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Firefly launches world’s largest carbon fiber rocket into orbit on second try
Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket has successfully reached orbit on its second try, cementing the company as the victor of a mostly unintentional race between three American NewSpace startups.
After weeks of delays and three aborted launch attempts on September 11th, 12th, and 30th, the second carbon-fiber Alpha rocket lifted off from its Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) SLC-2W launch pad at 12:01 am PDT (07:01 UTC) on October 1st. According to Firefly, the resulting mission was a “100%…success”, indicating that it achieved all of the company’s objectives – an outcome far from guaranteed on the second flight of any orbital rocket.
In a familiar display, Alpha’s suborbital booster lifted the upper stage, fairing, and payload most of the way out of the Earth’s atmosphere within a few minutes. After a mechanical system pushed the two stages apart, the upper stage successfully ignited its lone Lightning engine, ejected the two-piece fairing (nose cone) protecting its payloads, and continued uphill for another five minutes before reaching a stable parking orbit around 250 kilometers (~160 mi) above Earth’s surface.
After successfully reaching orbit, Alpha’s upper stage even made it through a more than 90-minute coast phase and reignited for a brief second burn. Finally, Alpha managed to deploy all seven of the satellites it lifted off with. As a test flight, there was no guarantee that those payloads would end up anywhere other than the Pacific Ocean, so the successful deployment was likely a very pleasant surprise for all satellite operators involved in the mission.
Nicknamed “Into The Black” by Firefly, it was the company’s second Alpha flight and followed an unsuccessful attempt on September 3rd, 2021. During the rocket’s first launch, a loose cable caused one of its booster’s four main Reaver engines to fail almost immediately after liftoff, dooming the attempt. However, the rest of the booster fought for more than two minutes to keep the mission on track before a termination system destroyed the rocket, demonstrating otherwise excellent performance and gathering invaluable data and experience.
Firefly wasted no time putting that experience to good use. Compared to the first vehicle, the booster and upper stage for Alpha’s second flight sailed through preflight testing and completed their respective proof tests (a combined wet dress rehearsal and static fire) on their first tries. That smooth processing bodes well for the timing of Firefly’s third Alpha launch, although the company’s official accounts have strangely been almost silent after Flight 2’s success.
Soon after launch, third-party data showed that Alpha deployed its seven payloads into a 210 x 270 kilometer (130 x 170 mi) orbit. Firefly’s official launch page had stated that the target orbit was 300 kilometers (~185 mi) and called the second ignition of the upper stage a “circularization burn.” Given that the final orbit is far from circular and has an apogee a full 10% below that stated target, it wasn’t clear the rocket had performed exactly as expected. The orbit’s very low perigee means that the customer satellites Alpha deployed could reenter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up after a matter of weeks in space, rather than months or years.
But according to Bill Weber, who became CEO of Firefly less than a month before the launch, Alpha “deployed [Firefly’s] customer payloads at exactly the spot [the company] intended,” strongly implying that the strange final orbit was intentional.
Additionally, official footage Firefly released after the launch suggests that Alpha’s upper stage Lightning engine nozzle narrowly missed the booster’s interstage during stage separation. Had the drifting booster hit that nozzle, it would have likely caused the upper stage to begin tumbling and potentially ended the mission well before orbit. Thankfully, it didn’t, and it should be relatively easy to fix whatever caused the Alpha booster to begin slipping sideways so quickly after separation.
Alpha is the largest all-carbon-fiber rocket ever built. It stands 29.5 meters (~95 ft) tall, 1.8 meters (6 ft) wide, weighs 54 tons (~120,000 lb) fully fueled, and can produce up 81 tons of thrust (~180,000 lbf). Alpha can launch up to 1.17 tons ~(2600 lb) of useful cargo to low Earth orbit (LEO), making it the first successful entrant in a new and rapidly growing field of privately-developed rockets designed to launch 1-2 tons to orbit.
Coincidentally, Firefly found itself neck and neck with two other prospective US providers, Relativity Space and ABL Space. For several months, all three companies were aiming to successfully launch their one-ton-class rockets to orbit sometime in the late summer or early fall. But despite delays, Firefly – already more than a year ahead after its first launch attempt in 2021 – still beat Relativity and ABL Space to flight and did so successfully, securing itself a small but significant milestone in the history of private spaceflight.
The timeline for Relativity’s first 3D-printed Terran-1 rocket launch is no longer clear after a hurricane disrupted its preflight test campaign. ABL Space, meanwhile, has been forced to sit with its first RS1 rocket ready to launch for weeks while waiting on the FAA to complete paperwork and grant it a launch license. Had the FAA moved faster, it’s entirely possible that ABL Space could have launched before Firefly’s Alpha Flight 2, although the odds of success are much lower for RS1 during its debut. Pending that regulatory approval, ABL Space intends to launch RS1 out of Kodiak, Alaska as early as mid-October.
