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SpaceX rapidly turns around drone ship for sixth launch this month

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SpaceX has rapidly turned around one of its two East Coast ‘autonomous spaceport drone ships’ and sent the vessel back to sea to support the sixth and final Falcon 9 launch planned this month.

SpaceX began the month with the successful launch of Transporter-4 – its fourth dedicated smallsat rideshare mission – on April 1st. Axiom-1 – the first all-private astronaut launch to the International Space Station – followed on April 8th. On the West Coast, another Falcon 9 rocket launched SpaceX’s second National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spy satellite mission in two months on April 17th. Most recently, Falcon 9 booster B1060 tied SpaceX’s current 12-flight reusability record with the successful launch of a batch of Starlink satellites at 1:51 pm EDT on April 21st.

Drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) was tasked with supporting Falcon 9 booster recovery for Transporter-4 and Starlink 4-14. Now, less than a day after returning to Port Canaveral with booster B1060, the ship has been towed back to sea to support another Starlink launch and landing.

Due to almost two weeks of launch delays caused by Dragon recovery challenges, drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas (ASOG) – the second of two East Coast drone ships – has been stuck at sea while waiting to support NASA and SpaceX’s upcoming Crew-4 astronaut launch. To preserve plans for a late-April Starlink mission, SpaceX’s recovery team has needed to move about as fast as they ever have to allow JRTI to take ASOG’s place.

Following Starlink 4-14’s April 21st launch and landing, drone ship JRTI sailed into Port Canaveral around 2am EDT, April 24th. Within minutes of arriving at its usual berth, a dockside crane had swung over and begun installing a lifting cap on top of booster B1060. Less than four hours later, the booster was lifted off of JRTI’s deck and moved onto dry land, freeing up the space it occupied for any necessary inspections or repairs. The quick booster removal also gave SpaceX time to drive the drone ship’s robotic ‘Octagrabber’ recovery robot into a garage on its deck.

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Just after 8pm EDT, less than 16 hours after JRTI reached its berth, support ship Bob towed the converted barge back out to sea. If Starlink 4-16 launches on time on April 29th, Just Read The Instructions will narrowly beat a three-year-old drone ship turnaround record (8d 6h) set by Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) in early 2019; recovering Falcon 9 booster B1062 just 8 days, 3 hours, and 42 minutes after Falcon 9 B1060 – and despite traveling ~1950 km instead of ~1850 km.

Ultimately, that distance is the main reason the current record has survived for so long. Short of building or modifying a new kind of recovery ship with a different type of hull, a flat-bottomed barge – towed or self-propelled – will never be able to traverse hundreds of miles of open ocean at high speeds.

Aside from breaking a potential drone ship turnaround record, Next Spaceflight reports that Starlink 4-16 will also almost certainly beat SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 booster turnaround record. Falcon 9 booster B1062 last launched Axiom-1 at 11:17 am EDT on April 8th. A 5:33 pm EDT, April 29th launch would translate to a turnaround time of 21 days and 6 hours, beating the current record of 27 days and 4 hours – set by B1060 in early 2021 – by more than a quarter.

If Crew-4 launches roughly on time, Starlink 4-14 will be SpaceX’s sixth launch in four weeks and 17th launch of 2022. If the company can sustain that pace over the remaining two-thirds of the year, it could feasibly launch more than 51 times in 2022.

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Tesla prepares for full-throttle manufacturing of major product

Tesla has the second quarter of 2026 as its projected start date for Cybercab production. It also plans to launch Semi and Megapack 3 for “volume production” starting next year, which will also be two major contributors to the company.

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(Credit: Tesla North America | X)

Tesla is preparing for a full-throttle manufacturing effort of potentially its biggest product in company history, job postings on the company’s website show.

In preparation for its foray into fully autonomous travel, Tesla is gearing up for Cybercab manufacturing with 30 job postings, ranging from repair technicians to manufacturing specialists.

Elon Musk sets definitive Tesla Cybercab production date and puts a rumor to rest

The jobs are all located in Austin, Texas, where the company’s Gigafactory Texas facility is located. This is where Cybercab production is going to take place.

Tesla has made major strides in the Cybercab project over the past few months, including launching the vehicle on the Fremont Test Track in California and conducting crash testing at Gigafactory Texas.

All of these indicate the company is preparing for an imminent production effort of the vehicle, which, as Elon Musk said during last week’s Earnings Call, will be void of a steering wheel or pedals.

Tesla has the second quarter of 2026 as its projected start date for Cybercab production. It also plans to launch Semi and Megapack 3 for “volume production” starting next year, which will also be two major contributors to the company.

