Thursday May 21, 2026
What to Actually Watch For When Starship Flies Tonight
SpaceX has been been rockets for 24 years. Founded in 2002, the company has spent more than two decades and over $15 billion inching toward a single, almost objective: a fully reusable rocket large enough to make humans a multi-planetary species. Tonight at Starbase, formerly Boca Chica, Texas, Flight 12 lifts off carrying a vehicle that has never flown before; almost nothing on it has.
The booster is new. The ship is new. The Raptor engines powering both are a new generation. Even the launch pad is new. SpaceX has redesigned nearly every component of Starship and is putting the entire architecture into the air on a single flight. If both stages spash down into the ocean, the media will likely call it a failure. Once again they will be wrong.
The objectives read like a stress test manual. One heat shield tile has been deliberately removed to measure how the surrounding tiles handle reentry without it. Several other tiles have been painted white so that two modified Starlink satellites can photograph them in flight and test whether SpaceX can inspect a returning vehicle from orbit. A single Raptor engine will attempt a relight in space. The rear flaps will be pushed to their structural limits on purpose. The ship will execute a dynamic banking maneuver that mimics the trajectory it will fly when future missions return to Starbase for a tower catch. And, rwenty Starlink simulators sized like next-generation satellites will deploy on a suborbital arc.
Both stages are scheduled to splash down. The first should land in the Gulf 7 minutes after launch, and stage 2 will land in the Indian Ocean, 58 minutes later. This is the stated plan, not a contingency.
The investor lesson sitting underneath this is the one most people still miss about SpaceX. The company has compressed twenty four years of capital, iteration, and public skepticism into a development model that treats expensive hardware as expendable data. Building a rocket is hard. Launching one is harder. Launching one the size of a 40 story building, again and again, while learning from every flight, is what SpaceX is now doing on a regular basis.
Note: The 90-minute launch window opens at 6:30 PM ET. SpaceX will live stream the attempt on X and YouTube.
◾ SpaceX files for IPO (SEC)
◾ Trump signs EO directing Fed and regulators to open payment services to fintechs and non-banks (White House)
◾ NVIDIA $NVDA Q1’27: Revenue $81.6B +85% y/y | Op income $53.5B +147% y/y | Net income $58.3B +211% y/y (NVIDIA)
Government & NGO Actions
◾ EU opens MiCA consultation period (EC)
◾ Fed proposes limited payment accounts for fintechs and crypto firms, no full banking privileges (Reuters)
◾ Qivalis, European euro-pegged stablecoin consortium, launches with 25 members (FT)
◾ Taiwan probes 3 over alleged illegal export of high-end AI servers to China (Reuters)
◾ Treasury sanctions Sinaloa cartel members for crypto money laundering (Treasury)
◾ Missouri AG sues crypto ATM operator CoinFlip over scam enablement (Missouri AG)
◾ Rep Horsford (D-NV) introduces Digital Asset Parity Act to revise crypto tax code (X)
◾ SEC seeks comment on prediction market ETFs (SEC)
◾ FTC begins enforcing Take It Down Act (FTC)
◾ SEC proposes reforms to encourage more companies to go and stay public (SEC)
◾ CFTC sues Minnesota over prediction market jurisdiction (CFTC)
◾ South Carolina governor approves crypto framework (State Affairs)
◾ Senate confirms Matthew Anderson as NASA Deputy Administrator (NASA Watch)
◾ Bank of England says tokenization could cut costs, enable near-real-time settlement, automate transactions, improve cross-border payments, expand liquidity, and drive competition (BoE)
◾ Sen Warren (D-MA) accuses OCC of violating banking regs by granting national trust charters to crypto firms (Senate Banking)
◾ Singapore revokes Bsquared’s crypto license (MAS)
◾ Estonia suspends Zondacrypto license (FIU)
Financial Notices & Public Company Releases
◾ Financial updates:
Anthropic expects Q2 revenue of $10.9B (CNBC) and operating profit of $559M (Reuters)
Ubisoft $UBSFY FY’26: Revenue €1.5B -17% y/y | Op loss €1.0B | Net loss €1.2B (Ubisoft)
NetEase $NTES Q1’26: Revenue RMB30.6B +6% y/y | Op income RMB12.7B | Net income RMB10.7B (NetEase)
Securitize $CEPT Q1’26: Revenue $19.5M +39% y/y | Net loss $7.9M | aEBITDA $0.8M (PR Newswire)
Corvex $MOVE Q1’26: Revenue $510K | Op loss $4.8M | Net loss $5.1M | aEBITDA loss $1.6M (SEC Filing)
◾ Operation updates:
Strive $ASST +382 BTC | total holdings 15,391 BTC ($1.1B) (X)
◾ OpenAI readies IPO filing (WSJ)
◾ Nakamoto $NAKA announces 1-for-40 reverse stock split (Business Wire)
◾ Rocket Lab $RKLB files $3B ATM shelf agreement (SEC)
◾ Truth Social $DJT withdraws bitcoin ETF registration (SEC)
Restructuring, Hacks, Losses & Legal Updates
◾ Meta $META lays off 8,000 in restructuring (NYT)
◾ Ethereum dev shop Syndicate Labs winds down (X)
Crypto Protocols, Applications & Business News
◾ Tether buys SoftBank $SFTBY stake in Twenty One Capital $XXI (Tether)
◾ Perpetuals $PDC launches risk-free prediction trading platform UpsideOnly (Business Wire)
◾ Fireblocks joins x402 Foundation, launches agentic payments suite (PR Newswire)
◾ Coinbase $COIN powers USDF, Flipcash’s Solana-issued stablecoin backed by USDC (Coinbase)
◾ MoneyGram $MGI becomes Tempo’s anchor remittance validator (PR Newswire)
◾ Crypto custodian Copper exploring $500M sale (CoinDesk)
AI Models, Applications & Developments
◾ Google $GOOGL upgrades Search with new AI model (Google)
◾ Anthropic hires OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy (CNBC)
◾ Anthropic to pay SpaceX ~$45B for compute deal (Bloomberg)
◾ Bristol-Myers Squibb $BMY rolls out Anthropic to 30,000 employees (WSJ)
◾ AMD $AMD plans $10B investment across Taiwan’s AI ecosystem (Reuters)
◾ KPMG integrates Claude across core workforce (Anthropic)
◾ Sam Altman offers YC founders $2M in OpenAI tokens for equity (The Information)
◾ Bezos calls 2-3 year timeline for space data centers “a little ambitious” (CNBC)
The Attention Economy, Gaming & Interactive Shifts
◾ Polymarket launches prediction markets on private companies, powered by Nasdaq Private Market data (Business Wire)
◾ Xbox hires Matthew Ball as Chief Strategy Officer (The Verge)
◾ Embracer to spin off Fellowship Entertainment as separate public company (GamesIndustry.biz)
Space Systems, Satellites & Cosmic Activity
◾ Vast expands into high-power satellite buses (Vast)
◾ Stoke Space commissions Cape Canaveral SLC-14 pad (Spectrum News 13)