News
NASA spacecraft successfully slams into asteroid ten months after SpaceX launch
Ten months after launching into interplanetary space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft has successfully impacted an asteroid moon.
Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4) carrying the 630-kilogram (~1400 lb) spacecraft on November 24th, 2021. The rocket performed flawlessly, continuing a streak of successful launches, and boosted DART on its way to a near-Earth asteroid pair.
The goal: slam into the small asteroid moon Dimorphos at an eyewatering speed of 6.3 kilometers per second (14,000 mph / Mach 18). Ten months later, the spacecraft has accomplished exactly that, successfully crashing into a target about 160 meters (530 ft) wide just 17 meters away from a perfect ‘bullseye’ after traveling for ten months and hundreds of millions of kilometers through space. Depending on the results NASA and dozens of other groups will now attempt to glean from ground and space telescopes, the successful impact could be a major leap forward for the field of planetary defense.
The main goal of planetary defense is to protect humanity’s home planet from asteroids, a threat that has routinely caused mass-extinction events throughout the multibillion-year history of life on Earth. With the technology to both detect and reach virtually all near-Earth objects (NEOs) more or less at hand, DART is the first attempt to test and verify what would seem to be the easiest and most obvious method of redirecting asteroids: knocking them off course with the spacecraft itself.
Planetary science and the behavior of things in microgravity conditions have a tendency to defy expectations, however, so testing that assumption is essential. The perfect way to do so came to DART Lead Investigator Andy Chang in a burst of mid-exercise inspiration: instead of hitting any odd NEO, a small spacecraft could slam into a tiny asteroid moon of a much larger parent asteroid. Hitting an asteroid moon would mitigate the small but nonzero risk of accidentally redirecting the target towards Earth while also amplifying the results, making them much easier to observe from tens of millions of kilometers away.
Rather than being forced to search for a virtually imperceptible change in a single asteroid’s half-billion-kilometer-long orbit, the results of hitting the right asteroid moon would be much more easily detectable as a change in the moon’s much smaller orbit around its untouched parent asteroid.
The problem is that aside from spectrographic readings that tell scientists the broad strokes of an asteroid’s composition and other telescope images that can make out the rough shape, it’s very difficult to scout the objects without actually visiting them. And given the difficulty, spacecraft have only visited a handful of the virtually countless asteroids of our solar system. Without knowing exactly what a target asteroid’s surface and subsurface are like, it’s hard to predict exactly what a spacecraft impacting that asteroid will do. A looser surface, which is what most visited asteroids appear to have, would be much worse at momentum transfer than a boulder or relatively solid surface of rock.
-
As an example, as DART rapidly approached and revealed more detailed views of the surface of Didymos and Dimorphos in its final minutes, Chang himself was surprised to see just how rough and boulder-strewn the surface of both asteroids were. Then, after the spacecraft impact, many scientists were also surprised to almost immediately see a massive cloud of dust – easily visible from ground-based telescopes – ejected from Dimorphos.
Despite the DART spacecraft’s eventful demise, the fun has only just begun on the ground as scientists attempt to solve that riddle (and many others) and begin searching for changes in Dimorphos’ orbit. Data will soon arrive from even larger and more prestigious observatories, including NASA’s space-based Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes. Italian companion cubesat LICIACube, which deployed from DART shortly before impact, will also downlink images it took up close, potentially offering the most detailed view of the impact for years.
Meanwhile, the European Space Agency (ESA) is developing a spacecraft called Hera that will launch in 2024 and attempt to enter orbit around Didymos and Dimorphos as early as late 2026 to examine the aftermath of DART’s last stand in even greater detail.
In the more distant future, particularly if the international science community ultimately concludes that DART did successfully redirect an asteroid (moon), it’s possible that the mission will help to kickstart an entirely new global project and fleet of spacecraft that will stand ready to protect Earth if the need ever truly arises. With a little luck and a modest amount of government funding, humanity may soon be able to entirely eradicate one of the most infamous sources of mass extinction.
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.
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.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
