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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.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
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Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
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Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
