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Blue Origin scraps New Glenn recovery ship, finishes first ‘test tank’
After four years of halting work, Blue Origin has fully abandoned a transport ship it once intended to convert into a landing platform for its orbital-class New Glenn rocket.
Known as Stena Freighter at the time of sale, Blue Origin purchased the ship for an undisclosed sum – likely several million dollars – sometime in mid-2018. Aside from a flashy, December 2020 re-christening ceremony in which Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos named the vessel Jacklyn after his late mother, the private aerospace company left the ship largely untouched in a Florida port. Small teams of workers would occasionally work on retrofitting the roll-on/roll-off cargo ship for a future life as a rocket recovery asset but made very little visible progress despite working on Jacklyn for several years.
Now, a few months after a Blue Origin spokesperson first acknowledged that the company was evaluating “different options” for New Glenn booster recovery, Jacklyn has left Florida’s Port of Pensacola for the Texan Port of Brownsville, where documents show that the ship will be scrapped.
According to an unconfirmed report, Blue Origin may ultimately use the same contractors as SpaceX to turn existing barges into ocean-going rocket-landing platforms. Blue Origin had hoped that a large, keeled ship would allow it to launch New Glenn and still recover its expensive booster even if seas were stormy downrange. However, after 107 successful SpaceX Falcon booster landings on flat-bottomed barges that are exceptionally sensitive to wave conditions, just a tiny fraction of launches have been delayed by the ocean. Further, SpaceX has only lost one booster to waves, and it solved that problem by developing a relatively cheap robot. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s not hard to see why Blue Origin changed its mind.
Much like SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket, Blue Origin began work on its semi-reusable New Glenn rocket in the early 2010s. Jeff Bezos publicly revealed New Glenn just a few weeks before CEO Elon Musk’s long-planned September 2016 reveal of SpaceX’s next rocket, then known as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). Both were massive, meant to be powered by huge new methane/oxygen-fueled engines, and designed from the ground up with some degree of reusability in mind.
But with fairly different designs and wildly different development philosophies, the paths of Blue Origin and SpaceX have only gotten further apart over the last six years. SpaceX thoroughly redesigned its next-generation rocket multiple times before throwing out a large portion of that prior work and settling on an unexpected stainless steel variant that CEO Elon Musk christened Starship in late 2018. Further differentiating the companies, SpaceX began work on steel prototypes almost immediately and successfully built and flew a scrappy pathfinder – powered by an early version of the same Raptor engine meant for Starship – less than a year later.
SpaceX then improvised a factory out of a series of tents and began churning out and testing dozens of more refined prototypes, seven of which would go on to perform flight tests between August 2020 and May 2021. SpaceX’s last test flight ended with a full-size steel Starship prototype successfully landing after launching to an altitude of 10 kilometers (~6.2 mi). Testing slowed considerably after that success but SpaceX appears to have begun ramping up again as it begins to test a Starship (S24) and Super Heavy booster prototype (B7) that have a shot at supporting the rocket’s first orbital launch attempt.
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That orbital launch debut has been more or less continuously delayed for years and is about 20 months behind a tentative schedule Musk first sketched out (albeit for a drastically different rocket design) in 2016. Technically, the same is true for Blue Origin, which also said that it intended to debut New Glenn as early as 2020. However, while SpaceX can point to the instability of Starship’s design before 2019 as a fairly reasonable excuse for delays, the general characteristics of New Glenn’s design appear to be virtually unchanged despite its many delays. The smaller rocket – 7m (23 ft) wide and 98m (322 ft) tall to Starship’s 9m (30 ft) width and ~119m (~390 ft) height – will still use traditional aluminum alloys for most of its structures, will be powered by seven BE-4 engines, will land on several deployable legs, will have an expendable upper stage powered by two BE-3U engines, and will be topped with a large composite payload fairing.
Blue Origin canceled plans for a smaller interim fairing, abandoned plans to land the booster on a moving ship, and tweaked the booster’s landing legs and a few other attributes, but New Glenn is otherwise (visibly) unchanged from its 2016 reveal. Ultimately, that makes it even stranger that Blue Origin has done practically zero integrated testing of any major New Glenn components. Only in 2022 did the company finally complete and test a New Glenn payload fairing. Blue may have also built and tested a partial booster interstage, which the New Glenn upper stage will attach and deploy from.
