Sign up to receive it in your inbox. Your story in this week's issue, " Predictions and Presentiments," is drawn from your forthcoming book, " Beginning Middle End," which is coming out in July. The audio version will incorporate sounds that you and your team recorded in Sicily, where both the piece and the novel are set. How would you compare the creative processes of writing and recording, and the experiences of reading and listening? Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now.

What does Elon Musk do with all his money? Tesla boss Elon Musk has been one of the world's richest people for several years now, and that wealth recently went stratospheric when he became the first half-trillionaire. Despite this, Musk has insisted he leads a largely unglamorous lifestyle. He said in 2021 that he lived in a Texas home valued at $50,000 (£38,000). His former partner Grimes, with whom he has two children, told Vanity Fair in 2022 he does not live the extravagant life of excess luxury many assume.

In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school's methods--surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers--to be an education in and of itself. At Alpha School's campus in Brownsville, Texas, a student works on exercises in a learning app. One day last fall, Kristine Barrios' 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes. At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her "guide," the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide's reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her. The adult guides in Alpha's classrooms "don't do any teaching," says the current head of the Brownsville school.

This was the last flight of SpaceX's V2 Starship design. Version 3 arrives next year. SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian Ocean. The rocket's 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines roared to life at 6:23 pm CDT (7:23 pm EDT; 23:23 UTC), throttling up to generate some 16.7 million pounds of thrust, by a large measure more powerful than any rocket before Starship. Moments later, the 404-foot-tall (123-meter) rocket began a vertical climb away from SpaceX's test site in Starbase, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.

Elon Musk Is Out to Rule Space. With SpaceX and Starlink, Elon Musk controls more than half the world's rocket launches and thousands of internet satellites. Just off the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, the hotel's rooftop bar is open late. The bartender passes out shots and turns Ozzy up. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off, its orange plume glowing bright, about 12 miles due north up the Banana River. The "Iron Man" riff starts to blast. When we hear the thud of the sonic boom, most everyone lets out some kind of hoot. This is SpaceX's 95th launch of the year, one nearly every other day. That's more liftoffs than the rest of the world gets into space, combined. For our politics issue, WIRED examines the state of tech's influence on governmental power--and the people who will change everything in the future. On this particular night, this Falcon 9 took 28 Starlink internet satellites to orbit. Starlink, of course, is another Musk space venture that dominates its competitors.

Orbital missions will unlock the next phase of Starship's development, providing better data on the performance of the spacecraft's heat shield and allowing for tests of in-orbit refueling, which will be essential for missions to Mars. Save this storyIt has been two weeks since SpaceX's last Starship test flight, and engineers have diagnosed issues with its heat shield, identified improvements, and developed a preliminary plan for the next time the ship heads into space. Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX executive in charge of build and flight reliability, presented the findings Monday at the American Astronautical Society's Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland. The rocket lifted off on August 26 from SpaceX's launch pad in Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border. It was the 10th full-scale test flight of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, combining to form the world's largest rocket. There were a couple of overarching objectives on the August 26 test flight.

Elon Musk has made light of the latest SpaceX test, which ended with the enormous rocket exploding on the launch pad. While footage showed Starship bursting into a gigantic ball of fire, Musk claimed that this was'just a scratch.' The Starship 36 rocket was undergoing a static fire test at SpaceX's Starbase test site at around 11pm last night, when its nose suddenly burst open. Within seconds, a giant ball of fire could be seen spreading on the ground as black clouds of smoke reached up to the night sky. The static fire test is a pre-flight procedure in which a rocket engine or a set of engines are ignited while the vehicle is firmly bolted to the launch mount, meaning the rocket was not set to launch Wednesday night when the explosion occurred. In a statement, SpaceX said the rocket suffered'a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase.

Fox News' Bret Baier has the latest on concerns over the retirement of the International Space Station on'Special Report.' Before the International Space Station was launched into orbit in 1998, the U.S. signed a document with several other countries to agree to the peaceful use of the orbital laboratory. The agreement included Russia, Japan, Canada and 11 European countries. China was left out of the plan. Nearly a decade later, China expressed interest in joining those on board the space station.

Tesla will unveil a prototype of its Optimus robot in September, Elon Musk has revealed. The Tesla CEO said the company's AI Day would be delayed in order to debut the humanoid robot, which the billionaire has claimed could be "more significant" than the company's electric car business. "Tesla AI Day pushed to Sept 30, as we may have an Optimus prototype working by then," Mr Musk tweeted. "Tesla AI Day 2 will be epic." The Optimus robot was first teased last August at Tesla's inaugural AI event, with Mr Musk saying it would have "profound implications for the economy".

SpaceX will launch its next-generation Starship SN20 rocket next month after successfully testing its deep space Raptor Vacuum engine, Elon Musk has confirmed. The launch will be the first orbital flight for the Mars-bound craft, which is being built to transport people and cargo around the Solar System. Previous Starship prototypes have performed high-altitude flight tests from SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, but the next stage of development requires a massive Super Heavy rocket in order to propel it to orbit. The November test will see Starship SN20 launch from Starbase before separating from the booster rocket and touching down 90 minutes later off the coast of Hawaii. SpaceX will attempt to catch the Super Heavy rocket using "robot chopsticks" attached to the launch tower – named'Mechazilla' by Mr Musk – that will guide it back down onto the pad.