designed Starship to be fully reusable, something no other rocket maker has achieved, with both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft intended to return to Earth intact after each launch so they can fly to space again. SpaceX has spent more than US$15 billion (S$19.36 billion) developing Starship. SpaceX also holds roughly US$4 billion worth of NASA contracts for Starship to land astronauts on the moon as soon as 2028. To do so, SpaceX will have to refuel the vehicle in space, launch it a dozen times or more in a row and ensure it's safe to hold humans - a demanding list of tasks for a vehicle which has yet to complete a full orbital mission. BLOOMBERG
Polymarket and Kalshi Are 'Likely' Underestimating Odds of Crypto Bill Passage Due to Insider Trading Restrictions, Says Fundstrat's Tom Lee
Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. Tom Lee, co-Founder and Head of Research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, said on Tuesday that the Clarity Act has stronger passage odds than shown in prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi. Tom Lee 'Bullish' on Clarity Act Passage Lee drew attention to comments by Sean Farrell, Fundstrat's head of digital asset strategy, who argued that prediction markets are not fully reflecting "informed expectations" about the bill's passage. Farrell said that "recent restrictions" were preventing Senators from trading on the outcome, and placed "less weight" on the quoted probability. Lee endorsed Farrell's view, stating that Polymarket and Kalshi markets "likely underestimate" the odds of passage. "This is bullish," the Wall Street analyst added. Love this take from @SeanMFarrell on Clarity Act odds of passage: - his convos with policymakers show higher odds than seen in prediction markets - "recent restrictions" prevent insiders from trading on this outcome Hence, @Polymarket and @Kalshi markets likely underestimate... pic.twitter.com/3StlyKnxUk -- Thomas (Tom) Lee (not drummer) FundstratDirect.com (@fundstrat) July 21, 2026 How Soon Until We Get 'Clarity'? As of this writing, Polygon-based Polymarket prices the odds of the bill becoming law in 2026 at 47%, while Kalshi gives it a 49% chance. See Also: Avoid the #1 Investing Mistake: How Your 'Safe' Holdings Could Be Costing You Big Time Polymarket odds jumped 4 percentage points over the last 24 hours, following reports that the White House agreed to add an ethics provision to the Clarity Act, a key sticking point that has kept the bill tied up amid President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency business interests. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Congress is at the "1-yard line" on the Clarity Act, urging lawmakers to pass the legislation before the August recess. Democrats have long demanded stronger guardrails around President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency businesses as a non-negotiable condition for their votes, and since the legislation requires 60 Senate votes to overcome a filibuster, bipartisan agreement is now mathematically required. Trump's financial disclosures revealed he earned roughly $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency ventures last year, including World Liberty Financial and the Official Trump memecoin.
Anthropic unveils Claude Opus 5, betting lower costs will win the AI race
Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, an affordable AI model that performs comparably to its premium offerings at half the cost, addressing concerns over AI expense by consuming fewer computing resources. Positioned against OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Opus 5 is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. While Opus 5 excels in coding and knowledge work, it is deliberately limited in cybersecurity and biological research to mitigate misuse risks, necessitating fewer safety interventions compared to previous models. The launch comes amid increased scrutiny from Wall Street due to upcoming market listings of both Anthropic and rival OpenAI. SAN FRANCISCO, July 25 -- Anthropic yesterday released Claude Opus 5, a new artificial intelligence model the company says approaches the performance of its most powerful system at half the price. The San Francisco-based startup, a chief rival to OpenAI, said the model tops industry benchmarks for coding and knowledge work while consuming fewer computing resources than earlier versions. The claim addressed the rising concerns of business customers who have balked at the expense of running advanced AI systems. Claude competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, and customers pay based on the amount of work performed, measured in units called tokens. Opus 5 costs US$5 (RM20) per million input tokens and US$25 per million output tokens, half the price of Fable 5, Anthropic's most expensive publicly available offering. The company said the new model performs close to Fable 5 across many tasks despite the lower cost. Cost has becomes a major issue after Anthropic and its archrival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, both filed for stock market listings in June. Wall Street is scrutinising their business performance more closely than ever ahead of their market debuts. On cybersecurity, Anthropic said it deliberately avoided training Opus 5 on cyber tasks, and that the model remains behind Mythos 5 -- its most capable and most tightly restricted system, available only to select partners -- on both offensive cyber work and biological research capabilities that could be misused. Mythos is Anthropic's most advanced series of AI models, and their strength at finding weaknesses in computer systems -- and at turning those weaknesses into working attacks -- has caused controversy and pushed the company to build tight guardrails around them. The company said Opus 5 finds software flaws about as well as Mythos 5 but lags far behind in turning those flaws into something that could be weaponized into an attack. Citing the reduced risk, Anthropic said its automated safety filters will intervene roughly 85 percent less often on Opus 5 than on Fable 5, the Mythos-class model it released last month. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were briefly pulled from public access in June after the US Commerce Department imposed export controls, which were lifted at the end of that month. -- AFP
