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Blue Origin launches first suborbital tourists after six years and 15 test flights
More than six years after New Shepard’s first test flight and nine years after a pad abort featuring a prototype of the rocket’s capsule, Blue Origin has launched its first crew of suborbital tourists.
Almost exclusively funded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ stock sales over more than 21 years of operations, Blue Origin has been working towards New Shepard’s first crewed launch for approximately a decade. Aside from a pad abort test of the rocket’s relatively simple ‘crew capsule’ in October 2012, New Shepard – purported to be fully reusable – has performed 15 uncrewed test flights since April 2015. At least according to Blue Origin, of those 15 tests, 14 were fully successful and 11 crossed the 100 km (~62 mi) Karman Line – a largely arbitrary line drawn between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
Six years and three months after New Shepard’s first flight, the rocket lifted off on its 16th suborbital mission and inaugural crewed launch. Along for the ride were Jeff Bezos himself, brother Mark Bezos, hedgefund multimillionaire Joes Daemen’s son Oliver Daemen, and trailblazing pilot and aviator Mary “Wally” Funk.
While New Shepard NS-16 reached an apogee of 107 km (66 mi) and a maximum speed of 2233 mph (1 km/s / Mach 2.9), less than 13% of the way to orbit, the mission did mark a number of “spaceflight” firsts insofar as its passengers did technically spend between 70 and 150 seconds in “space.” Notably, NS-16 passengers Oliver Daemon and Wally Funk are now respectively the youngest and oldest people in history to reach space. While Blue Origin hasn’t disclosed the value of his second-place bid, Oliver Daemen was technically a paying customer, making New Shepard the first rocket in history to launch a paying passenger on its first crewed flight.
In June, Blue Origin held a tone-deaf auction that ultimately resulted in a mystery buyer winning the first ticket on New Shepard at a jaw-dropping cost of $28 million – just shy of the $30M Richard Garriott paid to ride a Soyuz rocket to space, spend almost two weeks in orbit, and scream back to Earth at Mach 25. Bizarrely, the company still hasn’t revealed the winner, at no point mentioned that there would be runners-up, inexplicably swapped the mystery winner for Oliver Daemen with “scheduling issues” as the comical excuse, and has yet to reveal what Daemen paid for his ticket. In general, Blue Origin still refuses to provide any information about the price of seats on New Shepard.
Meanwhile, although Blue Origin did provide invite-only access to some media outlets and offered numerous interview opportunities with the NS-16 crew, there have been virtually zero chances for reporters and journalists to ask real questions. Beyond New Shepard, which raises dozens of questions on its own, Blue Origin’s orbital New Glenn rocket is years behind schedule and apparent issues with the BE-4 engine meant to power both it and the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan has also significantly delayed the latter rocket’s launch debut.
For the last several years, Vulcan and New Glenn were both aiming for a launch debut sometime in 2020. Both targets eventually slipped to 2021 and as of 2021, Vulcan is now expected to launch no earlier than early 2022 and New Glenn’s debut has slipped to “late 2022” – likely meaning 2023.
On its own, New Shepard has had one of the most bizarre development paths of any rocket in history. Despite virtually unlimited resources from Bezos’ average sale of billions of Amazon stock each year and the fact that New Shepard is a fully reusable rocket that demonstrated the ability to fly twice in ~60 days in 2016, Blue Origin has only launched the rocket 15 times in the 75 months before NS-16. The company has never once implied that New Shepard suffered major issues during any of its test flights, save for NS-1’s failed booster recovery (though Blue has generally glossed over or ignored that lone failure).
Somewhat coincidentally, New Shepard’s first test flight occurred just a few weeks before SpaceX attempted the first major test of a partially integrated Crew Dragon prototype, resulting in a successful pad abort test in May 2015. Despite several significant, documented delays, less than four years later, Crew Dragon aced an uncrewed orbital launch to the ISS and back to Earth. 14 months after Demo-1, SpaceX became the first private company in history to launch astronauts to orbit. Less than six months after that historic launch and four months after Crew Dragon returned two NASA astronauts to Earth, SpaceX launched its first operational four-astronaut mission to the ISS.
