News
Rocket Lab spacecraft sends NASA’s CAPSTONE mission to the Moon
Rocket Lab has successfully sent a small NASA spacecraft on its way to the Moon, acing the complex interplanetary launch on its first try.
The public aerospace company’s (mostly) standard two-stage Electron rocket lifted from its New Zealand-based LC-1 pad on June 28th and inserted NASA’s tiny 25-kilogram (~55 lb) “Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment” (CAPSTONE) spacecraft into a low Earth parking orbit without issue. As is fairly typical for most modern Electron launches, a small ‘kick stage’ was included for orbital operations and payload deployment, but CAPSTONE’s kick stage and destination were anything but typical.
Instead of slightly and briefly tweaking a run-of-the-mill low Earth orbit, CAPSTONE’s kick stage was tasked with sending the spacecraft (and itself) all the way from LEO (~300 kilometers) to a lunar transfer orbit with an apoapsis 1.2 million kilometers (~750,000 mi) from Earth.
To accomplish that feat, Electron’s extensively upgraded Lunar Photon kick stage would need to perform more than half a dozen major burns spread out over almost a week, and survive hostile conditions while maintaining total control throughout. Generally speaking, Rocket Lab offers three kick stage variants: a standard low-thrust, low-longevity stage for small orbital adjustments shortly after launch; an upgraded Photon that can either serve as a long-lived satellite or kick stage; and an even more upgraded Photon with large propellant tanks and a more powerful ‘HyperCurie’ engine. With an impressive 3200+ meters per second of delta V, the latter variant could boost significant payloads into higher Earth orbits but is primarily designed for deep space missions – sending payloads beyond Earth orbit.
Rocket Lab wants to launch its own self-funded mission(s) to Venus, delivering one or several small atmospheric probes to help peel back the curtain on the chronically under-explored planet. It also won a 2021 contract to supply a pair of Mars-bound Photon spacecraft buses for NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) in 2024, and has multiple orders for simpler Photons that will support slightly more ordinary missions back in Earth orbit.
Lunar Photon’s performance on CAPSTONE bodes extremely well for those ambitious future plans. Within hours of reaching orbit, Photon had begun the orbit-raising process. Over the course of five days, Photon performed six major burns, effectively taking larger and larger ‘steps’ towards the Moon. The spacecraft’s seventh and final burn boosted its apoapsis almost tenfold from ~70,000 to 1.2 million kilometers from Earth, officially placing CAPSTONE on a ballistic lunar trajectory (BLT). While highly efficient, CAPSTONE’s trajectory means it will have to wait until November 2022 to truly enter orbit around the Moon using its own small thrusters.
Once there, “CAPSTONE will help reduce risk for future spacecraft by validating innovative navigation technologies and verifying the dynamics of” lunar near-rectilinear halo orbits (NRHO). The story behind that strange lunar orbit – which will make exploring the Moon’s surface significantly less convenient – is far less glamorous, however. CAPSTONE is essentially a tiny precursor to NASA’s Artemis Program, which the agency claims will help “establish the first long-term presence on the Moon.”
In reality, NASA’s concrete plans currently include a series of short and temporary human landings in the 2020s. While the agency has contracted with SpaceX to develop a potentially revolutionary Starship Moon lander for a single uncrewed and crewed demonstration mission, NASA’s current plan involves using its own Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft as a sort of $4 billion lunar taxi to carry astronauts from Earth’s surface to a Starship lander waiting in lunar orbit. Starship will then carry those astronauts to the surface, spend about a week on the ground, launch them back into lunar orbit, and rendezvous with Orion, which will finally return them to Earth.
-
Orion’s service module delivers about half as much delta V as NASA’s 50-year-old Apollo Service Module, severely limiting its deep space utility and making safe crewed trips to and from low lunar orbits virtually impossible on its own. Instead of improving the spacecraft’s performance and flexibility by upgrading or replacing the European-built service module (ESM) over the last decade, NASA accepted that Orion would only ever be able to send astronauts to lunar orbits that would always be inconvenient for surface operations.
CAPSTONE’s ultimate purpose, then, is to make sure that spacecraft operate as expected in that compromise orbit – only necessary because Orion can’t reach the lower lunar orbits that are already thoroughly understood.
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