But the true star of the show, at long last, is an apparent full-scale prototype of New Glenn’s upper stage. At minimum, Blue Origin’s first ‘test tank’ (using SpaceX parlance) should allow the company to finally verify the performance of New Glenn’s aluminum tank barrel sections and domes under cryogenic (ultra-cold) conditions. It’s unclear how (or if) Blue Origin intends to complete integrated static-fire testing of New Glenn’s upper stage before the rocket’s first launch, but it’s possible that the tank it finally delivered was designed to support testing with and without engines.
Nonetheless, Blue Origin hasn’t specified what it actually plans to do with its first New Glenn test tank and it’s even less clear why it has taken the company so long to complete one. While difficult, the methods Blue Origin is using to build New Glenn’s primary structures are about as standard as they get for modern rockets. Blue Origin itself even uses the same tech to build its smaller New Shepard rockets. So does SpaceX, ULA, Boeing, Arianespace, and virtually every other manufacturer of medium-to-large rockets, including NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) core stage, which is wider than New Glenn.
The results of those challenges (managerial, technical, or otherwise) are clear: Blue Origin is nowhere close to debuting its next-generation rocket while competitors like Arianespace and ULA are tracking towards H1 2023 debuts of their Ariane 6 and Vulcan rockets. SpaceX, who is pursuing full reusability and really only settled on the design of its larger rocket in 2019, could even be ready to attempt an orbital-class launch with Starship before the end of 2022.
Still, the long-awaited beginning of hardware-rich New Glenn development appears to have finally arrived, and it’s possible that Blue Origin’s first orbital-class rocket could finally start picking up momentum towards its launch debut.
Elon Musk
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Tesla owner David Moss just pushed his intervention free FSD streak past 20,000 miles total.
Tesla Model 3 owner David Moss has spent the better part of eight months turning his vehicle into a rolling stress test for Full Self-Driving, and this week he pushed his single, continuous FSD streak past 20,000 miles without a human intervening.
Moss, a Tacoma, Washington resident who sells LiDAR scanning equipment for a living, first drew wide attention in December 2025 when he logged 10,000 consecutive miles on FSD v14.2. Days later he drove from the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, covering 2,732 miles in two days and 20 hours with zero disengagements, the first verified coast to coast autonomous drive in Tesla’s history. Tesla even featured the trip as an official customer story in March. That original streak eventually reached 12,961 miles across 30 states before ending in rural Wisconsin in January, when snow and single digit temperatures forced Moss to take over.
Tesla FSD successfully completes full coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions
He started over, and this run has gone further. In late May, Moss drove 3,760 miles across Canada with two companions, from Horseshoe Bay in Vancouver to a Tesla showroom in Halifax, again without a single intervention, a trip Tesla AI software VP Ashok Elluswamy publicly congratulated him for on X. In June, he pushed the same unbroken streak south, aiming to link the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and crossed 10,000 miles on Tesla’s newly added in car streak counter along the way, the first driver to do so since Tesla began showing confetti animations for the feature.
20,000 Mile Tesla FSD Screen Streak!
Special thank you to @DevinOlsenn, @scotsrule08, & @OwenSparks for helping co drive during all these fun adventures these last couple of months
Also thank you to @wholemars for always tracking me along the journey verifying it all with his… pic.twitter.com/CZ2yO6Ev0X
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) July 27, 2026
It’s worth noting that every mile is logged through the FSD Database, a community run tracker built by Tesla influencer Omar Qazi, well known as @WholeMars on X, that pulls telemetry straight from the car and records disengagements down to a tenth of a mile. That verification is what separates Moss’s numbers from casual claims on social media.
The streak itself is a fairly recent addition to Tesla’s software. FSD v14.2 introduced a Self Driving Stats panel tracking the ratio of autonomous to manual miles, and v14.3.4 added the live streak counter in June, which resets the moment a driver brakes, wrenches the wheel or cancels navigation. Reaching 20,000 miles on that counter means a single Tesla drove itself through countless highways, city grids, construction zones and Supercharger stalls without a single reset.
Moss has said the goal was never to set a record for its own sake, but to show, mile by verified mile, what the software can already do.
