News
DeepSpace: China tests SpaceX-reminiscent grid fins after iSpace snags orbital milestone
Eric Ralph · August 1st, 2019
Welcome to the latest edition of DeepSpace! Each week, Teslarati space reporter Eric Ralph hand-crafts this newsletter to give you a breakdown of what’s happening in the space industry and what you need to know.
Although the accomplishments aren’t quite as flashy as a launch to the Moon, the last week has featured a number of interesting developments and significant milestones from both the state-run and quasi-commercial wings of Chinese spaceflight.
In the commercial realm, Chinese startup iSpace became the country’s first commercial entity to successfully reach orbit, achieving the feat with a three-stage solid rocket called Hyperbola 1.
One day later, state-owned Chinese company China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) completed its 50th successful Long March 2 rocket launch on a relatively routine government spy satellite mission. Unique was the fact that the rocket marked the first flight test of grid fins – extremely similar to those used on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 – on a Long March rocket.
The march to orbit
- In 2019 alone, three Chinese spaceflight startups have made their first orbital launch attempts and more tries are planned in the second half of the year. OneSpace and LandSpace both got close but ended up suffering partial failures that cut their attempts short before safely reaching orbit.
- Enter iSpace: one of dozens of startups in a burgeoning Chinese commercial spaceflight industry, the company’s three-stage solid rocket – named Hyperbola 1 – became the first Chinese startup-launched rocket to successfully reach orbit on July 25th.
- Although a large amount of the hardware may well have been procured (or licensed) wholesale from CASC, the success still signifies the start of a new alternative to government launches for companies (and perhaps government agencies) seeking to launch smaller satellites.
- Hyperbola 1 stands about 21m (68 ft) tall, is 1.4m (4.6 ft) in diameter at its widest point, and weighs about 31 tons (68,000 lb) when fully fueled. Three solid rocket stages are followed by an extremely small fourth stage meant to circularize the payload(s) in low Earth orbit (LEO).
- The rocket is capable of launching as much as 260 kg (570 lb) to a 500 km (310 mi) sun-synchronous orbit (SSO).
- For iSpace, Hyperbola 1 is more of a stopgap measure as the company works to develop Hyperbola 2, a significantly larger launch vehicle meant to feature a reusable booster and internally-developed liquid rocket engines.
- Ultimately, Hyperbola 1 reaching orbit is an exciting milestone, but it will be far more significant when a Chinese startup reaches orbit with a launch vehicle it has truly designed and built itself. A number of companies aim to do just that next year (2020).
The sincerest form of flattery…
- A day later (July 26th) and approximately 1000 miles (1600 km) to the southeast, state-run corporation CASC was preparing for a routine launch of its Long March 2C rocket, carrying a trio of relatively small spacecraft for a government spy satellite constellation.
- Technically known as YW-30 Group-5, the launch was a routine success that just so happened to be the Long March 2 family’s 50th successful launch in more than 35 years. The family has only suffered one in-flight failure.
- Long March 2C is a two-stage rocket that stands 42m (138 ft) tall (shorter than Falcon 9’s first stage), 3.35m (11 ft) wide, and weighs ~233 tons (514,000 lb) fully fueled. The 2C variant is capable of launching ~3850 kg (8500 lb) into LEO and more than 1250 kg (2750 lb) into geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).
- Although the rocket’s 50th launch success milestone is worth recognizing, this particular launch wound up drawing a significantly greater amount of attention for an entirely different reason: attached to the outside of the Long March 2C’s booster interstage was a quartet of immediately familiar grid fins.
- SpaceX has grown famous in the last five or so years for its spectacularly successful Falcon 9 recovery and reusability, aided in no small part by grid fins used by the booster to retain aerodynamic control authority during its hypersonic jaunts through the atmosphere.
- The appearance of grid fins on a Chinese rocket – looking undeniably similar to SpaceX’s first-generation aluminum fins – raised some (moderately xenophobic) ire in the space community, with people falling back on the stereotype of the perceived willingness of Chinese people to flagrantly ‘copy’ ideas.
