Eric Schmidt's aircraft lands in New York the week NASA's Mars contract reshapes his space ambitions

Eric Schmidt's aircraft, N652WE, a Gulfstream G650ER registered to a Bank of Utah trustee, was tracked departing Los Alamitos Army Air Field on the afternoon of June 23 and landing at New York Stewart International Airport four hours and ten minutes later, after a high-altitude crossing over the continent.

If aboard, Schmidt would arrive in the New York area the same week his rocket company, Relativity Space, was selected by NASA for a 2028 Mars orbiter mission carrying the Aeolus instrument suite, as reported by TechCrunch, The Verge, and Scientific American on June 17. The public-private partnership—structured like SpaceX's cargo flights to the ISS—tasks Relativity with providing both the Terran R rocket and the spacecraft in an arrangement that could see Schmidt's company beat Elon Musk's SpaceX to a private Martian mission, a neat twist given their long-running debates on AI safety.

This transit follows a well-worn pattern: N652WE has frequented Teterboro and Stewart terminals repeatedly this month after a flurry of West Coast hops between Van Nuys and Santa Barbara last month. Should Schmidt continue the pattern, another swing through the Northeast may point toward his ongoing legal entanglement—a 2025 lawsuit seeking to void a 2024 settlement—or perhaps toward philanthropic meetings tied to Schmidt Sciences, which funds the Lazuli space telescope and, per The Next Web, stands as the unnamed customer behind the Aeolus relay data center technology.