On Second Test of Its Newest Starship Design, SpaceX Sticks the Landing
SpaceX completed a successful test flight of its Starship rocket on Friday evening, setting the stage for more ambitious developments in the months to come. The flight was the 13th for Starship but just the second for what SpaceX calls its Version 3, which incorporates a number of changes to improve performance and reliability. Friday's flight appeared to accomplish almost all of its objectives, including correcting problems that occurred during the previous flight in May, deploying Starlink internet satellites and ending its journey bobbing intact in the Indian Ocean. "We're really pumped about this," Kate Tice, one of the hosts of the SpaceX webcast, said after the gentle water landing. This time, in contrast to an aborted attempt eight days earlier, all 33 engines on Starship's booster stage ignited. The 407-foot-tall rocket lifted off at 6:51 p.m. Eastern time from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, near Brownsville. Starship consists of two stages: a booster, known as the Super Heavy, and an upper-stage spacecraft that is also called Starship but is often shortened to Ship. Both stages are designed to be fully reusable, which could greatly reduce the cost of sending satellites to space. On Friday, the return of the booster stage for a simulated landing over the Gulf of Mexico was not entirely successful. Instead of slowing to a hover, the booster appeared to hit the water while still descending at a quick pace. While in space, the upper-stage Ship deployed 20 functioning, next-generation Starlink satellites. Earlier flights released dummy versions to test the deployment mechanism, which resembles a large Pez dispenser, pushing out the satellites one by one. After deploying their solar arrays and antennas, all the satellites successfully connected to the rest of the Starlink constellation via laser communications. The upper-stage Ship also restarted one of the engines for 14 seconds. Demonstration of that capability was a prerequisite before Starship's first orbital flight. An engine burn in orbit will be needed for the upper stage to drop out of orbit safely; otherwise, the spacecraft would be stranded in orbit, slowly dragged down by the friction of the atmosphere, with the possibility that pieces would land on populated areas. By design, all of the flights of Starship so far have traveled along trajectories that re-enter the atmosphere above the Indian Ocean after a journey halfway around the world. On this flight, the accompanying Starlink satellites were traveling along the same suborbital path, so they also re-entered the atmosphere and burned up, just 20 minutes after they had been deployed. Before their demise, six of the Starlink satellites used cameras to scan Starship's heat shield, observing how well the shield performed as temperatures heated up to thousands of degrees. The upper-stage Ship survived its fiery path through the atmosphere. Over the Indian Ocean west of Australia, it slowed down and mimicked the maneuvers of landing in a vertical orientation. And unlike in previous landings, the rocket did not explode in a fireball when it tipped into the water. "This is the first time we've put an intact Starship in the water," said Dan Huot, another host of the SpaceX webcast, describing the fact that the cameras on the spacecraft were still sending back video as "just a little bit surreal." He added, "Wow, lucky No. 13 -- hell of a flight for Starship." If data gathered during the flight does not reveal any major obstacles, SpaceX will be able to move on to the next set of more challenging objectives for Starship: entering orbit around Earth, returning the upper-stage spacecraft to Texas and catching it on the launch tower as it has done with the booster. Starship is key to NASA's moon plans. SpaceX is slated to provide a version of the Ship spacecraft to take its astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon's surface. But work on Starship has taken longer than Mr. Musk and SpaceX originally promised. For the moon mission, SpaceX needs to demonstrate several technological firsts. They include conducting multiple Starship launches over a short period of time, because the lunar-lander version of Starship will need to have its propellant tanks refilled before leaving low-Earth orbit. Transferring ultracold liquid methane and liquid oxygen between two spacecraft in the weightlessness of space has not yet been demonstrated. The successful test flight could also shore up investor confidence in SpaceX, which is planning to use Starship to deploy up to a million data center satellites in orbit. SpaceX debuted on the stock market in June in the largest initial public offering ever. A few days later, the share price shot up to $225.64, a jump of 67 percent over its debut price of $135, but it has slumped since. The stock closed at the end of this week at $115.07. The post On Second Test of Its Newest Starship Design, SpaceX Sticks the Landing appeared first on New York Times.