Musk spoke in great detail during the Earnings Call last week about Cybercab’s potential to change the grand picture of the automotive market, comparing other vehicles in the Tesla lineup to “a little bit of the horse-carriage thing.”

He said:

“That’s really a vehicle that’s optimized for full autonomy. It, in fact, does not have a steering wheel or pedals and is really an enduring optimization on minimizing cost per mile for fully considered cost per mile of operation. For our other vehicles, they still have a little bit of the horse carriage thing going on where, obviously, if you’ve got steering wheels and pedals and you’re designing a car that people might want to go very direct past acceleration and tight cornering, like high-performance cars, then you’re going to design a different car than one that is optimized for a comfortable ride and doesn’t expect to go past sort of 85 or 90 miles an hour.”

Cybercab production is imminent, given the job postings and the company’s proposed timeline for manufacturing to begin. Of course, there is always the potential that Tesla is late to the party, as it has been with other projects.

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xAI’s Grokipedia goes live, gets praise from Wikipedia co-founder

xAI’s latest creation, Grokipedia, has gone live, and even if it’s only at Version 0.1, it is already receiving positive reviews from some users.

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Credit: xAI/X

xAI’s latest creation, Grokipedia, has gone live, and even if it’s only at Version 0.1, it is already receiving positive reviews from some users. These include Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, which has become quite controversial in recent years over accusations of bias.

Grokipedia launches

Immediately after Grokipedia went live, the AI-powered Wikipedia alternative was tested by numerous users. So far, a good number of testers have responded positively to the online encyclopedia, with many observing that Grokipedia does tend to be more neutral than Wikipedia. This was particularly evident in controversial topics, from alternative medicine to events like Gamergate.

Among these users was Larry Sanger, who noted that while Grokipedia still has a lot of areas of improvement, it is already very promising. “My initial impression, looking at my own article and poking around here and there, is that Grokipedia is very OK. The jury’s still out as to whether it’s actually better than Wikipedia. But at this point I would have to say “maybe!” He wrote in a post on X. 

Musk responded to Sanger’s comments, stating that the Wikipedia co-founder’s observations are “accurate.” The xAI founder also noted in a separate X post that even in its V0.1 form, Grokipedia is already better than Wikipedia. 

Why Grokipedia exists 

During an interview on the Tucker Carlson Show, Sanger point out that Wikipedia has become a far cry from his initial vision for the online encyclopedia, and a lot of this was because of the its “Reliable sources/Perennial sources” page, which categories publications and sources into tiers of credibility. Sanger noted that the list leaned heavily left, with conservative publications getting effectively blacklisted in favor of their more liberal.

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Musk responded to Sanger’s comments by stating that Grokipedia will be created as a step towards xAI’s broader goal of “understanding the Universe.” He added that Grokipedia, which will use xAI’s Grok, would provide broader sourcing and a freer exchange of information compared to Wikipedia’s current system. 

One month after Elon Musk’s comments, Grokipedia has gone live in its V0.1 form.

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Tesla Fremont Factory celebrates 15 years of electric vehicle production

Since opening in 2010, the Fremont Factory has produced all four “S3XY” models while creating tens of thousands of jobs.

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla is marking the 15-year anniversary of its Fremont Factory in California, the first automotive mass-manufacturing plant acquired by the electric car maker. 

Since opening in 2010, the Fremont Factory has produced all four “S3XY” models while creating tens of thousands of jobs and investing billions of dollars in the region.

Celebrating 15 years of EV production

The Fremont Factory’s milestone was celebrated by the official Tesla Manufacturing account on X, which posted a photo of several Teslas forming a “15” in front of the facility’s iconic white facade. As per the electric vehicle maker, the Fremont Factory has now produced 3.6 million vehicles so far, and it has also created over 20,000 jobs in the state. 

“15 years ago, we opened Fremont factory. Today, the Fremont team is producing all 4 S3XY models, totaling 3.6M vehicles made so far. 20k+ California jobs created w/ billions of dollars invested,” the official Tesla Manufacturing account on X wrote in its post.

The Fremont Factory’s transformation

Tesla acquired the Fremont Factory from the defunct NUMMI joint venture between General Motors and Toyota in May 2010 for $42 million. The facility had produced more than 8 million vehicles under GM and Toyota over 26 years. Following its acquisition, Tesla retooled the 5.3-million-square-foot plant to support the production of the Model S sedan.

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Over the past 15 years, the factory has evolved into Tesla’s primary North American production hub, assembling the Model S, 3, X, and Y. Annual output has exceeded 550,000 vehicles, including nearly 560,000 produced in 2023 alone. Expectations are high that other products, such as the next-generation Roadster and Optimus, might be produced in the Fremont Factory as well.

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