News
SpaceX’s historic NASA astronaut launch debut on track for second attempt
Rather than making history on May 27th, SpaceX’s highest-profile launch ever – Crew Dragon’s NASA astronaut launch debut – was scrubbed just minutes before liftoff by stormy Florida weather. Unfortunately, conditions appear to be even less favorable on Saturday and Sunday backup windows.
Weather trended well, until it didn’t
The day began with launch fans growing increasingly concerned about a system of low-pressure off of Florida’s northeast coast that strengthened into tropical storm Bertha – the second named storm before the official start of the Atlantic basin hurricane season on June 1st. As the day progressed, Bertha became less of a worry for SpaceX recovery and emergency abort drop zones as it moved further north up the coast eventually making landfall in South Carolina. Then the thunderstorms began firing up.
Going into launch day launch weather officer, Mike McAleenan of the U.S. Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron predicted a 60% chance of favorable launch weather conditions. That decreased slightly to 50% during the morning’s launch weather briefing. The 50/50 shot of Florida weather cooperating to get the launch off during the one-second long launch window opportunity remained the main concern for the rest of the day.
During the final thirty minutes of the countdown, many of the weather constraints that were holding up a green-light for launch from cleared up, but one last weather rule remained no-go. McAleenan stated over the internal weather communication loop during NASA’s live broadcast that if the launch window could’ve extended another 10 minutes, the weather would probably cooperate. This wasn’t the case, though. The launch attempt was ultimately aborted just 14 minutes shy of liftoff due to the “field mill” rule not clearing in time. The lightning field mill rule refers to a sophisticated electrical field system that spans the entire area of Kennedy Space Center and the surrounding area of Cape Canaveral responsible for continuously detecting the electrical charge of the atmosphere.
Protecting rockets from producing lightning
Rockets are not permitted to launch through an electrically charged atmosphere because of the possibility of what is called “triggered” lightning – lightning that is actually produced by a rocket bursting through an electrically charged atmosphere. Sending a rocket through an already unstable atmosphere can cause a disturbance, a lightning bolt, to be triggered. This phenomenon has the capability of being potentially dangerous for the rocket and, more importantly in this case, the occupants on board.
Demo-2, Round 2
Following a scrubbed first attempt, the 45th Weather Squadron released the L-3 (3 days until launch) forecast for the second attempt to send NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station. The prediction looked much like the one going into Wednesday’s attempt. On Thursday morning, May 28th, a new L-2 (2 days until launch) forecast was released showing very little change from the evening before.
SpaceX’s next attempt at a Demo-2 launch will occur on Saturday, May 30th, at 3:22:41pm EDT with another backup attempt scheduled for Sunday, May 31st at 3:00:07pm EDT. The outlook for the weather, however, looks much the same as it did for Wednesday. The 45th Weather Squadron is currently predicting only a 40% chance of favorable launching conditions on both days, and that’s just for the weather directly over LC-39A at the time of launch.
The 45th Weather Squadron does not predict other conditions that can determine a scrub of launch including upper-level atmospheric winds capable of completely sheering apart a rocket at altitude, or weather conditions for booster recovery and the recovery zones needed to rescue the Dragon capsule in the event of an emergency abort scenario. SpaceX has its own team of professionals that work in tandem with the 45th Weather Squadron to monitor the conditions of the recovery and abort zones. SpaceX takes things into consideration like wave height and patterns to determine whether or not conditions are appropriate enough for crews to perform any and all recovery operations that may be needed.
For Saturday’s attempt, the SpaceX Demo-2 will once again face the challenges of precipitation and dangerous lightning producing anvil and cumulus clouds. Expect launch day to look much like it did during the first attempt on Wednesday. SpaceX will need to thread one seriously precise needle to pull off the most historic rocket launch in company history.
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News
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
SpaceX launched the classified USSF-385 mission from Vandenberg, landing its booster on a tenth flight.
SpaceX launched another classified mission for the U.S. Space Force from California early Saturday morning, and the Falcon 9 booster that carried it landed on a drone ship in the Pacific for the tenth time. The USSF-385 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:00 a.m. PT.
Booster B1100 touched down on Of Course I Still Love You roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. It was the booster’s tenth flight and tenth successful landing, following the NROL-95 national security mission and eight Starlink launches. Its previous flight, a Starlink Group 15 mission on August 22, came just 35 days earlier. SpaceX ended its livestream shortly after the landing, which is standard for classified payloads, and neither the company nor the Space Force has said what the rocket carried.
Watch Falcon 9 launch the USSF-385 mission from pad 4E in California https://t.co/CAdbx85Ydy
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 26, 2026
USSF-385 is the fourth Space Force launch from the same Vandenberg pad in roughly six weeks, following USSF-366 on August 15, USSF-153 on September 10, and USSF-259 on September 17. When SpaceX flew USSF-366 in August, independent trackers noted that the rocket’s stage drop zones matched SpaceX’s Starlink Group 15 missions, pointing to Starshield, the government version of the Starlink satellite bus. The Space Force later cataloged 23 satellites after both USSF-366 and USSF-153, while USSF-259 placed 17 satellites into a different orbital plane, per KeepTrack. Launch databases describe USSF-385 the same way, though the payload remains officially unidentified.
The cadence lines up with the contracts, because in July, the Space Force awarded SpaceX $1.6 billion in task orders for 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg through the end of 2027. SpaceX also holds contracts to build pieces of that same network, which pushed its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion.
Saturday’s flight was also the sixth and final Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg in September, according to Spaceflight Now, while only one Falcon 9 flew from the East Coast this month as SpaceX shifts its Florida infrastructure toward Starship. Launch trackers list it as SpaceX’s 112th mission of 2026 and the 108th Falcon 9 flight of the year, with SLC-4E turned around about six and a half days after its previous launch.
The West Coast pad will not stay quiet for long, considering SpaceX has another Starlink mission scheduled from SLC-4E on September 30. Meanwhile, in Texas, the company is two days away from Starship Flight 14, which is targeting Monday at 7:15 a.m. CT for the vehicle’s first attempt to reach orbit.
News
Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.
Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.
“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.
The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.
See you next week pic.twitter.com/BT52bGVxFu
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 25, 2026
The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.
That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.
Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.
The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