SpaceX Starship Launch
...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT MDT MONDAY NIGHT... * WHAT...High temperatures of up to 100 degrees, with low temperatures in the lower to mid 70s providing little relief overnight. HeatRisk will be in the red (major) range through the weekend. * WHERE...Cache Valley/Utah Portion. * WHEN...Until midnight MDT Monday Night. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures may cause heat illnesses. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Take extra precautions when outside. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing. Try to limit strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Take action when you see symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. If you do not have air conditioning in your home or lack shelter, you can call 211 or visit 211utah.org for assistance locating appropriate shelter from the heat. &&
Anthropic drops Opus 5 at half of Fable 5's price
Opus 5 carries lighter safety restrictions than Fable 5, plus a new Automatic Fallbacks option that reroutes blocked requests instead of returning errors. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on Friday, July 24. The company sold it to developers and enterprise buyers as a model somewhere around Fable 5's intelligence for half the price. It follows Opus 4.8 by two months, and gives cost-conscious teams a cheaper default than the flagship they've been paying a premium to use. Opus 5 matches Fable 5 at half the price Opus 5 has the same operating cost as its predecessor. But it does a lot more, Anthropic says. The model outperforms all competitors on the coding assessment Frontier-Bench v0.1. It is cheaper per task, and outperforms Opus 4.8 by more than a factor of two. There's a tradeoff. An effort setting puts buyers in control. Buyers can choose between maximum intelligence or dialling down to spend fewer tokens on faster, cheaper answers. It's also now the default model on Claude Max, and the most capable option on Claude Pro. Anthropic sells it as a workhorse for everyday use, not as a specialist. The company claims it is more efficient than the alternatives sitting next to it. On the CursorBench 3.2 coding test, Opus 5 at maximum effort is within half a percentage point of the best score from Fable 5, at half the per-task cost. The smaller of the two is the Opus 5. But it beats Fable 5 outright on several of the benchmarks Anthropic released. On the novel problem test ARC-AGI 3, Opus 5 was three times better than the second best model. The pass rate on Zapier's AutomationBench was approximately 1.5 times higher than the nearest competitor, for the same price. It also beat Fable 5's best score in the OSWorld 2.0 computer use benchmark, for a third of the price. Anthropic admitted that in cybersecurity work, Opus 5 lags behind Mythos 5. Fewer restrictions add a new fallback option Opus 5 falls outside of the 30 day data retention policy that is in place for Fable and Mythos. Anthropic expects its safety classifiers to fire 85% less on Opus 5 than on Fable 5. But there are still guardrails for security tasks. Opus 5 cannot scan a compiled software binary for vulnerabilities. It can still search source code for them, since source level work is seen as more defensive. Anthropic is rolling out a beta feature called Automatic Fallbacks to reduce the pain when a classifier fires. It then routes a flagged request to a weaker model, ensuring that API users get a working answer instead of an error. Anthropic gave examples of the model working around obstacles, not stopping at them. For one task on the Frontier Bench, the model was shown a drawing of a machine part and asked to reproduce it as a 3D FreeCAD model. It couldn't see the photo. Opus 5 wrote its own computer vision code to read the geometry from raw pixels and then reconstructed the part. No rival model succeeded after five tries. Devin CEO Scott Wu quoted Anthropic's launch materials in saying the model "approaches Fable-level performance at half the cost" on the firm's FrontierCode 1.1 test. Zapier CEO Wade Foster said that Opus 5 topped his company's AutomationBench leaderboard. It also achieved a 100% pass rate on an end-to-end churn prevention workflow that earlier models had failed. In life sciences work, Anthropic reported a 10.2 percentage point increase over Opus 4.8 in inferring molecular structures from spectroscopy data. Mythos 5, Fable 5, and Sonnet 5 shipped back in June. Haiku is the only model still on the older generation. Cryptopolitan reported the company reached a ~$350 billion valuation in November 2025. The company generates about 80% of its revenue from over 300,000 business and enterprise customers.
Watch: Starship splashes down in Indian Ocean after Texas launch, SpaceX calls it 'lucky number 13'
Videos capturing the spectacular "landing" of the Starship V3 have since gone viral on social media. The space giant's CEO Elon Musk joined in on the massive celebrations online, confirming on X, "Starship is intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry!" Meanwhile, SpaceX's Dan Huot's live commentary at the time affirmed, "This is just the first time we've put a Starship into the water." Calling it SpaceX's "softest splashdown" ever, he hailed the latest test flight launch as "Lucky number 13." "This is a dream scenario for this team that's trying to get this heat shield data," Huot exclaimed. This is a developing story.
SpaceX launches Starship prototype on its 13th test flight
The launch was originally scheduled for July 16 but was aborted at the last minute NEW YORK, July 25. /TASS/. US aerospace company SpaceX on Friday launched a rocket carrying its Starship prototype spacecraft on its 13th test flight, with the event livestreamed on the company's X account. The rocket lifted off at 6:51 p.m. EDT (10:51 p.m. GMT on July 24) from the Starbase launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The flight is expected to last about an hour. During this time, SpaceX plans to deploy 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, six of which are equipped to monitor the prototype's heat shield. Upon mission completion, the spacecraft is scheduled to splash down in the Indian Ocean. The launch was originally scheduled for July 16 but was aborted at the last minute. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explained that an automatic abort was triggered after several engines failed to ignite. A subsequent attempt on July 23 was postponed to July 24 due to unfavorable weather conditions. The 12th test flight took place in May, featuring Starship S39--the first of SpaceX's third-generation V3 vehicles. That spacecraft exploded shortly after splashdown. SpaceX stated that engineers have since implemented necessary software updates and resolved the issues identified during that flight. According to SpaceX, the Starship space system is designed to be fully versatile. Its various configurations will be used for crewed low-Earth orbit flights, satellite deployments, and deep-space missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft are designed to be fully reusable and capable of vertical landings.
