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NASA has good news after SpaceX Crew Dragon parachute test accident
NASA has good news after SpaceX suffered an accident that destroyed a Crew Dragon mockup before it could complete a parachute test, indicating that the anomaly could have minimal impact on the spacecraft’s Demo-2 astronaut launch debut.
According to NASA, SpaceX and the space agency are still working to launch astronauts on Crew Dragon as early as “mid-to-late May”. While two recent challenges – the loss of the spacecraft’s most important parachute testing mockup and an unrelated in-flight rocket engine failure – could both singlehandedly delay Demo-2 in certain scenarios, NASA continues to state that a May timeframe is still in the cards. This is an excellent sign that both issues – as previously speculated on Teslarati – are probably much less of a problem than they otherwise could be.
As of now, all Demo-2 hardware – including Falcon 9 booster B1058, a new Falcon upper stage, Crew Dragon capsule C206, and an expendable Dragon trunk – are all believed to be in Florida and technically ready for flight. Waiting for launch at and around Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A, the long straw for SpaceX’s inaugural astronaut launch is most likely the completion of formal paperwork and reviews, most of which must be done primarily by NASA employees. SpaceX’s latest technical challenges certainly toss some uncertainty into the mix and serve as a reminder that nothing can or should be taken for granted in human spaceflight but on the whole, there is reason for optimism.
“To date, SpaceX has completed 24 tests of its upgraded Mark 3 parachute design they are working to certify for use on the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The system was used during the SpaceX in-flight abort test in January.
On March 24, SpaceX lost a spacecraft-like device used to test the Crew Dragon Mark 3 parachute design. The test requires a helicopter to lift the device suspended underneath it to reach the needed test parameters. However, the pilot proactively dropped the device in an abundance of caution to protect the test crew as the test device became unstable underneath the helicopter. At the time of the release, the testing device was not armed, and a test of the parachute design was not performed.
Although losing a test device is never a desired outcome, NASA and SpaceX always will prioritize the safety of our teams over hardware. We are looking at the parachute testing plan now and all the data we already have to determine the next steps ahead of flying the upcoming Demo-2 flight test in the mid-to-late May timeframe.”
NASA.gov — March 26th, 2020
While the challenges SpaceX and NASA still have to surmount are thus significant, it’s safe to say that Crew Dragon’s track record more than earns it some optimism as the spacecraft nears the T-1 month mark for what will arguably SpaceX’s most significant launch ever.
Following a successful Pad Abort test in May 2015, the company spent several years working head down. In mid-2018, SpaceX’s first finished Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully passed through electromagnetic interference (EMI) and thermal vacuum (TVac) testing, arriving at the launch site for preflight processing by July. Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, it took more than half a year more for NASA to finally permit Crew Dragon to launch.
A month and a half after completing an integrated static fire test at Pad 39A, Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon lifted off for the first time ever on March 2nd, 2019. A flawless launch was followed by an equally flawless International Space Station (ISS) rendezvous and docking, completed autonomously and without issue on SpaceX’s first try. Crew Dragon capsule C201 spent five days at the station before autonomously departing, reentering Earth’s atmosphere, and gently splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean under four healthy parachutes.
Altogether, Crew Dragon’s orbital launch debut was such a flawless success that SpaceX’s own director of Crew Dragon mission management stated that he could barely believe how perfectly it went – likely expecting at least something to go slightly awry. That near-perfection certainly didn’t come easily for SpaceX. Boeing – NASA’s second Commercial Crew Program (CCP) partner – has had a far rougher go of things despite the fact that the company does technically have extensive experience building aircraft and rockets.
In November 2019, Boeing completed Starliner’s first fully integrated ‘flight’ test in the form of a pad abort. While the spacecraft was able to perform a soft landing, mishandling and bad quality control caused one of its three main parachutes to fail to deploy in an unintentional stress test. A little over a month later, a separate Starliner spacecraft performed its inaugural orbital launch on a ULA Atlas V rocket. From the moment Starliner separated from Atlas V, things began to go wrong. It would ultimately become clear that extremely shoddy software and an almost nonexistent integrated testing regime caused the spacecraft to waste most of its propellant and resulted in an extremely delayed orbital insertion.