Elon Musk told The Economist that artificial intelligence will likely surpass the combined intelligence of every human on Earth within about five years, and that humans may not remain in charge once that happens. In a wide-ranging interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, recorded at Giga Texas for the outlet’s Insider series, Musk compared the widening gap between AI and human intelligence to the gap between humans and chimpanzees.
“It’s hard to imagine that the chimpanzee would be in charge,” he said, addressing what happens to human authority once AI moves far beyond us.
Elon Musk reiterates his most optimistic prediction yet with “UHI” forecast
Musk’s timeline stretches out from there. Five years for AI to out-think humanity combined, ten years before humans lose meaningful control, and by 2036, he says, money itself may stop mattering.
Musk notes that if robots and AI produce more goods and services than people could ever consume, currency loses its purpose. He told Beddoes that governments could respond with direct payments, what he called “universal high income,” a term he first used in an X post last August describing a future where “everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.”
There will be universal high income (not merely basic income).
Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.
Sustainable abundance.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2025
He also floated a more surprising prediction that deflation, and not inflation, would become the bigger economic problem, since expanding the supply of goods and services faster than the money supply grows would push prices down rather than up.
None of this is new territory for Musk, who has spent years describing an “age of abundance” built on Optimus and autonomous vehicles. What’s notable is the timing. The interview landed the same week Tesla shares dropped roughly 19 percent following a second quarter earnings report that beat on revenue but missed badly on profit, and as SpaceX stock continues to slide from its post-IPO peak.
Musk’s own net worth has fallen close to $700 billion since mid-June, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, even as he describes a future where personal wealth stops being the point.
Musk did not dodge the risk side of the equation either. He put the odds of AI contributing to human extinction somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range, then arrived at what he called his “philosophical conclusion” since the technology cannot realistically be stopped and the arguably better response is to keep building it and hope the outcome leans toward abundance rather than catastrophe. “I’ve gone from exhilaration to terror regarding AI,” he told Beddoes, “even intraday.”
Tesla is adding a new “Traction Control Modes” feature to its cars for better handling in any conditions. These features will roll out to the Model 3 and Model Y, the two vehicles in Tesla’s lineup that typically do not have drive modes for various conditions.
Tesla did include this in the Model S and Model X, as well as the Cybertruck.
The new feature will roll out with the 2026 Summer Update, which Tesla announced last week and subsequently started rolling out to some owners today. The Summer Update is the latest iteration of the usual four seasonal releases the company rolls out throughout the year. These releases typically feature some owner-requested features, as well as improvements to things like the Full Self-Driving suite.
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
This release is no different. Among the changes are improvements to Navigation, new customization options with wraps and how they can be shared and stored, more functionality with the Tesla smartphone app, and new gamification with self-driving.
However, Tesla announced today that it was adding another feature to the Summer Update. Traction Control Modes will now be available with the release
Tesla describes them:
“Choose from three updated Traction Control Modes: Auto for normal driving conditions, Slippery Surface for icy or wet roads, Stuck Assist when stuck in snow, mud, or sand. The mode resets to Auto at the start of each drive. To select, go to Controls > Dynamics > Traction Control Mode.”
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update also includes new Traction Control Modes
📸: @PatchesHQ https://t.co/N9cD2lGP14 pic.twitter.com/ogLC5ROIgc
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 26, 2026
The use of these modes will help improve a Tesla’s overall performance in less-than-ideal conditions. Typically, these traction control modes monitor wheel speed through sensors and track engine power to adjust responsiveness in various conditions.
These drive modes are not an ultimate solution to all driving conditions; just because there is a “Stuck Assist,” doesn’t mean your Tesla will dig itself out of a foot-and-a-half trench during a blizzard. It is important to remember that some of these scenarios also require some assistance from the driver. For example, driving in sand requires tires to be aired down significantly to increase traction and control.
However, this will be a welcome addition for those who use the Full Self-Driving suite and might not be convinced of its performance in adverse conditions. Some of us prefer to be in control in rain, snow, or ice, which is totally understandable. However, adjusting the Traction Control Mode while utilizing FSD in snow, rain, or ice could increase confidence and overall experience.
Tesla’s Summer Update is already rolling out to some owners, so it should be making its way to most of the fleet over the next several weeks. The Spring Update rolled out at a very conservative pace, so if you don’t have it by the end of August, don’t be too upset. It might just be Tesla’s method.
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Elon Musk explains what happens when AI outsmarts all of us
