NASA Picks Relativity for Mars as SpaceX Snaps Rally and Ariane 6 Lofts 36 Amazon Leo Sats

SpaceX gave back some of its post-IPO surge on Wednesday, with the newly listed stock closing down 4.95% after a multi-day rally that briefly carried its market capitalization above Amazon and Microsoft. The pullback came on the same day SpaceX disclosed that former Sequoia Capital steward Roelof Botha had taken an open seat on a board that now sits at nine directors, with Elon Musk still controlling more than 80% of the voting power. Options trading in the ticker also set first-day post-IPO records, with institutional desks already structuring collars around the September expiry to lock in early gains.

NASA gave Relativity Space its biggest validation since Eric Schmidt took control of the company, awarding it the Aeolus Mars orbiter mission for a 2028 launch under a six-year reimbursable Space Act Agreement. Relativity will supply the Terran R rocket, spacecraft, and cruise operations while NASA Ames builds a four-instrument atmospheric suite, a structure Administrator Jared Isaacman explicitly compared to the cargo deals that seeded SpaceX. Relativity separately announced its own Interplanetary Sciences Program around the same mission, signaling a broader push into privately financed planetary science.

European and commercial launch lines stayed busy around the SpaceX story. Arianespace flew the P160C-boosted Ariane 64 from French Guiana, lofting 36 Amazon Leo satellites on Europe's heaviest payload ever, while ESA studied raising Ariane 6 to 15 flights a year before 2030. SpaceX itself stacked three AST SpaceMobile BlueBirds on a single Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral, France committed €138 million to Eutelsat for secure satellite communications under a wider €1 billion framework, and Dawn Aerospace closed a $25 million Series B at a $196 million valuation for propulsion and its Aurora spaceplane.