While NASA and Boeing both managed to forget a second partial failure until media reporting shed light on it months later, it also turned out that another entirely separate instance of incomplete software may have nearly destroyed Starliner a matter of hours before it was scheduled to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. The spacecraft was ultimately prevented from even attempting a space station rendezvous, one of the major purposes of the test flight.
In simpler terms, Crew Dragon – even with the challenges it has and will soon face – is just shy of primed and ready for flight. As always, it’s better to be safe (and late) than sorry in human spaceflight, particularly the first such mission for SpaceX, but it’s looking increasingly likely that Crew Dragon will be on the launch pad and preparing to lift off with NASA astronauts just two or so months from now.
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Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
SpaceX launched three final O3b mPower satellites Sunday, finishing a lesser known SES satellite network.
SpaceX had an 87 minute window opening at 2:49 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to fly a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying the final three satellites for SES’s O3b mPower constellation, a project that has taken more than a decade to finish since Boeing and SES first signed SpaceX on for the work.
Unlike the thousands of Starlink satellites SpaceX has stacked into orbit over the years, O3b mPower flies in a different neighborhood entirely. The three new satellites, tagged F11, F12 and F13, are headed for medium Earth orbit at roughly 5,000 miles up, more than ten times higher than Starlink’s shell around 340 miles but still a small fraction of the 22,000 miles where old school geostationary satellites sit. That middle position is the whole point, because a satellite that far out needs far fewer siblings to blanket the globe than a low orbit constellation does. Essentially, SES only needed 13 satellites total to build a network offering quick, steady service that used to require thousands of spacecraft.
With most people having heard plenty about Starlink and almost nothing about O3b mPower, SES and SpaceX already blend the two networks for some customers. Both SpaceX and SES sell satellite broadband, but they’re aimed at different buyers. Starlink is built for volume, direct to consumers, RVs, homes, small businesses, plus a growing aviation and maritime business. O3b mPower skips consumers entirely and sells enterprise grade connectivity to airlines, cruise lines, offshore energy operators, telecoms needing backhaul, and governments, priced and provisioned more like a dedicated circuit.
A 2023 partnership lets cruise ships combine Starlink’s speed with O3b mPower’s steady capacity depending on what a ship needs at a given moment. Sunday’s completed 13 satellite constellation effectively finishes the medium orbit half of that pairing, years after.
Sunday’s mission was already a something on SpaceX’s manifest well before O3b mPower entered the picture. This flight marked its 29th trip to orbit, a history that includes two crewed Axiom missions, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope and 22 separate Starlink batches. SpaceX has landed boosters on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas so often that Sunday’s touchdown attempt, if it went as planned, was set to be the 661st successful Falcon booster landing to date.
For a company that pushed the Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites back in August, almost entirely through bulk launches from California, Sunday’s flight was a reminder that SpaceX’s schedule still has room for someone else’s satellites too. SES gets a finished network built for a narrower set of customers, and Falcon 9 gets one more line on an already long resume.
Elon Musk
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
Tesla teased an October 1 Roadster reveal, reviving years of delayed SpaceX thruster hover promises.
Tesla teased an October 1 event date for its next generation Roadster, posting an image on X Saturday that shows the car lit up like it is sitting on a launch pad, with the date “10.01” stamped across the bottom and the caption “Go for launch.” A countdown clock on Tesla’s Roadster order page now points to the same date, which falls on a Thursday. The company has not said where the event will happen or whether it will be streamed at the moment. Stay with us @Teslarati for live updates.
Go for launch pic.twitter.com/Khu03eiZ04
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 12, 2026
Tesla has since sent formal invitations to reservation holders confirming the event will take place in Waco, Texas, about 90 minutes north of its Austin headquarters, based on a digital ticket shared on X by Sawyer Merritt. Tesla did not name the exact venue, though Waco sits close to SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, rocket test site, previously reported as the planned location for a Roadster thruster demonstration. The invite sets the reveal for 8:30 p.m. Eastern on October 1, requires RSVPs by midnight on September 16, and limits entry to guests 21 and older. Invitations are non-transferable.
