🚨🇺🇸 The SpaceX IPO filing just set the entire space sector on fire🔥 Space and satellite stocks surged across the board today as investors piled into anything orbit-adjacent. Redwire closed up 26%, Firefly Aerospace jumped 19% after NASA picked its spacecraft for a moon mission, AST SpaceMobile rose 13%, and MDA Space climbed nearly 5%. A Bank of America basket of space-race stocks posted its biggest one-day gain in over a year and is up 57% on the year, crushing the S&P's 9.8%. Elon's filing, targeting up to $75 billion at a rumored $2 trillion valuation, is the gravity pulling all of it upward. When the biggest private company on earth opens its doors to public investors, every smaller player in its orbit suddenly looks like the next big thing. Source: Bloomberg @SpaceX

She was bullied for being "different." Now her IQ is higher than Einstein's. Meet Adhara Pérez Sánchez. 11 years old. From a low-income neighbourhood in Tláhauc, Mexico City. And quietly outsmarting two of the greatest minds in history. Her score? 162. Einstein and Hawking both clocked 160. Diagnosed with autism at age three after her speech regressed, Adhara spent her early years getting picked on at school for being "different." The same brain her classmates mocked had already memorised the entire periodic table and taught itself algebra. Her mum thought she was just bored. She wasn't bored. She was operating on another level entirely. By five, she'd finished elementary school. One year later, she had middle school AND high school in the rearview mirror. Then depression hit. A therapist sent her to the Center for Attention to Talent, where her sky-high IQ was finally discovered. A visit to a doctor's office decorated with Stephen Hawking artwork lit the fuse. The doctor explained who Hawking was, what he did, how he spoke to the universe through a machine. That was it. Space had her. Adhara already holds a bachelor's degree in systems engineering from CNCI University. Right now she's deep into a master's in mathematics at the Technological University of Mexico. The endgame? NASA. Mars. The stars she was practically named after. She's also chasing her G-tests, the gateway to flying with an agency linked to NASA. If everything lines up, she could be the first autistic person ever to fly a mission, around age 17. The kid they bullied is heading to space. Source: IBTimes UK (via Marie Claire Mexico)

SAUDI ARABIA SPENT 5 MONTHS BUILDING AN ESCAPE ROUTE FROM IRAN. THE HOUTHIS JUST CLOSED IT. When Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia didn't panic. It rerouted oil 1,200 kilometers overland through the East-West Pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, sacrificing natural-gas-liquids revenue to push capacity from 5 million to 7 million barrels a day. It’s actually a genuine engineering and economic achievement, built in months, designed to make the kingdom's oil exports untouchable by Iran. This week, the Houthis put a spanner in the works. THE SQUEEZE On July 20, Yemen's Houthi movement declared a full naval blockade of Saudi Arabia and struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. By Friday, they hit the source directly: missiles and drones on Aramco's Jizan refinery, and a simultaneous strike on the Yanbu export terminal, the exact port the kingdom built its Hormuz workaround around. NASA's satellite fire-detection system confirmed multiple thermal anomalies at Jizan at 1:17am UTC. Brent crude broke back above $100 a barrel within hours. Here's the part that makes this more than another rocket over the Red Sea: every barrel Yanbu loads still has to exit through the Bab al-Mandeb strait to reach open water. Iran controls the door on one side of the peninsula. The Houthis, backed by Iran, now threaten the only other one. WHO SAYS WHAT Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree framed it as retaliation, not initiation, accusing Saudi of "escalation" after Saudi strikes on Hodeidah, and vowing to answer "escalation with escalation." Yemen's government says the Houthis are using the strait "to serve Iran's regional agenda and strengthen Tehran's negotiating position" The Houthis have a real grievance, a blockade Riyadh has enforced on Yemen for over a decade, and Iran has a real interest in every additional lever it can pull on Saudi Arabia while its own war with Washington grinds on. FLIP THE SEATS Picture the Saudi energy ministry official who spent five months and real money solving the Hormuz problem, converting NGL infrastructure, pushing throughput past design limits, briefing the world that the kingdom had insulated itself from Iranian leverage. Now picture that same person watching satellite footage of Yanbu-bound crude burning at the refinery gate, in a port they specifically chose because it wasn't supposed to be anyone's chokepoint. The lesson isn't that the pipeline was badly planned. It's that in a region with this many armed, motivated actors, there is no single fix. THE BIGGER PATTERN This isn't the tidy version of multipolarity, a single rising bloc calmly displacing a single declining hegemon. It's messier than that, and more honest: when no one power can fully guarantee the safety of the world's oil, the number of actors who can threaten it doesn't shrink to two. It grows. Iran doesn't need to personally close both routes. It just needs an ally willing to close the second one for its own reasons, at the moment that reinforces Iran's position most. The Unipolar Order is discovering it never had as many fronts covered as it thought. Saudi Arabia will likely find a third route eventually. The question worth sitting with is how long the kingdom, the world and the price of gas everywhere can survive the search.

NASA’s WB-57 jet studies eclipses from about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) — above most of the haze and turbulence that blur the view below, for a sharper look at the Sun’s corona. The WB-57 will observe the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse from above. More: