SpaceX
SpaceX, NASA ready for first astronaut launch from US soil in nearly a decade
NASA and SpaceX have confirmed that the private spaceflight company’s historic astronaut launch is officially set to blast off on May 27, marking the return of human spaceflight to U.S. soil for the first time since 2011.
During the mission, known as Demo-2, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will launch to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This flight will mark the first time astronauts have launched from American soil in nearly a decade, following the retirement of the shuttle program.
-
- Space Crew Dragon (Credit: NASA)
-
- Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will launch to the space station on May 27, 2020. Credit: NASA
It is also the final test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. If all goes as planned, the gumdrop-shaped capsule will carry a crew of four astronauts later this year.
Liftoff for Demo-2 is set for 4:32 p.m. EDT (2032 GMT) from NASA’s historic launch pad 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida — the same site that hosted NASA’s storied Apollo and shuttle programs.
https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1251178705633841167?s=20
NASA has not set a specific duration for the mission yet; that will likely be determined once the crew arrives on station. NASA launched a new web page dedicated to the mission, describing it as simply “an extended stay at the space station,” for now.
Behnken and Hurley will join fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who launched to the station on April 10. Many of the details are still being ironed out, but we do know that Hurley will be the mission’s commander, and Behnken will serve as joint operations commander. Each will be tasked with specific duties during flight, with Hurley focusing on launch, landing, and recovery. Behnken will handle docking and undocking, as well as any activities while the Dragon is docked with the station.
-
Once the crew finishes its mission, Behnken and Hurley will return to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Florida coast. From there, the capsule will be retrieved by a SpaceX recovery ship.
SpaceX made history in 2012 by becoming the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Now, that cargo-carrying Dragon has been upgraded to carry a new type of cargo: people.
To prepare for the historical journey, SpaceX had to prove that the craft was capable and safe to transport astronauts. To that end, the company launched an uncrewed test flight in March 2019. Dubbed Demo-1, that mission was a huge success, with the Crew Dragon capsule performing as expected.
Earlier this year, in January, SpaceX completed a crucial test of the Falcon and Dragon’s safety system. Known as a launch escape system, the technology is designed to push the capsule to safety in the event something goes wrong during the climb to orbit. Musk and NASA described that launch as “picture-perfect.”
That brief test was the last major hurdle that SpaceX had to complete before it was given the go-ahead to launch the crewed test flight. In the intervening months, the crew, as well as team members in launch control, have been busy running simulations and practicing essential launch day procedures.
While SpaceX will be the first to launch people, they are not alone in the quest to return human spaceflight to American soil. In 2014, NASA selected SpaceX and Being to design and build spaceships capable of transporting astronauts to and from the space station. Boeing launched its uncrewed test flight in December 2019; however, that flight failed to reach the station because of some issues with the vehicle’s software.
As such, Boeing has decided to fly a second uncrewed flight before astronauts climb aboard its Starliner spacecraft.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
-
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
SpaceX’s massive investment in AI will make it a big winner, Argus Research said after the company’s successful earnings call last week.
The firm also upgraded shares to a Buy from Hold and set a $160 price target.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) is currently recovering from its heavy AI infrastructure investments, as it spent nearly $16 billion in Q2 alone. The company did this primarily by monetizing high-demand GPU compute capacity at a much faster pace than traditional data center economics would suggest.
Company CFO Bret Johnsen said that SpaceX would be able to pay back anything on new deployments within a year.
There are plenty of ways the company can do this:
Leasing excess compute capacity through contracts
SpaceX has already built Colossus and Colossus II, largely for its own model training. However, much of that capacity is already rented out to third parties. It already has major deals with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI. These partnerships are adding billions per month to SpaceX’s spreadsheet.
-
High utilization driven by industry-wide scarcity
The demand for advanced AI training and inference capacity continues to exceed what is available for use. SpaceX can fill new racks quickly after they come online, so the capital deployed converts into revenue with minimal idle time.