The tease follows nine years of a project defined by unimaginable specs along with slipped dates. Musk first showed the second generation Roadster in November 2017 as a surprise reveal at the end of the Tesla Semi event, promising a 0 to 60 mph time under two seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery, and production starting in 2020. At last November’s shareholder meeting, Musk set an April 1 demo date and joked the choice gave him “deniability” if it slipped again, which it did, moving first to late April, then to “a month or so,” then to August.
Tesla Roadster SpaceX Package’s 1.1-second 0-60 mph launch visualized in concept video
Whatever Tesla shows on October 1 is expected to center on the SpaceX developed thruster package Musk has described since 2018. Internally code named A71, a nod to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the system reportedly uses cold gas thrusters fed by a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, the same tank design SpaceX uses on Falcon 9. Musk has said a thruster equipped Roadster could hit 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds under roughly 2.75 g of launch force, well past the 1.9 second figure quoted for the standard car. That version reportedly will not be street legal and has reportedly been discussed as a limited run sold through a track only program.
The standard Roadster is still expected to carry the original $200,000 base price and $250,000 Founders Series tier, both set when Tesla opened $50,000 and $250,000 reservations in 2017. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy has confirmed production will happen at Gigafactory Texas, with Musk targeting 2027 or 2028, 12 to 18 months after whatever the company demonstrates next month.
Tesla is planning to roll out some pretty significant safety and accident avoidance features with Full Self-Driving version 15, which will be the next major FSD deployment from the company.
Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy used a near-miss this week to preview what the company says is the next leap in Full Self-Driving.
In response to a driver whose car had swerved away from another vehicle pulling out of a parking lot, Elluswamy wrote that he was glad the owner was safe and that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” would arrive with FSD v15.
Glad you are safe. Even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance coming as part of the next big upgrade (v15).
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) September 11, 2026
The comment landed as Tesla continues to treat software as the primary safety upgrade path. v15 is described internally as a larger architectural step, with a much bigger neural network and tighter coupling between prediction and control.
The company has already begun using early v15 software in some robotaxi operations while rolling out safety features such as Automatic Collision Evasion into current customer cars, allowing the driving stack to intervene even when the driver is in manual control.
Tesla is rolling out a new FSD version with a massive safety addition
Tesla’s published telemetry is the backbone of its safety argument. In recent North American Vehicle Safety Report data, vehicles with FSD (Supervised) engaged traveled roughly 5.1 million to 5.7 million miles between major collisions, defined as airbag-deployment events.
Tesla’s estimate of the U.S. average over the same period is about 699,000 miles per comparable crash. That is the comparison Tesla often frames as roughly seven times fewer major collisions.
A tighter comparison uses the same Tesla fleet. Cars driven manually with active safety features such as automatic emergency braking still recorded a major collision about every 2.1 million miles. Against that baseline, FSD’s advantage shrinks to roughly 2.4 to 2.7 times fewer severe crashes, which independent researchers argue is the more apples-to-apples figure.
European data released in 2026 pointed in the same direction: Tesla reported FSD as 3.5 times safer than manual driving in the Netherlands and 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas with active safety across more than 100 million kilometers in five approved countries.
Those numbers do not settle every debate. NHTSA’s Standing General Order still shows Tesla accounting for the large majority of U.S. Level 2 driver-assist crash reports, in part because the fleet logs far more assisted miles than rivals. Critics also note that Tesla’s “U.S. average” mixes crash definitions and driving mix.
Even so, Tesla’s own same-car comparisons, plus lower rates of automatic emergency braking and harsh maneuvers when FSD is engaged, are the evidence Elluswamy is pointing to when he says v15 will push prediction and collision avoidance further. The claim is not that software already eliminates risk. It is that each major version is meant to widen the gap between the system and an unaided human driver.
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
