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NASA’s first Artemis Moon mission a flawless success after Orion splashdown
NASA has successfully recovered an uncrewed version of its Orion crew capsule, marking the flawless completion of the spacecraft’s first Moon mission and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s first launch.
Six years behind schedule, roughly $20 billion over budget, and costing taxpayers almost $50 billion through its first full flight test, anything less than near-perfection would have been a moderate scandal. But to the credit of NASA and its contractors, who have all worn excuses in the spirit of ‘perfection takes time’ threadbare, the international team behind Artemis I appears to have actually delivered on those implied promises. While some small bugs were unsurprisingly discovered over the 25-day mission, a collection of excellent post-launch NASASpaceflight.com interviews confirm that each major part of the SLS rocket performed about as flawlessly as their respective teams could have hoped for.
Originally intended to launch in late 2016, the first SLS rocket lifted off with the second space-bound Orion spacecraft on November 16th, 2022. Propelled by its European Service Module (ESM), Orion passed the Moon around November 21st. It then entered an unusual distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the Moon on November 26th, reaching a record distance of 432,200 kilometers (268,563 mi) from Earth in the process. After less than a week in lunar orbit, Orion departed DRO on December 1st and began a long journey back to Earth.
The update that's rolling out to the fleet makes full use of the front and rear steering travel to minimize turning circle. In this case a reduction of 1.6 feet just over the air— Wes (@wmorrill3) April 16, 2024
On December 11th, about four weeks after liftoff, Orion separated from its disposable service module (~$400 million) and slammed into Earth’s atmosphere traveling around 11 kilometers per second (~25,000 mph). In another credit to NASA and capsule contractor Lockheed Martin, Orion’s reentry, descent, and splashdown all went perfectly. After its ablative heat shield did most of the work slowing it down, the spacecraft deployed parachutes and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean some 240 kilometers (~150 mi) off the coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, southwest of California.
Taking full advantage of the fact that Orion and SLS are a government program and continuing in the footsteps of the Apollo Program, the US Navy was tasked with Orion spacecraft recovery. To that end, it deployed USS Portland – a 208-meter-long amphibious transport ship crewed by hundreds of sailors – to recover Artemis I’s Orion, which was completed without issue using the ship’s Navy helicopters, fast boats, and floodable well-deck.
Following capsule recovery, which wrapped up almost seven hours after splashdown, it’s safe to say that NASA’s Artemis I mission was a spectacular, near-perfect success. Only a few aspects detract from the extraordinary performance of the spacecraft. Most significantly, despite being half a decade behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, Artemis I’s Orion capsule and service module did not fly with or test a functioning docking port or Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). Those systems will not be tested in space until Artemis II, Orion’s first astronaut launch, inherently reducing the risk-reduction and predictive value of the flight test.
Additionally, Artemis I launched Orion to a distant retrograde lunar orbit. No future NASA missions are scheduled to use DRO. For the time being, Artemis II will be a free-return lunar flyby mission, meaning that Orion will never enter orbit around the Moon – the safest possible lunar trajectory for its crewed debut. For Artemis III and all future Orion missions, the spacecraft will enter a different near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon – similar to DRO in spirit but entirely different in practice. That again slightly reduces the value of Orion’s spectacular performance during Artemis I.
Waiting for Artemis II
Finally, due to a series of decisions and the shockingly slow expected performance NASA and its contractors, the next Orion and SLS launch is unlikely to occur before 2025. Recently discussed by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a September 2022 report [PDF], the cause is strange. GAO says that “NASA estimates it will require ~27 months between Artemis I and Artemis II due to Orion integration activities and reuse of avionics from the Artemis I crew capsule on…Artemis II.” In other words, even though Artemis I was near-flawless, Artemis II will be delayed partly because of an attempt to reuse a tiny portion of its successfully recovered capsule.