Firefly has yet to offer a substantial statement after the successful launch, which means that the company has provided no information about its next steps or next launch. Per prior statements, the company is working to upgrade its Texas factory to enable up to six Alpha launches in 2023.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
The in-car Tesla Theater is among the most unique features available within the cars. When charging, parked, camping, or just hanging out, vehicle occupants can access a variety of streaming platforms on the large center screen, helping keep them entertained during downtime.
However, the Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms, something that owners have requested for some time.
Tesla owners recently discovered that visiting Apple TV in the vehicle browser can launch a fullscreen interface that looks and behaves like a dedicated application rather than an ordinary webpage:
Today I learned that if you go to Apple TV in the Tesla browser, it will open up an actual Apple TV app, fully functional. Not just the site.
Apparently there are more apps than just the few that show on the apps page. pic.twitter.com/os1Ypfm4JR
— Jason W (@jmwilt21) August 20, 2026
The experience drops the usual address bar and browser chrome, presenting catalogs, continue watching rows, and playback controls in the same window Tesla Theater already uses for its listed services. Independent testers soon found similar treatment for HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, and Prime Video when those sites are opened from the car browser.
This shift is a plausible early signal that Tesla is widening Theater support without a formal software note. Theater has long been a set of web views rather than native applications, so recognizing extra domains and stripping the browser frame is a small server-side change that can expand the catalog quickly.
Owners still lack permanent Theater icons for the newly recognized services, and video remains limited to Park, yet the smoother launch is a meaningful step toward a broader lounge while charging.
Tesla Theater arrived with software version 10 in September 2019. The first video services were Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, available only while parked and originally tied to WiFi. Spotify arrived in the same era as music rather than Theater video. Disney+ joined officially in July 2021 with the 2021.24 update, giving owners another major catalog on the center screen. Twitch and TikTok later appeared among the default Theater tiles, and Tesla Tutorials remained a persistent educational tile.
Not every addition stayed put. In December 2023, a Holiday software build removed the Disney+ tile for many United States owners after a public dispute involving advertising on X. Hulu stayed visible even though Disney owned it. Visiting disneyplus.com in the browser often restored the tile, which suggested the removal was a recognition list change rather than a complete block. Owners have also reported occasional blank Theater grids after updates, usually fixed by language toggles, resets, or later firmware.
Tesla axes Disney+ from vehicles with Musk-Iger rivalry, but there’s a workaround
Code archives from 2024 listed many unused source names, including Apple TV and Prime Video, that never became official icons, which now looks like groundwork for the current fullscreen browser behavior.
Now that this hint toward an expanded Theater experience has been recognized, Tesla could follow through with these additional shortcuts as a sign that more streaming platforms are available in Teslas than ever before.
Tesla recently received its largest order for the all-electric Semi from Einride, a Swedish transport service, for 500 units, a groundbreaking invoice to receive before the first deliveries begin.
Even more remarkable, Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said in a recent interview that he expects his company to take delivery of all 500 — the entire order — before the end of 2027. He even expects to have 75 Tesla Semi units in the Einride fleet before the end of this year.
🚨 Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli on the Tesla Semi partnership:
“If we start with the Amazon announcement that we did earlier this year, that was on the back of having gone through a proving period together with them and proving out our technology. Then we took that next step in… pic.twitter.com/oazkXjwoig
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 28, 2026
Charli said the Tesla partnership was part of a broader push, along with its earlier partnership with Amazon. Einride is assisting Amazon with the use of its Saga AI platform, which helps eliminate questions about budgeting and forecasting for logistics companies.
The Semi, as well as Tesla’s production and subsequent delivery of the units to Einride, will help the company “to have a good supply of vehicles that we can deploy on the [Saga AI] platform,” Charli said. “Tesla is also a relationship we’ve had for a while, and as the Tesla Semi deliveries are firming up, we decided to do a larger commitment to that and deploy that on our platform.”
In its initial announcement, Einride said it anticipated taking delivery of the trucks over the next two years, but now it appears the company is expecting all 500 units within the next 16 months.
Built at a dedicated factory in Sparks, Nevada, the Tesla Semi has been perhaps the biggest and most intensive testing process the company has ever had for a single vehicle model. For the past several years, Tesla has been working with many companies, most notably Frito-Lay and PepsiCo, to gain knowledge on the performance on regional routes.
Tesla plans to launch the Semi officially on September 24, five months after production started ramping.
Additionally, drivers have said they are happy about the Semi’s performance and that its numerous safety and productivity features have made their jobs and routes much easier.
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
