News
SpaceX will launch its Mars spaceship into orbit as early as 2020
First spaceship prototype already under construction
Speaking on a launch industry round-table at the Satellite 2018 conference, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell revealed that the company intends to conduct the first orbital launches of BFR as early as 2020, with suborbital spaceship tests beginning in the first half of 2019.
Only six months after CEO Elon Musk first debuted the Interplanetary Transport System in Adelaide, Australia, a flood of recent comments from both executives have made it overwhelmingly clear that SpaceX intends to have its first spaceship ready for short suborbital test flights at the beginning of 2019. Considering Musk’s unprovoked acknowledgment at SXSW 2018 of his tendency towards overly optimistic timelines, the repeated affirmations of BFS test flights beginning in 2019 and now an orbital launch of the full BFR booster and ship in 2020 hold a fair deal more water than they did in 2017.
SpaceX’s subscale Raptor engine conducting a 40-second test in Texas. This engine will power both BFR and BFS. (SpaceX)
Breaking it down
These past few weeks have been filled with a number of similar statements from SpaceX executives like Shotwell, Musk, and others; all focused in part on the company’s next-generation launch vehicle, BFR (Big __ Rocket). Composed of a single massive booster and an equally massive second stage/spaceship (BFS), the rocket is meant to enable the affordable expansion of permanent human outposts on Mars and throughout the inner solar system by making good on the decades-old promise of fully reusable launch vehicles.
In order to succeed, the company will need to solve the problems that NASA and its Shuttle contractors never could.
-
- The relatively cylindrical BFS reduces complexity and lowers weight. (SpaceX)
-
- BFS (circa 2017) shows off its complement of SL and Vacuum Raptor engines. SpaceX is moving back to something similar to this. (SpaceX)
-
- SpaceX’s 2017 BFS (now Starship) delivers cargo to a large lunar base. (SpaceX)
To an extent, SpaceX has already matured the principles and technologies needed to reliably recover and reuse the booster stage of two-stage rockets, demonstrated by their incredible success with Falcon 9.
BFR is a whole different animal, partly owing to its massive size, huge thrust, and new propellant and tankage systems, but those problems are more technical than conceptual. SpaceX already knows how to reuse boosters, and that will apply to BFR once its several technological hurdles have been overcome. Designing and building the orbital spaceship (BFS), however, will undoubtedly be the most difficult task SpaceX has yet to take on. The safety and cost records of the only other orbital-class reusable second stage in existence, the Space Shuttle, are at least partially indicative of the difficulty of the challenges ahead of SpaceX.
In order to succeed, the company will need to solve the problems that NASA and its Shuttle contractors never could – they will need to build an orbital, crewed spaceship that can be reused with minimal refurbishment, can launch for little more than the cost of its propellant, and does so with safety and reliability comparable to the records of modern commercial airliners – perhaps the safest form of transport humans have ever created.
Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with the beginnings of the International Space Station. The Shuttle suffered several deadly failures and cost more than the expendable Saturn V moon rocket it replaced. (NASA)
Rockets do not easily lend themselves to such incredible standards of safety or reliability – airliners average a single death per 16 million flights – but SpaceX will need to reach similar levels of reusability and reliability if they hope to enable even moderately affordable spaceflight or Earth-to-Earth transport by rocket. Still, there can be little doubt that SpaceX employs some of the absolute best engineering expertise to have ever existed in the US, and their extraordinary personal investment in the company’s goal of making humanity multi-planetary bode about as well as could be asked for such an ambitious endeavor. According to Musk and Shotwell, the first spaceship is already being built and suborbital tests will begin as soon as 2019, while full-up orbital launches – presumably involving both the booster and spaceship – might occur just a single year later in 2020.
SpaceX's Shotwell: BFR will probably be orbital in 2020, but you should start seeing hops in 2019. (Grasshopper reference?) #satshow
— Caleb Henry (@ChenrySpace) March 12, 2018
Musk: People have told me that my timelines historically have been optimistic. I am trying to recalibrate. What I do know is we are building the first ship. We will be able to do do short flights in the first half of next year. It's a big booster and ship. Saturn V thrust x2.
— Michael Baylor (@MichaelBaylor_) March 11, 2018
It appears that we will find out sooner, rather than later, if SpaceX has truly found a way to lower the cost to orbit by several orders of magnitudes. Follow us for live updates, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks, and a sea of beautiful photos from our East and West coast photographers.
Teslarati – Instagram – Twitter
Tom Cross – Twitter
Pauline Acalin – Twitter
Eric Ralph – Twitter
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