Ars Technica’s Eric Berger recently provided another tidbit of painful context with the discovery that the decision to reuse the first deep space Orion’s avionics boxes was made eight years ago to close a “$100 million budget hole.” Inexplicably, NASA and Lockheed Martin believe it will take more than “two years to re-certify the flight hardware.” Berger explains that years ago, NASA only intended to launch SLS’s first Block 1 variant once, and expected that it would take at least three years to retrofit the rocket’s sole launch tower for the rocket’s Block 1B upgrade and second launch overall.
Years later, parochial pork-hungry members of Congress leaped on an opportunity to force NASA to build a second launch tower to help avoid that three-year gap between launches. Ironically, that second tower, ML-2, is now expected to cost anywhere from 2.5 to 4 times more than its original $383 million price tag and is years behind schedule. Meanwhile, SLS Block 1B is also years behind schedule, which led NASA to decide to launch SLS Block 1 three times instead of just once.
Ultimately, that means that the bizarrely slow recertification of eight Artemis I Orion avionics boxes – not the SLS rocket, ground systems, or any rework required after their launch debut – is now “the primary critical path for…Artemis II.” As a result, Berger estimates that delays caused by the decisions NASA made to save $100 million almost a decade ago will likely end up costing taxpayers $1 billion.
Artemis II is unlikely to launch less than 27 months after Artemis I, pegging the launch no earlier than February 2025. That gap of more than two years is just 20% shorter than the 33-month gap a NASA advisor once said could raise safety concerns because of the loss of experience that would result, which factored into the decision to build a second launch tower. Ultimately, NASA appears to have secured another very large chunk of time to ensure that Artemis II – like Artemis I – goes as perfectly as possible when the time finally comes.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Elon Musk’s Boring Company says Vegas Loop stations will double by year end once again.
The Boring Company says the Vegas Loop’s station count will double by the end of the year, tying the target to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers in Las Vegas. “Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!” the company wrote in a post on X, attaching listings for a Loop driver and a senior Loop operations manager.
The number checks out against what’s already public, with the Vegas Loop currently running 14 operational stations, while the Boring Company’s own project page lists 28 as the target for the end of 2026.
Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!
Urgently hiring exceptional and enthusiastic Drivers and Ops Managers.
Apply here!
Driverhttps://t.co/ZUPXBYTONb
Senior Loop Ops Managerhttps://t.co/mV6V22V8jH pic.twitter.com/IZ9FqIw8WY
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) September 14, 2026
Much of that growth is tied to tunnels that are already built and waiting on an opening date. A roughly two-mile dual tunnel system under Paradise Road, connecting Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, is expected to open in stages over the coming weeks, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief executive Steve Hill told the Review-Journal last week. New stations at 4744 Paradise, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, and the former Gordon Biersch site would come online with it, several of them built to speed up rides to Harry Reid International Airport ahead of Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Clark County entitled Vegas Loop for 123 stations after approving 19 more in August, as Teslarati reported at the time. Entitlement and construction move at different speeds on this project, so county approval alone does not guarantee a station opens on any particular schedule.
Clark County approved 18 additional stations back in 2023, part of a plan that pushed the system’s target to 69 stations across 65 miles, doubling the network on paper for the first time. The target kept climbing after that, to roughly 93 stations by the end of that year and 104 by last year, before August’s vote pushed it to 123. This week’s announcement is the first time that doubling language has been attached to stations actually running rather than stations merely approved on a county map.
Ridership gives some sense of what a denser network could carry. Boring Company executive Mike Baier said in July that the Vegas Loop already moves around 40,000 passengers on busy convention days, a total that tops most light rail systems in the country despite the system running on a fraction of its planned tunnel mileage. Company leadership has projected ridership could triple or quadruple once the airport connector tunnels fully open.
Boring Company did not say which stations beyond those already under construction would open by year end, or whether the hiring push points to a fleet expansion alongside the new stops.
Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.
Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”
The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.
Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.
Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.
Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.
Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.
Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done
Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence
