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NASA to roll SLS Moon rocket to the launch pad two days early
NASA has given the go-ahead to roll its Space Launch System (SLS) Moon rocket to the launch pad two days ahead of schedule.
That bodes well for plans to launch the rocket for the first time (a milestone NASA originally hoped to pass in December 2016) as early as late August or September 2022. NASA says that its first SLS rocket is now on track to begin a roughly 24-hour journey to Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39B launch pad at 9 pm EDT on August 16th. That will kick off approximately two more weeks of work that could finally culminate in the rocket’s first real launch attempt as early as August 29th, a moment anywhere from 12 to 16 years in the making.
SLS was created by Congress in 2010 when the legislative body drafted a law demanding that NASA develop a heavy-lift rocket to replace the Space Shuttle. In practice, Congress (particularly several key stakeholders with former Shuttle workforce and facilities in their states or districts) was primarily interested in keeping former Shuttle infrastructure active and workers employed, and left NASA to figure out how to retroactively engineer a rocket out of a list of legal requirements mostly driven by politics.
NASA ultimately devised a rocket that would extrapolate Shuttle external tank technology into a larger liquid hydrogen/oxygen ‘core stage’ powered by four flight-proven, reusable Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME; now RS-25). A relatively small orbital upper stage derived from Boeing’s Delta IV rocket would sit atop the core stage, which would be augmented with two stretched Shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Altogether, the first variant of SLS – Block 1 – is expected to be able to launch up to 95 tons (~210,000 lb) to low Earth orbit and around 27 tons (~59,500 lb) to the Moon, 32% and 38% worse than the Saturn V rocket NASA abandoned for the Space Shuttle in the 1970s.
Nevertheless, SLS will likely become the most powerful rocket currently in operation if it successfully debuts within the next few months. Only SpaceX’s Starship, which will eventually launch a Starship-derived Moon lander for NASA, is likely to challenge or beat the performance of SLS within the next 5-10 years.
However, after more than half a decade of delays and around $25 billion spent without a single launch to show for its investment, NASA no longer has any near-term plans to use SLS for more than sending a few astronauts on their way to the Moon once every year or two. The only tangible payload currently assigned to SLS Block 1 is NASA’s own Orion spacecraft, an earlier version of which Lockheed Martin began developing for NASA in 2006. Approximately 16 years and $25 billion later, the Orion capsule will be better than the Apollo Program’s Command module (capsule) by most measures, but its service (propulsion) module will be far worse.
With about half as much usable delta V (propulsive capability) as the Apollo CSM, Orion is incapable of transporting astronauts to the same convenient low lunar orbits that the Apollo Program used, forcing NASA to send it to high, exotic alternatives. As a result, NASA has been forced to create a multi-billion-dollar destination for Orion (the Gateway station) and complicate the mission of new Moon landers like SpaceX’s Starship.
Countless pitfalls and shortcomings aside, NASA is about to finally roll the fourth most capable flightworthy rocket ever assembled (behind Saturn V, N-1, and Energia) to the launch pad. Regardless of the outcome of the mission, SLS will likely be the fifth largest rocket (including the Space Shuttle) ever launched when it lifts off. If that launch is successful, the achievement will be even more impressive, marking the third time out of three attempts that NASA has successfully launched a super heavy-lift launch vehicle (>50t to LEO) on its first try.
A successful Artemis I launch would also give the Orion spacecraft an opportunity to enter orbit around the Moon and test most of the systems it will need for Artemis II, which is intended to carry two astronauts. Orion won’t carry or test any life support or docking systems, making it only a partial demonstration, but it will still be the first time a prototype of a crewed spacecraft has attempted to enter lunar orbit since December 1972.
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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
