Venture Atlas

SpaceX is now targeting July 23 for its 13th Starship test flight after an interim July 20 window slipped, following the July 16 launch abort that halted the countdown at T-0 when four of Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite. Engineers removed and replaced two Raptors on the booster before the next attempt. The mission — the second flight of the more powerful Version 3 vehicle — aims to deploy 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites for the first time on a suborbital trajectory, six of them carrying cameras to inspect the ship's heat-shield tiles before reentry.

Vertical Aerospace began the first public piloted eVTOL demonstration flights in the history of the Farnborough International Airshow's flying display, flying its full-scale VX4 prototype during the July 20-24 show and exhibiting a full-scale model of its production aircraft, Valo. The Bristol-based company's piloted, four-passenger VX4 offers zero-emission flight with about 100 miles of range and a 150 mph cruise. Vertical says it holds roughly 1,500 conditional Valo pre-orders across four continents from customers including American Airlines, Japan Airlines, Avolon, Bristow and GOL.

SpaceX is negotiating a multibillion-dollar arrangement to lease AI data-center computing capacity to the U.S. Department of Defense, the Wall Street Journal reported July 17. Rather than selling data centers outright, SpaceX would rent out compute for a limited period to run AI models across Pentagon operations — a move that would push the company into direct competition with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle for military cloud work. The talks are ongoing and could still fall apart; they follow SpaceX's earlier compute deals, including a roughly $45 billion multiyear contract with Anthropic and about $920 million a month from Google.

The Farnborough International Airshow, the aerospace industry's biggest gathering, opened July 20 for a five-day run, with Boeing giving its uncrewed MQ-28 Ghost Bat collaborative combat aircraft its first static display at the show alongside a full-size 777X cabin mock-up and a T-7 trainer flight deck. Aviation-analytics firm IBA forecast up to 875 aircraft orders, options and commitments across the week — a rebound from the roughly 438 booked at Farnborough 2024 — though delivery slots sold out into the 2030s mean attention is as much on production as on fresh demand. Carriers including Etihad, Philippine Airlines and Riyadh Air are expected to firm up widebody deals with Boeing and Airbus during the event.