Ray Blanco:

Going the Farthest: NASA’s Artemis II Scheduled to Launch This Evening

Four astronauts could launch toward the moon on Wednesday for the first time in more than 50 years. The targeted launch time is 6:24 p.m. tonight.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are set to fly on NASA’s Artemis II mission, a 10-day journey that will take them swinging around the moon. 

Their path through space could send the group farther from Earth than any human has ever ventured, surpassing the Apollo 13 distance record of 248,655 miles set in 1970.

Though the astronauts will not land on the moon’s surface, the flight is meant to kick-start a new era of lunar exploration, paving the way for a targeted moon landing in two years. The Artemis II mission will mark the first time that NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule carry human passengers.

The next mission, the Artemis III in 2027, will conduct technology demonstrations in low-Earth orbit, including testing out how a moon lander built by SpaceX or Blue Origin will dock with the Orion capsule.

In 2028, NASA plans for the Artemis IV mission to land astronauts on the moon.

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James Altucher:

OpenAI Is Now Valued at $852 Billion – That’s About 5 Disneys

OpenAI, the behemoth behind ChatGPT and still very much the cash-burning mass at the center of the AI universe, just closed out the biggest funding round in Silicon Valley history, raising a total of $122 billion and taking its current valuation to a genuinely staggering $852 billion.

The vast majority of the latest round comes from just three companies: Nvidia and SoftBank stumped up $30 billion apiece, while Amazon chipped in (a very much conditional) $50 billion – with the remainder made up of smaller sums from Andreessen Horowitz, MGX, and a host of other investors.

Sam Altman’s company is now expected to IPO before the end of the year, according to reports, and the latest raise puts it well ahead of competitor Anthropic, which makes the Claude suite of products and raised a somewhat paltry by comparison $30 billion last month at a $380 billion valuation.

With its new jaw-dropping valuation, OpenAI is now valued at roughly the same as McDonald’s ($222 billion), Disney ($171 billion), Boeing ($156 billion), Uber ($148 billion), Comcast ($105 billion), and Ford ($46 billion)... combined.

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Davis Wilson:

SpaceX Files Confidentially for IPO in Mega Listing Potentially Valued at $1.75 Trillion, Report Says

SpaceX, the technology conglomerate founded by Elon Musk, reportedly filed disclosures confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of an initial public offering. SpaceX could seek a valuation of $1.75 trillion, according to Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources.

Under SEC rules, a private company can file its IPO registration statement confidentially 15 days before it begins marketing its shares to public investors, allowing it to receive feedback from the agency in private. The company has also lined up an unusually large number of 21 banks to manage the mega IPO, internally codenamed “Project Apex,” Reuters reported Tuesday.

The company expects to raise $75 billion, which would make it the largest IPO in history, far beyond oil giant Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing in 2019. SpaceX has raised an estimated $10 billion as a private company.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX is the world’s leading space company, flying a fleet of reusable rockets and spacecraft, and operating a 10,000-satellite communications network, Starlink.

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