A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched three AST SpaceMobile BlueBird satellites (BlueBird 11, 12, and 13) from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 0749 UTC, Wednsday (Aug. 5).

The Falcon 9's first stage booster B1077 returned to Earth roughly 8.5 minutes after liftoff as planned, touching down in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas." It was B1077's 30th launch and landing, according to a SpaceX mission description. The rocket also flew the BlueBird 8-10 mission in June.

The next-generation Block 2 satellites deployed on this BlueBird 11-13 mission, features massive 223-square-meter phased-array antennas, and is designed to deliver direct-to-cell broadband to unmodified smartphones.

These new satellites offer nearly double the peak download speeds of the first-generation Block 1 models. Wednesday's launch follows the successful deployment of BlueBirds 8, 9, and 10 in June and brings the total number of BlueBird spacecraft launched to 13, positioning the company for beta services later in 2026. BlueBird 7 was lost shortly after liftoff this past April after its Blue Origin New Glenn rocket suffered an anomaly.

"This orbital launch, combined with expanded manufacturing capacity and the recent successful launch and deployment of BlueBird satellites 8, 9, and 10, position us for beta services later this year with our space-based cellular broadband coverage," Scott Wisniewski, the company's president, said in a July 28 statement.

BlueBirds 11 through 13 nearly double the off-Earth population. "These next-generation BlueBird satellites are expected to deliver nearly double the peak download speeds achieved by the company's initial Block 1 BlueBird satellites, which recently demonstrated peak download speeds of 98.9 Mbps directly to standard smartphones," AST SpaceMobile wrote in the same statement.

Wednesday's launch expands AST SpaceMobile's constellation, which holds FCC authorization for up to 248 satellites and partnerships with major carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and Vodafone. Manufacturing is advancing rapidly, with BlueBirds 14, 15, and 16 already in production and assembly flowing through satellite 42.

In its first earnings call since going public on June 2026, SpaceX reported Q2 2026 revenue of $7.8 billion, beating analyst expectations of $6.93 billion, though shares fell 7% after-hours due to $18.4 billion in capital expenditures, mostly for AI.

CEO Elon Musk and President Gwynne Shotwell highlighted a new exclusive partnership with Nvidia to develop "Starmind AI1" satellites equipped with Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture for orbital computing, with launches expected as early as 2027.

Starlink remained the top revenue generator at $4.29 billion (up 66% YoY), fueled by the upcoming V3 satellites which Musk says could deliver "a majority of the world's internet" within 10 years.

Musk also announced accelerated AI goals, including $100 billion in annualized revenue run rate by December 2026 and a potential $1 trillion revenue target by 2029–2030, while confirming Grok 4.6 would launch within a week and Grok 5 by year-end, integrating all SpaceX data.

CFO Johnsen highlighted favorable cloud economics (sub-1-year payback on new compute deployments) and additional ~$6.7 billion in early Q3 cloud contracts ramping from October. Musk raised this further, calling the $100B figure a “do nothing” baseline that would likely be exceeded, and accelerated the internal $1 trillion revenue target from 2031 to 2030 (non-zero chance of 2029).

Regarding Starship, Musk said the heat shield problem is "solved" and hinted at daily launches by mid-2027, though Shotwell tempered expectations, citing NASA milestones for human lunar landing by 2028.

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I would call the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said. "All indications from data and visual inspection is we have solved it. That doesn't mean we won't make improvement, but we do not see any technical obstacles to achieving rapid reusability at this point."

The call also noted SpaceX's $541 million net loss (narrowed from $1 billion YoY) and an impending lock-up expiration that could allow insiders to sell up to 20% of shares.

SpaceX went public on June 12, 2026, under the ticker SPCX (Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas), in the largest IPO in history. It raised roughly $75–85.7 billion (including overallotment) at $135 per share, implying a $1.77 trillion valuation. Shares opened higher (around $150) and closed the debut day up ~19%. Musk retained strong control.

A critical firmware vulnerability in Coldcard hardware bitcoin wallets by Coinkite allowed attackers to steal about 1,367 BTC (valued at up to $89 million) from over 4,500 addresses in a series of coordinated attacks in the past week.

An initial coordinated sweep drained 594 BTC (~$38 million) from roughly 500 wallets in just 25 minutes, targeting the highest-value dormant accounts. The attack expanded to 1,082 BTC across 1,196 addresses within a 41-minute window, with attackers using elevated transaction fees to ensure rapid confirmation.

Cumulative losses reached 1,367 BTC across 4,585 addresses, with attackers continuing to exploit the vulnerability as other actors joined in.

The flaw, present since March 2021, caused affected devices to generate wallet seeds with significantly reduced entropy—40 bits for Mk3 devices and 72 bits for later models—instead of the intended 128 bits, by silently falling back to a predictable software-based random number generator instead of the hardware RNG.

A 2021 code commit introduced a library (`libngu`) that used a preprocessor check which only verified if a macro was defined, not if it was enabled. This caused the device to bypass its secure hardware random number generator.

The fallback software generator relied on non-secret data like chip IDs and internal clock values, creating a search space small enough for attackers to brute-force private keys offline.

Mk3 units running firmware 4.0.0 or later were most severely impacted. Mk4, Mk5, and Q devices were also vulnerable, though with slightly higher entropy (~72 bits).

The bug remained undetected through five years of updates and AI-assisted audits, as the generated seeds appeared valid but lacked true randomness.

The stolen Bitcoin remains largely unspent, held in a small number of attacker-controlled addresses, with analysts suggesting this is a deliberate strategy to avoid capture by authorities and triggering immediate market panic.

Galaxy Research identified about 600 suspected attacker addresses and reported them to federal investigators, compliance firms, and cybersecurity teams. Block, Jack Dorsey’s company, published an independent technical analysis confirming the RNG flaw.

Coinkite released patched firmware and urged users to transfer funds to new, secure wallets. Crucially, users were warned that updating the device does not fix old seeds; users must generate entirely new seeds using the updated firmware.

In an update on X Tuesday, Coinkite wrote in part: "We understand there is real anger at this moment. Users have suffered real losses, and for those impacted, no public statement is enough.

"We continue to support affected customers directly and urge others to reach out to any other users they are aware of who may be affected. Urgently: if your seed was generated with our affected firmware, without at least 50 independent, private dice rolls, and your funds aren't protected by a strong, unique BIP-39 passphrase, move those funds to a new wallet now.

"As independent researchers have publicly corroborated, this firmware bug appears to have lived at a boundary between two unrelated submodules, not in the parent code, and not in the cryptographic or Bitcoin-specific logic that are the subject of most internal and third-party reviews.

"Because the flag check looked correct, the bug silently went unnoticed, and its potential impact grew with every release.

"We believe it’s important for the broader ecosystem to understand how this bug arose, and why it evaded detection, so they can avoid similar consequences.

"We know there are questions about our own use of AI in code review. We'll cover this fully in our post-mortem, but given the active investigation right now, here's what we can say immediately.

"We've run AI-assisted review against our critical codebases, including in the weeks before the exploit. It did not catch this vulnerability. Since the incident, we've also tested our code against frontier models, including Kimi K3, Claude Fable, and Codex 5.6. None of them caught it.

"It's a reason for us, and anyone else relying on AI tools, to be specific about what it currently catches and what it might not."

The ColdCard incident highlighted that hardware wallet security is only as strong as its entropy generation, prompting competitors like Ledger and Trezor to reaffirm the security of their own TRNG implementations.