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SpaceX to launch asteroid mining spacecraft alongside private Moon lander
SpaceX customer Intuitive Machines says it will use spare capacity on one of its Moon lander launches to send startup AstroForge’s first asteroid prospector spacecraft into deep space.
Intuitive Machines’ second Nova-C Moon lander is scheduled to launch no earlier than (NET) Q4 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The IM-2 lander is the primary payload but is only expected to weigh about 1.9 tons (~4300 lb). To take advantage of the rocket performance left on the table by the relatively light payload, Intuitive Machines has opted to include a secondary payload adapter ring (ESPA) located below each lander. That gives companies like AstroForge an opportunity to hitch a ride to high Earth orbit, deep space, and the Moon for a likely unbeatable price.
Built by UK startup Orbital Astronautics, AstroForge’s Brokkr-2 spacecraft will attempt to become the first private vehicle to prospect for resources on an asteroid. It’s also the third rideshare payload announced for Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission.
We’re excited to launch these missions and many more to come. More information on this year’s launches: https://t.co/MSR61V8Lh7— AstroForge (@ForgeAstro) January 24, 2023
The update that's rolling out to the fleet makes full use of the front and rear steering travel to minimize turning circle. In this case a reduction of 1.6 feet just over the air— Wes (@wmorrill3) April 16, 2024
Lunar Trailblazer
Coincidentally, the main purpose of the second IM-2 rideshare payload to be announced is to search for resources in space. It isn’t concerned with asteroids, but NASA’s 200-kilogram (440 lb) Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft is designed to find, characterize, and map water ice resources on the Moon. That map could help future missions explore the possibility of turning lunar ice into commodities like breathable oxygen or rocket propellant.
The challenges facing such a concept are extreme, but a rocket propellant depot located on the lunar surface could significantly increase the performance of future Moon landers. Propellant depots in cislunar orbit could also help boost spacecraft further and faster to destinations elsewhere in the solar system.
Tanker-002
The first IM-2 rideshare payload to be announced was OrbitFab’s Tanker-002 spacecraft. It’s unclear if OrbitFab is on track to fly Tanker-002 in late 2023, but the spacecraft is meant to be the first geostationary propellant depot ever launched. The Colorado startup has already won a $13.3 million contract from the US military to refuel satellites in geostationary orbit, 36,000 kilometers (~22,250 mi) above Earth’s surface. It’s possible that Tanker-002 is meant to support that refueling mission.
The spacecraft is designed to carry a few hundred pounds of hydrazine monopropellant, potentially enabling it to extend the useful lives of multiple multimillion-dollar satellites by several years. Alongside IM-2, Falcon 9 will launch Tanker-002 on a lunar flyby trajectory. But thanks to the cooperation of startup GeoJump, instead of entering orbit around the Moon, Tanker-002 will slingshot around the Moon to slow itself down. That lunar slingshot will allow the depot to efficiently enter geostationary orbit, where it can begin refueling spacecraft.
Brokkr-2
Brokkr-2 is the second of two AstroForge spacecraft scheduled to launch in 2023. The first, Brokkr-1, will head to low Earth orbit (LEO) as early as April 2023 on SpaceX’s seventh Falcon 9 rideshare launch. Once in orbit, it will attempt to demonstrate technology AstroForge has developed to refine platinum ore in microgravity conditions. Brokkr-2 will then visit an asteroid and search for platinum resources. If enough platinum is discovered, Bloomberg reports that AstroForge will send a third mission to demonstrate the ability to land on the asteroid. As early as 2025, AstroForge’s fourth mission would be the first to attempt to land, gather ore, turn that ore into platinum, and return the precious metal to Earth.
AstroForge has raised $13 million to date. Unlike failed asteroid mining startups Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, the new company intends to exploit increasingly capable off-the-shelf hardware and services to keep its costs as low as possible. In theory, that will allow it to focus most of its resources on developing the unproven technology required to gather and refine space-based resources.
IM-2
Finally, the IM-2 Nova-C Moon lander’s primary payload is a pair of NASA instruments designed to drill into the lunar surface and analyze the regolith for volatiles. Also known as PRIME-1, the mission will be NASA’s first serious exploration of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) on the Moon.
The mission is a sort of microcosm of the future of space utilization, which may focus heavily on ISRU and refueling to extend the capabilities of chemically-powered rockets and spacecraft. Lunar Trailblazer will map lunar water resources. Brokkr-2 will attempt to prospect an asteroid for extractable metal. IM-2 will test technologies that could help extract resources from the Moon. And Tanker-002 will be a significant step forward for commercial propellant depots, which could eventually create markets for space resources.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
The in-car Tesla Theater is among the most unique features available within the cars. When charging, parked, camping, or just hanging out, vehicle occupants can access a variety of streaming platforms on the large center screen, helping keep them entertained during downtime.
However, the Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms, something that owners have requested for some time.
Tesla owners recently discovered that visiting Apple TV in the vehicle browser can launch a fullscreen interface that looks and behaves like a dedicated application rather than an ordinary webpage:
Today I learned that if you go to Apple TV in the Tesla browser, it will open up an actual Apple TV app, fully functional. Not just the site.
Apparently there are more apps than just the few that show on the apps page. pic.twitter.com/os1Ypfm4JR
— Jason W (@jmwilt21) August 20, 2026
The experience drops the usual address bar and browser chrome, presenting catalogs, continue watching rows, and playback controls in the same window Tesla Theater already uses for its listed services. Independent testers soon found similar treatment for HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, and Prime Video when those sites are opened from the car browser.
This shift is a plausible early signal that Tesla is widening Theater support without a formal software note. Theater has long been a set of web views rather than native applications, so recognizing extra domains and stripping the browser frame is a small server-side change that can expand the catalog quickly.
Owners still lack permanent Theater icons for the newly recognized services, and video remains limited to Park, yet the smoother launch is a meaningful step toward a broader lounge while charging.
Tesla Theater arrived with software version 10 in September 2019. The first video services were Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, available only while parked and originally tied to WiFi. Spotify arrived in the same era as music rather than Theater video. Disney+ joined officially in July 2021 with the 2021.24 update, giving owners another major catalog on the center screen. Twitch and TikTok later appeared among the default Theater tiles, and Tesla Tutorials remained a persistent educational tile.
Not every addition stayed put. In December 2023, a Holiday software build removed the Disney+ tile for many United States owners after a public dispute involving advertising on X. Hulu stayed visible even though Disney owned it. Visiting disneyplus.com in the browser often restored the tile, which suggested the removal was a recognition list change rather than a complete block. Owners have also reported occasional blank Theater grids after updates, usually fixed by language toggles, resets, or later firmware.
Tesla axes Disney+ from vehicles with Musk-Iger rivalry, but there’s a workaround
Code archives from 2024 listed many unused source names, including Apple TV and Prime Video, that never became official icons, which now looks like groundwork for the current fullscreen browser behavior.
Now that this hint toward an expanded Theater experience has been recognized, Tesla could follow through with these additional shortcuts as a sign that more streaming platforms are available in Teslas than ever before.
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