- Both the stereotype and the grid fin-stoked ire are arguably undeserved. SpaceX did not invent grid fins, nor did it invent the concept of using grid fins to guide suborbital projectiles.
- In fact, CEO Elon Musk would almost certainly be happy to see someone – anyone! – blatantly copy SpaceX’s approach to reusability. A blatant copy, while not exactly worthy of pride, is still a major improvement over companies sticking their heads in the sand and tacitly choosing insolvency and commercial irrelevance rather than admit that they were wrong and SpaceX was right.
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- (Pauline Acalin – Teslarati)
- According to CASC, this mission’s grid fins were included to flight-test their ability to more carefully guide the booster’s return to Earth. China infamously takes a… lax… approach to range safety, allowing spent boosters and fairings to haphazardly crash into inhabited areas, often containing remnants of their sometimes toxic propellant.
- Indeed, this particular booster did appear to crash in an uninhabited valley, be it thanks to those experimental grid fins or pure chance
- However, aside from not crashing large objects in populated areas, CASC and China have plans to develop a Long March 6 rocket with a reusable booster that will use the same recovery methods as Falcon 9. That rocket could fly as early as 2021 and July 26th’s grid fin test is an obvious sign that work is ongoing.
- If China manages to develop and launch a partially reusable rocket by 2021, they will be miles (and years) ahead of its space agency peers (NASA, ESA, CNES) and companies like ULA and Arianespace.
Thanks for being a Teslarati Reader! Stay tuned for next week’s issue of DeepSpace.
– Eric
News
Tesla’s AI Chief just hinted at something big for FSD v14 lite owners
Tesla’s AI chief suggests the newest FSD v14 Lite build may finally go wide release.
Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, noted on Sunday that the newest FSD v14 Lite build rolling out to Hardware 3 cars is likely the version that goes to wide release, the strongest signal yet that Tesla is near to closing out an early access phase that Hardware 3 owners have waited more than a year for.
Elluswamy made the comment in response to an extensive review from Tesla owner Zack, known on X as @BLKMDL3, who tested software version 2026.20.6.10 and detailed the changes in a lengthy post. “FSD v14 Lite (for Tesla AI3 hardware vehicles) review.
The update restarts a rollout that had stalled after its initial release. Tesla began pushing FSD v14 Lite to Hardware 3 early access drivers on June 29, bringing driving behavior learned on the newer Hardware 4 computer down to the more limited chip that has powered Tesla vehicles built between 2019 and early 2023. That release, as we covered in detail, gave roughly 4 million HW3 vehicles their first meaningful update since being frozen on version 12.6 in early 2025.
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ Release Notes: new capabilities and features
The latest build adds features that bring Hardware 3 closer in line with what Hardware 4 owners already have. FSD can now start directly from park without a brake pedal confirmation, a change Zack called a small but meaningful quality of life improvement. The interface also picks up the blue “P” park icon, approaching destination alerts, and a dedicated Self-Driving app with streak tracking, all details previously exclusive to the AI4 branch of v14, as outlined in Tesla’s original release notes.
The stakes around Hardware 3 go beyond software polish. Tesla sold the Full Self-Driving package for years on the promise that every vehicle equipped with it had the hardware needed to eventually drive itself without supervision. That promise broke down during Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call, when Musk acknowledged HW3 cars could not run unsupervised FSD, prompting Tesla to offer trade-in discounts and hardware retrofits alongside the Lite software track.
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla has continued to frame v14 Lite as the primary path forward for the HW3 fleet, telling owners in April that international markets would follow the U.S. rollout once regulatory approvals came through. For now, HW3 owners in the early access group are the only ones running the new build. A broader rollout would mark the second major software delivery to the legacy fleet since Tesla first released FSD v14 to Hardware 4 vehicles, and the first sign since June that the Lite program is still moving rather than stuck in early access limbo.
In a pointed message on X, Elon Musk warned that firms maintaining significant short positions in SpaceX over time face “very low” survival probability.
The statement comes amid post-IPO volatility for the rocket company, now trading under the ticker $SPCX.
The survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2026
Five weeks after what was described as the largest IPO in history, the stock had fallen roughly 30% from its peak above $2.6 trillion, briefly surpassing Microsoft and Amazon in market value. Short sellers celebrated gains of about $8.7 billion, but Musk’s reply underscores his long-term conviction.
