News
NASA may prematurely kill long-lived Mars rover with arbitrary wake-up deadline
In a decision with no obvious empirical explanation, JPL’s Opportunity Mars rover project manager John Callas was quoted in an August 30th press release saying that the NASA field center would be “forced to conclude” that the dust storm-stricken rover was effectively beyond saving if it fails to come back to life 45 days after 2018’s massive dust storm can be said to have officially ended.
Below the upbeat-sounding title of this press release is the scarier fact that after tau clears below 1.5, the rover has 45 days to wake up before NASA stops actively trying to revive it. Come on, #WakeUpOppy https://t.co/piCQLeaCEO
— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) August 30, 2018
Over the course of that press release, Callas made a number of points that may technically hold at least a few grains of truth, but entirely fail to add up to any satisfactory explanation for the choices described therein. This is underscored in one critical and extended quote:
“If we do not hear back [from Opportunity] after 45 days, the team will be forced to conclude that the Sun-blocking dust and the Martian cold have conspired to cause some type of fault from which the rover will more than likely not recover. At that point, our active phase of reaching out to Opportunity will be at an end. However, in the unlikely chance that there is a large amount of dust sitting on the solar arrays that is blocking the Sun’s energy, we will continue passive listening efforts for several months.” – John Calwell, JPL
Scott Maxwell, a former JPL engineer who led drive planning for rovers Spirit and Opportunity, solidly explained the differences between active and passive recovery attempts:
Because it's a FAQ … "active listening" has two parts: (1) forcing Opportunity's radio, if she's listening, to a particular frequency (because it can drift), and (2) a command to talk to us. Pretty much guaranteed to work if she's awake with her radio on. https://t.co/iaHbHXFKqm
— 🇺🇦ScottMaxwell @marsroverdriver@deepspace.social (@marsroverdriver) August 31, 2018
The JPL press release offers exactly zero explanation for the “45-day” deadline, starting the moment that dust clears from Martian skies near Opportunity to a certain degree, likely to happen within the next few weeks. Nor does it explain why “active” recovery attempts would stop at that point, despite the fact that the PR happens to directly acknowledge the fact that the best time to attempt to actively restore contact Opportunity might be after Mars’ windy season is given a chance to blow accumulated dust off of the rover’s solar arrays.
In fact, while all points Callas/the press release makes may theoretically be valid, the experiences of the actual engineers that have been operating Opportunity and MER sister rover Spirit for nearly two decades suggest that his explanations are utterly shallow and fail even the most cursory comparison with real data.
Thanks largely to a number of comments collected by The Atlantic from past, present, and anonymous employees involved with Opportunity, it would seem that there is no truly empirical way to properly estimate the amount of dust that may or may not be on the rover’s solar arrays, no rational engineering-side explanation for the 45-day ultimatum, no clear excuse for how incredibly short that time-frame is, and essentially zero communication between whoever this decision originates from and the engineers tasked with operating and restoring communications with the forlorn, 15-year old rover.
Most tellingly, this exact impromptu dust-storm-triggered hibernation already occurred several times in the past, and even resulted in the demise of Opportunity’s sister rover Spirit in 2010. The Atlantic notes that when a dust storm forced that rover into hibernation in 2010, JPL mission engineers spent a full ten months actively attempting to resuscitate Spirit, followed by another five months of passive listening before the rescue effort was called off.
Given that Opportunity’s engineers appear to believe that there is every reason to expect that the rover can, has, and should survive 2018’s exceptional Martian dust storm, the only plausible explanation for the arbitrary countdown and potentially premature silencing of one of just two active rovers on Mars is purely political and financial. While it requires VERY little money to operate scientific spacecraft when compared with manufacturing and launch costs, the several millions of dollars needed to fund operations engineers and technicians (roughly $15 million per year for Opportunity) could technically be funneled elsewhere or the employees in question could be redirected to newer programs.
For example, the ~$200 million spent operating the rover from 2004 to 2018 could instead fund considerably less than 20% of the original cost of building and launching both Opportunity and Spirit. This is to say that that cutting operation of functioning spacecraft to save money can be quite fairly compared with throwing an iPhone in the trash because the charging cable ripped because $10 could instead be put towards buying a new phone months or years down the line.
Ultimately, all we can do is hope that Opportunity manages to successfully wake up over the course of the next two or three months. If the rover is unable to do so, chances are sadly high that it will be lost forever once active communications restoration efforts come to an end. With an extraordinarily productive 15 years of exploration nearly under its belt, Opportunity – originally designed with an expected lifespan of ~90 days – would leave behind a legacy that would fail to disappoint even the most ardent cynic. Still, if life may yet remain in the rover, every effort ought to be made to keep the intrepid craft alive.
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Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Tesla has stunned by gaining yet another approval for its Full Self-Driving suite in Europe, its second in two days and its fifth overall.
Belgium will be the latest country to allow Tesla owners to utilize FSD on public roads in Europe, joining a quickly growing list that started with the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Estonia.
On Tuesday, Denmark announced its approval of the FSD suite, which has now been followed by Belgium just one day later.