In the same period that Blue Origin completed five uncrewed New Shepard test flights, SpaceX launched Crew Dragon’s Demo-1, In-Flight Abort, Demo-2, Crew-1, and Crew-2 missions, carrying six astronauts to orbit and back and delivering another four to the ISS (where they still are). Not only did SpaceX also launch five Crew Dragons, but April 2021’s Crew-2 mission marked the first time in history that astronauts launched on a flight-proven liquid rocket booster and a flight-proven space capsule, beating Blue Origin to the punch despite the far greater challenges and risks posed by orbital spaceflight.
Put simply, it’s disappointing but not exactly surprising that Blue Origin continues to go to great lengths to avoid having to answer questions that haven’t been obviously vetted or preselected.
Elon Musk
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
Tesla’s quiet mode reaches Model Y Robotaxis, blacking out the screen for riders wanting rest.
Tesla’s quiet mode, the setting that blacks out the screen for riders who want to rest, has moved beyond the Cybercab. A video posted Thursday by Spencer (@scotsrule08) shows the feature running in a Model Y Robotaxi on a night ride that appears to be in Dallas.
New quiet mode now on @Robotaxi https://t.co/2cM2eM9NeN — Spencer (@scotsrule08) October 29, 2026
The rider taps a small crescent moon icon in the bottom right corner of the map screen. The map, media player, app shortcuts and Grok prompt disappear, leaving a dark display with “Arriving soon,” the destination and a line reading “Tap display to exit quiet mode.” Controls a passenger may still need, including Pull Over, cabin temperature, volume and Support, stay visible. One tap anywhere brings the full map back.
Quiet mode first showed up in the Cybercab last week, which Teslarati reported alongside a new rear camera view. Tesla has been trimming cabin noise in other ways too. On October 25, Spencer reported that Robotaxi turn signals now chime for the first four blinks and then go silent. Tesla has not published release notes for either change.
Elon Musk has been pitching this use for more than a decade. In October 2014, he said that “maybe five or six years from now I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination,”
By 2017 he was setting a higher bar. Speaking at TED, Musk said the hard part was not making self-driving work 99.9 percent of the time, “because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you’re probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn’t be, certainly.”
Owners asked for something similar in their own cars. In December 2019, a Tesla owner requested a Nap Mode that would keep the climate running and wake the occupant with an alarm, and Musk answered “Ok,” as Teslarati covered at the time.
The line returned when the Cybercab was unveiled at the We, Robot event in October 2024. “We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving, where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk said. On Tesla’s first quarter earnings call in April 2025, he called it the deciding measure: “The acid test is, can you go to sleep in your car and wake up in your destination and I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the US by the end of this year,”
Tesla has run driverless Model Y rides in Dallas and Houston since April, so a passenger dozing off on the way home is now a realistic use of the button. Tesla is also offering new riders a free first trip in both cities, according to an in-app screen shared by tracker Ethan McKanna, and said on its third quarter call that Cybercab rides would launch in Dallas next month.
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FCC green lights SpaceX’s move to a showdown with Verizon and AT&T
The FCC advanced plans opening 482 MHz to satellite phone service, boosting SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile.
The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to move forward with a proposal that would open an additional 482 MHz of spectrum to satellite service beamed directly to ordinary phones, a step that could widen the road for SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile to compete with the country’s largest wireless carriers.
The commission adopted the notice of proposed rulemaking at its October open meeting in Washington, Reuters reported. The proposal would raise the number of bands eligible for Supplemental Coverage from Space from five to 13, according to the FCC fact sheet. Commissioners also advanced a companion item proposing an auction of 25 MHz in the 1675 to 1695 MHz and 2020 to 2025 MHz bands, which could be used for terrestrial service, direct to device service or both.
Thursday’s vote does not hand any spectrum to SpaceX. It opens a public comment period, and final rules will come later. Under the draft, comments would be due 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register. The FCC had not released the adopted text at the time of writing, so it is not yet clear whether any bands were changed before the vote.
That question is where the fight now moves. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, through industry group CTIA, asked the FCC to drop the 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz bands, which make up 290 MHz of the 482 MHz on the table, as Teslarati reported ahead of the vote. T-Mobile argued satellite interference could wipe out up to 96% of a cell site’s uplink coverage area. SpaceX asked the commission to go the other way and add the 902 to 928 MHz band.
The rule change that matters most to SpaceX may be a structural one. Today, a satellite operator must lease spectrum from every carrier holding co-channel licenses across an entire region such as the contiguous United States. The proposal would replace that with a certification that the operator has coexistence agreements covering only the areas it plans to serve, or that it holds the terrestrial licenses itself.
SpaceX has spent this year building that second path. It bought EchoStar’s AWS-4 and H-block licenses in a deal worth roughly $17 billion, and earlier this month agreed to acquire Grain Management’s nationwide 800 MHz portfolio, which the company said would pave the way for Starlink to become a major US mobile carrier. The FCC approved SpaceX’s purchase of three unused AWS-3 licenses from Tristar on October 21, and cleared its plan for 15,000 next generation direct to cell satellites on October 6.
The regulator has not always sided with SpaceX. In April, the FCC dismissed a SpaceX petition seeking access to Mobile Satellite Service spectrum held by incumbents, and it rejected 2.5 GHz for satellite coverage when it first adopted the framework in 2024.
The carriers are also building their own defenses. In May, the three companies agreed in principle to form a joint venture pooling spectrum for satellite service, and T-Mobile remains SpaceX’s US launch partner for Starlink Mobile even as it leads the push to keep satellites out of 2.5 GHz. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said service on SpaceX’s own airwaves is targeted for early 2028.
Elon Musk
Tesla’s Roadster appearance at SpaceX has merger watchers talking
Tesla’s next generation Roadster was spotted at SpaceX’s Hawthorne headquarters, two weeks after its unveiling.
Tesla’s next generation Roadster turned up at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California on Wednesday, less than two weeks after the car flew off a ramp at its unveiling in Texas.
Photos shared on X by SpaceX Engineer (@DeannaRiceSPCX) show the new Roadster parked outdoors beside the famed Falcon 9 that stands outside company headquarters at the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Jack Northrop Avenue. Rocket B1019 was the first orbital-class booster ever to land after a launch on December 21, 2015 after it sent 11 Orbcomm satellites to orbit and then flew back to Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral, which would be the first landing in what became SpaceX’s reusable rocket program. SpaceX chose not to fly it again. After a test fire in Florida, the booster was shipped to Hawthorne and raised upright as a permanent monument in August 2016, as Teslarati reported at the time. Putting the Roadster, which flies on SpaceX cold gas thrusters, next to the rocket that started SpaceX’s landings is symbolic in itself.
Small car, big rocket ambitions 🚀🚗 #roadster #falcon9 #spacex #tesla https://t.co/H32xUSXoCl
— Deanna Rice (@DeannaRiceSPCX) October 29, 2026
The Thrust and Rocket versions of the Roadster use cold gas thrusters fed by composite overwrapped pressure vessels, the same type of tank SpaceX flies on Falcon 9, and Elon Musk described the car as the work of Tesla and SpaceX engineers working together. Tesla lists 0 to 60 mph in under 0.9 seconds for Thrust and under 0.59 seconds for Rocket, while the base Performance model relies on a fan and ground sealing system for grip, as Teslarati detailed in its breakdown of the three Roadster configurations.
Tesla has kept the car in the spotlight since the October 15 event near Waco. Last week, the company posted a video of the Roadster’s fighter jet inspired cockpit, including a Track Mode screen with a “Thruster · 5,500 PSI” readout, which we covered in our look at the Roadster’s center display. Musk also said owners will be able to ask the car to perform the stunts autonomously, and promised a looping track at Tesla’s Texas headquarters.
The visit comes as special committees at Tesla and SpaceX weigh a possible merger, a step Musk confirmed on SpaceX’s third quarter earnings call. The Roadster, built on SpaceX hardware, has become one of the clearest examples of the two companies already building products together.
Musk said at the unveiling that Roadster production will begin in 2028. Reservations are open with a $50,000 payment, Thrust is listed as a limited release and Rocket is invite only. Tesla says the car is not approved for public road use.
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
FCC green lights SpaceX’s move to a showdown with Verizon and AT&T
