Lifestyle
What will it feel like to ride on SpaceX’s BFR? NASA astronaut explains
Former NASA astronaut and International Space Station commander, Leroy Chiao, explains what it might feel like to ride inside SpaceX’s human-transport rocket and travel across the world in roughly 40 minutes. The Elon Musk coined BFR or Big Falcon Rocket is the serial tech entrepreneur’s latest vision for a city-to-city transportation system that would use rockets to transport passengers at speeds upwards of 18,000 mph (27,000 km/h), or over 30 times the speed of today’s passenger airliner.
Musk revealed details for his concept of a multi-planetary rocket during a recent presentation given at the International Astronautical Congress conference in Adelaide, Australia, where he described his grandiose vision to take people anywhere in the world in under an hour. A concept video showed people traveling from New York to Shanghai aboard a SpaceX BFR in 39 minutes.
But one has to ask, could the average person withstand the forces associated with rocket travel and what would it feel like to ride inside SpaceX’s Mars-intent rocket?
Surprisingly, the G-forces experienced from the rocket blasting off from ground level won’t be that uncomfortable for the passenger, says former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao who’s flown on the space shuttle and Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. “During launch on a rocket with liquid engines … the liftoff is very smooth, and one really can’t feel it.”
Instead, SpaceX BFR passengers experiencing weightlessness for the first time as the spacecraft temporarily arcs through space may feel a sense of nausea. “You feel like you are tumbling, as your balance system struggles to make sense of what is happening, and you are very dizzy,” says Chiao in speaking with Business Insider. “You feel the fluid shift [in your body], kind of like laying heads-down on an incline, because there is no longer gravity pulling your body fluids down into your legs. All this can cause nausea.”
Once the second stage section of the rocket that’s carrying humans begins to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, passengers will begin to feel a gradual increase in G-forces and until it reaches roughly 5 G’s or the pressure of roughly five times that person’s weight. “As you start to re-enter the atmosphere, you would feel the G’s come on smoothly and start to build,” says Chiao.
The spaceship would descend towards a floating drone ship thats’s located back on Earth before firing its engines and slowing the spacecrafts’s descent onto the barge. “You would both feel and hear” the engines, Chiao said. “As the thrust builds, you would feel the G’s come on again, and then at touchdown, you would feel a little bump.”
As to whether this city-to-city travel-by-rocket concept could become a popular form of transportation, Chiao tells Business Insider that it’s not for the faint of heart and it likely won’t come cheap.
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I would board a SpaceX BFR rocket for city-to-city travel (assuming free) … https://t.co/1rjTP4rQ4j
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) September 29, 2017
Teslarati asked more than 1,100 people their thoughts on taking a SpaceX BFR if it were free. The majority of respondents said they would volunteer for BFR’s maiden voyage, while 31% said they would only ride aboard after 500-1,000 SpaceX BFR successes with no failures.
Knowing that the voyage won’t come without a potentially vomit-inducing experience, would you still volunteer for the journey?
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Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
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Elon Musk escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”
The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”
Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love
Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.
Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.
The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”
The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.
Custom wraps via mobile app https://t.co/5OydZ26g9p pic.twitter.com/uexU0ZePxu
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
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It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.
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