The warning directly echoes a detailed bullish analysis arguing that Starship’s cost reductions could unlock a multi-trillion-dollar space economy. Projects ranging from solar power beamed from orbit and asteroid mining to orbital data centers and Mars terraforming were projected to create over $100 trillion in new market capitalization.
In this vision, SpaceX acts as the essential infrastructure provider, akin to AWS for cloud computing, capturing monopoly-like revenues from launches, crew transport, and data traffic across a rapidly expanding frontier.
This is far from the first time Musk has targeted short sellers. With Tesla, he has repeatedly framed persistent bears as destined for major losses. In July 2024, Musk declared that once Tesla achieves full autonomy and volume production of Optimus robots, “anyone still holding a short position will be obliterated. Even Gates,” referencing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ reported short bets.
Elon Musk reveals what Tesla stock surge could do to Bill Gates
Earlier, in 2018, he taunted shorts that they had “about three weeks before their short position explodes,” a remark followed by sharp stock gains. Musk has also called short selling “value destroying” and once suggested it “should be illegal,” viewing it as betting against innovation and progress.
Critics often dismiss Musk’s optimism as hype, especially when near-term metrics like quarterly deliveries or stock fluctuations disappoint.
Yet his pattern remains consistent: framing short positions against his companies as fundamentally misjudging exponential technological leaps. For SpaceX shorts, the message is clear: betting against multi-planetary ambitions and the infrastructure monopoly they enable carries existential risk for the firms involved.
As Musk and supporters see it, the space economy’s upside dwarfs Earth-bound valuation models, making today’s dips temporary in a decades-long ascent.
Tesla has evidently revealed which of its vehicle models will be the first to receive Starlink integration: the Cybercab.
Tesla’s Santana Row showroom now has a full-fledged display of the Cybercab, with an extensive bit of information hung around an exhibit that seems to reveal the vehicle’s newest feature: an integrated Starlink antenna that will enable secure and reliable internet access during trips.
Credit: @Starscream_SJC | X
Cybercab is geared toward autonomous ride-hailing for one or two passengers. The production units rolling off the lines at Gigafactory Texas are built without steering wheels or pedals, meaning when public rides begin, passengers will not need to interact with a human being or control the vehicle in any way outside of what appears on the center screen for their entertainment during the ride.
Tesla Santana Row will be reopening tomorrow with a full focus on self-driving. Everything in the showroom is about Robotaxi and Cybercab with stats and information about the technology. The Cybercab on display is the production model. pic.twitter.com/yIUYdOGFOp
— Shaun Cassidy (@Starscream_SJC) July 20, 2026
Along the display, Tesla wrote this message about Cybercab:
“Cybercab is built for autonomy. It has no steering wheel, no side mirrors, and no pedals. It goes where you tell it to go and how you want it to, so you can relax along the way. It is hyper aware and responsive to your surroundings, monitoring other drivers, responding to emergency vehicles, utilizing its expertise in the rarest scenarios to help keep you safe.”
Tesla has been teasing a potential Starlink integration for quite some time now. In December, the company hinted at potential Starlink internet terminal integration within its vehicles in a patent that described a vehicle roof assembly with integrated radio frequency (RF) transparency.
The company wrote in its patent application that a new roof design built with materials that differ from the standard metallic or glass elements used in today’s cars would allow it to integrate modern vehicular technologies, in particular, ones that require radio frequency transmission and reception.
Tesla suggested high-strength polymer blends, like Polycarbonate, Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, or Acrylonitrile Styrene Acrylate.
This is the first time we’ve seen Tesla officially confirm the Starlink integration into the Cybercab. It’s not much of a surprise considering the company’s intention behind the Cybercab, which is to make travel autonomous.
Productivity will now be at a maximum during a work-related commute, while the center screen could be utilized for Netflix or potentially even live TV for those who are heading to dinner or to a fun activity.
Tesla’s AI Chief just hinted at something big for FSD v14 lite owners
Elon Musk sends first warning to SpaceX short sellers
