I had a rare opportunity to visit Rocket Crafters, a small rocket company located in Cocoa, Florida, just 10 miles from the Kennedy Space Center, that is developing and testing what is known as ‘hybrid rocket engines’. These 3D printed engines are born in Colorado from a custom-made printer because none exist on the market that’s large enough to print these rocket engines that DARPA contracts them to build, with a $600,000 investment.
Press gathered inside Rocket Crafters control room to speak to the team. (Tom Cross)
After the hybrid fuel grains are printed, they’re shipped to Rocket Crafters in Florida where they are further processed by wrapping them in carbon for additional strengthening and then test fired. The company is testing three engines per week at an industrial location in the city of Cocoa. The only requirement the City has for testing these engines is to keep the noise level below a certain decibel, over concerns of disruption to neighboring residential.
Multiple small unwrapped 10-second burning test-engines on a shelf for future testing. (Tom Cross)
The engines, called fuel grains, are tubes made of ABS plastic, the same material LEGO are made of. The fuel grains are so safe, in fact, they can fly with them on airplanes as a carry on. They are specially shaped for the use of burning smoothly as a rocket engine, something only a printing process could form, which is a patented invention by Ronald Jones. The fuel grain needs an oxidizer in order to burn through, and without that, there’s really not much you can do with them because they’re just a tube of plastic.
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- Rocket Crafters engine is a Patented printing process. (Tom Cross)
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- A look inside the fuel grain. (Tom Cross)
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- A fuel grain in the process of carbon-wrapping. (Tom Cross)
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- Inventor, Ronald Jones. (Tom Cross)
When I arrived at Rocket Crafters the day of the test, I asked if I could set up my launchpad cameras to capture the flame of the engine during the test fire. Due to safety concerns over their oxidizer tanks that were already full, the team kindly advised against doing so. The oxidizer is nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas at the dentist. Needless to say, it probably would have been incredibly funny had it sprung a leak while I was setting up my camera. The whole test stand sits on the back of a flat-bed trailer that’s ratcheted down to the concrete and protected by mobile steel walls on three sides.
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- Rocket Crafters engine test stand. (Tom Cross)
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- Technicians take readings from the gauges on the test stand. (Tom Cross)
CEO Sid Gutierrez, a former Space Shuttle Pilot, and Shuttle Commander touted the safety aspects of their rocket engine. “What you won’t see are cryogenics, bi-propellant liquid fuel engines, no signs saying explosives,” he said during the video conference. Rocket Crafters are carving their slice into the new wave of affordable launches for small-scale cube satellites and have grand plans of creating their own rocket called Intrepid consisting of multiple hybrid rocket engines burning simultaneously.
They brought me into their testing facility to showcase their fuel grains, carbon wrapping process, and most importantly a 10-second test fire of one of the engines from inside their control room. During the test, the engine could be heard through multiple block walls and doors as if it was just 10 feet away. The building didn’t shake, the sound was intense, though. The video on the screen doesn’t do it justice. The whole experience was pretty awesome.
Rocket Crafters still has a bit of work to do trying and testing new components before they’re ready to launch but they’ve already begun making prototypes of their full-scale engine. The day I was there, engineers were testing a nozzle made of a material they hadn’t tried before. “You don’t see many 15-person companies developing a rocket,” said Robert Fabian, SVP of Propulsion.
SVP of Propulsion explains the components inside the test-tube. (Tom Cross)
I’m no rocket expert, I’d be a rocket scientist instead of a photographer if so, but I learn a lot by doing this. I think this particular hybrid rocket engine would be perfectly suited for a prosumer market of amateur rocketry, especially considering how safe they are and non-toxic to the environment. The few amateur rocket enthusiasts I’ve asked about hybrid engines said they’d be great to have after they fix the flaws of hybrid engines.
Here’s a video of one of their engine tests:
https://youtu.be/BVPxbdkC1y8
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Tom Cross
Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
Tesla launches V2L Outlet Adapter for Premium Model Y in the U.S.
Tesla Roadster unveiling nears, and it will fly: The Information