The country’s Minister of Mobility, Annick De Ridder, announced the approval on her X account, stating that she had just signed the approval of Tesla FSD. It now goes to the country’s homologation department for the last step of the approval process.
De @Tesla community houdt hier al geruime tijd de vinger aan de pols over de toelating voor de FSD-technologie op onze Vlaamse en Belgische wegen.
Uit waardering voor jullie niet-aflatende interesse (en aanmoediging 😉), krijgen jullie hierbij de primeur: ik heb net de toelating… pic.twitter.com/Yrps4OHTj8— Annick De Ridder (@AnnickDeRidder) June 10, 2026
The Belgian approval is one of mighty importance because it truly shows how quickly countries in Europe could greenlight the FSD suite consecutively. Approvals are already coming in relatively quickly, which is a great sign.
Perhaps the next big development that could come from FSD approvals in Europe is an approval from a country like England, Italy, France, Spain, or Germany. It would be something to see how FSD would perform in a major European metro, such as London, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Rome, or Berlin.
Getting Full Self-Driving in Spain and England will be such huge milestones for Tesla. I am so excited to see how FSD performs in Madrid, Barcelona, and London, specifically.
The ultimate test will always be Mumbai or New Delhi. Excited for India’s eventual approval! https://t.co/paw9Ch1qmL pic.twitter.com/9RdDERVSSJ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 9, 2026
Full Self-Driving does an excellent job of roaming around major U.S. cities like New York and Los Angeles, but other high-profile international cities of significance would truly mark a line in the sand for Tesla, which can simply enable any vehicle in its customer-owned fleet to run FSD with the correct approvals.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently confronted worries about orbital data centers and launching satellites in mass quantities in space, as some voiced concerns about crowding.
Musk’s SpaceX plans to combat the issue of needing data centers by launching them into space instead of taking up valuable real estate on Earth. It has been a major point of SpaceX’s future, including its looming IPO, which could be the largest ever.
In a recent interview filmed at SpaceX’s Starlink terminal factory in Bastrop, Texas, Elon Musk directly addressed concerns that deploying large numbers of AI satellites for orbital data centers could crowd Earth’s orbit. His message was straightforward and reassuring: space is vast beyond human intuition.
“Space is really big,” Musk said. “It’s not like space is gonna get crowded. Space is enormous. If you actually look at it relative to the Earth, the satellites are so tiny you can’t even see them.” He emphasized that even zooming in makes a satellite appear large, but from a planetary perspective, they are minuscule specks.
Elon on concerns that AI satellites will crowd space:
“Space is really big. It’s not like space is gonna get crowded. Space is enormous. If you actually look at it relative to the earth, the satellites are so tiny you can’t even see them.” https://t.co/Mvr7NpL25Q pic.twitter.com/5Fi629Rii7
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) June 8, 2026
Musk pointed to SpaceX’s real-world experience operating roughly 10,000 Starlink satellites as evidence that large constellations can be managed safely. “We’ve got a pretty good idea of how to operate just really large constellations and do it safely,” he noted. SpaceX remains the only operator with meaningful experience at this scale, giving the company unique insight into tight orbital packing without compromising safety
The discussion highlighted SpaceX’s plans for “AI1” satellites—essentially orbiting racks of AI compute powered by massive solar arrays and cooled via radiative panels in space’s vacuum.
These satellites leverage proven Starlink V3 technology, making them simpler to design than communications satellites. A first-generation unit targets around 150 kW peak power, with a 70-meter wingspan for solar panels and radiators. Laser links will connect them to each other and the Starlink network, delivering low-latency access (on the order of a few milliseconds from low-Earth orbit).
FCC accepts SpaceX filing for 1 million orbital data center plan
Musk framed orbital data centers as a practical solution to Earth’s constraints on AI growth. Ground-based facilities face power shortages, water demands for cooling, and grid limitations. In space, constant sunlight (no day-night cycle), vacuum radiative cooling, and abundant solar energy offer clear advantages.
Production will ramp up at an expanded “Gigasat” factory in Bastrop, with solar manufacturing already underway and full AI satellite output expected at reasonable volume by the end of 2027. Starship’s rapid, high-volume launch capability, aiming for multiple flights per hour, will make massive deployment feasible.
Critics sometimes raise risks like space debris or Kessler syndrome, but Musk’s response underscores scale: even a million satellites would represent an imperceptible fraction of available orbital volume when viewed against Earth’s size. SpaceX’s automated collision avoidance and deorbiting designs for Starlink further mitigate concerns.
This vision ties into broader ambitions. Musk sees orbital AI compute as a step toward harnessing more of the Sun’s energy, advancing humanity on the Kardashev scale from a Type 0 civilization toward Type 1 and eventually Type 2. By moving power-hungry data centers off-planet, SpaceX aims to unlock orders-of-magnitude more compute while preserving Earth’s resources.
Musk’s comments should ease public anxiety. With proven operational expertise, incremental engineering, and the immensity of space itself, orbital data centers represent not overcrowding, but smart expansion into the final frontier.
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla stuns with another FSD approval in Europe, its second in two days