Additionally, management and outside observers have described the new compute capital as behaving more like a cost-of-goods-sold than traditional multi-year capex, especially because of this rapid monetization pattern.
Capacity has already scaled from ~0.4 GW a year to 1.4 GW annually by the end of Q2. There are targets of more than 2 GW by year-end.
High incremental margins on the rental business once capacity is online
GPU cloud providers often operate at strong gross margins. SpaceX can monetize capacity that was already partially built or can be added efficiently. This means that incremental EBITDA margins on the rental revenue are usually high. This accelerates cash recovery relative to the gross capital outlay.
Parallel monetization of its own AI software and applications
Beyond pure infrastructure rental, SpaceX also generates revenue from Grok through subscriptions and usage, from X through ads, data, and other related services, enterprise APIs, and the planned integration of the Cursor coding tools acquisition.
These application layers ride on the same compute infrastructure and provide additional high-margin streams that could offset build-out costs. AI-segment revenue overall rose sharply to about $2.6 billion in Q2, according to Motley Fool. This was driven primarily by the infrastructure contracts, but the software side is also partially responsible.
Efficient, large-scale deployment and vertical integration advantages
SpaceX has emphasized the rapid construction of power and cooling infrastructure and favorable cost-per-megawatt economics relative to industry benchmarks in some disclosures.
-
Combined with its ability to scale capacity aggressively and the fact that many contracts start generating revenue within months of capacity coming online, the effective payback compresses dramatically compared with more conventional multi-year data-center projects.
SpaceX’s dominant near-term recovery path will turn the AI clusters into a hyperscale-style compute rental business for other leading AI companies while still using a portion for internal models.
Elon Musk
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
Elon Musk again denies a Tesla China split as new SpaceX merger speculation resurfaces quickly.
Elon Musk restated that Tesla has no plans to separate its China business from the rest of the company, responding to a new round of merger speculation from ARK Invest.
On the firm’s “Brainstorm” podcast, Cathie Wood’s team, including chief futurist Brett Winton and research director Nick Grous, argued a Tesla and SpaceX combination remains likely, with an announcement possible before the end of the year even if the deal itself would not close that quickly. Winton called Tesla’s Shanghai operations a “small ish wrinkle” for a merger rather than a real obstacle, since SpaceX’s national security work with the U.S. government sits uneasily next to Tesla’s manufacturing base in China.
Musk pushed back on the framing directly. “China is awesome. I strongly encourage people to visit,” he wrote on X. He also repeated language he first used in late July, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla executives had been told to prepare for a possible spinoff, sale, or closure of the China business ahead of a SpaceX tie up. Musk called that report “absurdly fake news” at the time, adding that a separation had “never even come up in a discussion ever,” a line he echoed again this week.
The repeated denial has not settled the underlying question, because Shanghai’s role in Tesla’s business is exactly what makes a merger complicated. Gigafactory Shanghai still ships more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries and functions as the company’s main export hub for Europe and Asia. Teslarati previously reported on Musk’s initial denial, and the merger conversation itself has been building since SpaceX’s IPO gave it public shares to use as acquisition currency.
Wedbush’s Dan Ives has pegged the odds of a Tesla SpaceX merger at 80 to 90 percent by early 2027, and ARK’s prediction of a year end announcement adds another data point to that timeline, even as Musk keeps rejecting the specific mechanics reporters have described. Neither position rules out the other. Musk can deny a China spinoff was ever discussed while analysts still expect some form of combination to move forward, since ARK and Ives are both describing convergence at the corporate level, not necessarily the internal restructuring the Journal described in July.
For now, Tesla’s China business remains intact, and Musk’s comments this week make clear he has no interest in publicly walking that position back, no matter how often the merger question resurfaces.
-
Tesla launches V2L Outlet Adapter for Premium Model Y in the U.S.
Tesla Roadster unveiling nears, and it will fly: The Information
