Latest Developments

Intel has signed on as a key design and manufacturing partner for Terafab, Elon Musk’s sprawling AI chip complex planned for the North Campus of Giga Texas in Austin — a facility intended to supply both SpaceX (now merged with xAI) and Tesla with next-generation AI silicon. The partnership marks a pivotal step toward closing what Musk describes as the gap between current chip production capacity and the exponential demand he anticipates for autonomous vehicles, humanoid robotics, and — critically — orbital data centers SpaceX plans to deploy in space. On the launch front, a Falcon 9 is queued to lift Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station, keeping cadence high as SpaceX’s constellation of 10,187 operational Starlink satellites continues supporting global broadband demand. With SpaceX’s IPO expected later this year, the Terafab announcement adds further momentum to the company’s diversification beyond launch and connectivity services.

Space Safety

Current conjunction assessments identify four moderate-risk events involving operational Starlink satellites and non-operational debris objects, with the highest probability conjunction occurring between STARLINK-33563 and COSMOS 2251 DEB on Apr 13, 2026 at 21:44 UTC (39.73% collision probability at 0.012 km minimum range). No high-risk conjunctions are currently flagged in the monitoring window. Concurrently, eight Starlink satellites are under active reentry prediction, with all predicted to decay between Apr 9-10, 2026, and associated uncertainty windows of ±24 hours.

Detailed Coverage

Intel Signs On to Design and Build Musk’s Terafab AI Chip Factory in Austin

Elon Musk’s Terafab venture, first announced in March 2026, has landed one of the semiconductor industry’s most storied names as a partner: Intel. The American chipmaker confirmed it will help design and construct the massive facility slated for the North Campus of Giga Texas, positioning Terafab as a vertically integrated AI chip pipeline serving Musk’s expanding empire. SpaceX — now merged with xAI — intends to use the output to power ground-based and space-based data centers, a key infrastructure layer for Starlink’s evolution beyond broadband into AI-driven services.

The Intel partnership carries particular strategic weight given the chipmaker’s own foundry ambitions and its effort to recapture relevance in AI silicon against NVIDIA and TSMC. For SpaceX watchers, the orbital data center angle is the thread most worth pulling: if Terafab delivers custom AI accelerators optimized for space deployment, future Starlink generations could carry onboard compute payloads far beyond today’s flat-panel terminals. SpaceX’s anticipated IPO later in 2026 makes the timing of this announcement anything but coincidental.

Read the full story: The Verge

Terafab Secures Major New Partner as Austin Semiconductor Hub Takes Shape

Beyond Intel, Terafab is assembling a broader coalition of partners as construction planning accelerates at Giga Texas’s North Campus. The joint-venture structure Musk has outlined suggests multiple stakeholders will share both capital risk and chip output, a model designed to de-risk the enormous upfront cost of fab construction while guaranteeing supply to SpaceX and Tesla ahead of commercial allocation. The facility’s scale, described as sprawling, signals ambitions that go well beyond serving internal demand alone.

For the Starlink constellation — currently sitting at 10,196 satellites in orbit with 10,187 operational out of 11,749 launched — onboard processing capability is increasingly a competitive differentiator. Terafab-derived chips tailored for radiation tolerance and thermal management in LEO could accelerate SpaceX’s roadmap toward autonomous satellite-to-satellite routing and edge AI inference, reducing latency without ground-station hops.

Read the full story: Teslarati

Falcon 9 to Deliver Cygnus to ISS as Busy April Launch Manifest Builds

A Falcon 9 booster is scheduled to loft Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus NG-22 cargo spacecraft toward the International Space Station in the coming days, adding to an already dense April cadence that also includes a Minotaur IV mission launching from California. The Cygnus flight underscores SpaceX’s continued role as a critical ISS logistics provider even as NASA’s Artemis II crewed lunar flyby mission reaches its halfway point in deep space.

From a tracking perspective, the Falcon 9 upper stage and any residual hardware will join an already-congested low Earth orbit environment monitored by tools like KeepTrack. Each additional ISS resupply mission generates short-lived debris risk during separation events, making precise orbital insertion and rapid passivation of the second stage an operational priority. With SpaceX flying at high tempo across both commercial and government manifests, booster reuse data from this mission will add another data point to the block upgrade reliability record.

Read the full story: NASASpaceFlight

Constellation Status

There have been no changes to the Starlink constellation since the last check. The constellation currently consists of 11,749 total launched satellites, with 10,196 remaining in orbit, 10,187 of which are actively working, and 1,553 that have decayed from orbit.

• Total Launched: 11749
• Total On Orbit: 10196
• Total Working: 10187

Track Starlink satellites in real-time: Track Starlink