News
SpaceX braces for Florida-bound Dorian as hurricane threatens local Starship facility
Hurricane Dorian is currently growing into a potentially devastating Atlantic storm some 1,200mi (~2000km) off the Florida Coast and local spaceflight facilities – including SpaceX’s launch pads and Starship campus – are at high risk.
As of the latest storm advisories, Hurricane Dorian is likely to grow into a Category 3 or 4 storm prior to making landfall somewhere along the East Coast of Central Florida. Dorian’s ground track forecast is unusually uncertain just four days out from landfall, but the Space Coast’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), and other local spaceflight facilities (including SpaceX’s) are at high risk and are preparing for a worst-case scenario.
HURCON V – I
As of 0800hrs Wednesday morning, Brigadier General Doug Schiess – Commander of the 45th Space Wing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Director of the Eastern Range at Patrick Air Force Base – initiated HURCON V preparations across Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) and surrounding areas. This precaution is triggered when storm winds in excess of 50 knots (58mph) are measured fewer than 96 hours to landfall. While CCAFS hurricane operations begin 96h out from landfall, KSC’s preparations begin after HURCON IV, indicating that storm winds in excess of 50 knots (58mph) have been measured 72 hours out from landfall. All facilities then follow a HURCON IV – I warning system that defines a series of preparation events and personnel evacuation plans.
A HURCON IV issuance will see all personnel report for duty as usual while specialized teams will begin implementing organization-specific checklists, vehicles are fueled, and storm Ride-Out Team (ROT) personnel will be identified. From there as the storm approaches non-essential personnel will be evacuated, facilities will be secured, and roads will be closed. ROT personnel will remain on-site and will begin the evaluation of the premises once the storm has passed.
SpaceX follows KSC’s lead, battens down Starship hatches
As SpaceX leases Launch Complex 39-A from KSC it is expected that they will follow all precautions initiated by KSC as they did almost two years ago amid launch preparations during HURCON III conditions while facing down Hurricane Irma. SpaceX has released an official statement confirming the obvious: the company is working closely with KSC and CCAFS to monitor weather conditions and plan to take all necessary precautions before, during, and after landfall.
SpaceX may not be new to preparing its Florida launch facilities for hurricanes and tropical storms, but Hurricane Dorian poses entirely new challenges due to the fact that the company has recently begun operating a fairly extensive Starship production facility in Cocoa, Florida. The vast majority of Cocoa’s work is done entirely out in the open, rarely protected by more than a spartan windbreak or temporary tent. According to local photographer Greg Scott, SpaceX has paused all Starship production work for the moment and is working all-out to secure its facilities as the potentially catastrophic Cat 4 Hurricane Dorian fast approaches.
The total lack of hurricane-rated protection puts SpaceX’s Starship facility at exceptionally high risk. The Cocoa production facility is thus facing many obstacles with hurricane preparedness as the majority of Starship production takes place outside and is completely vulnerable to the elements. Aerial photos depict what a daunting – if not utterly impossible – task it will be to secure all of the current production pieces of Starship Mk2.
Along with the main section structures and the completed nose cone section of Starship, many smaller fabrication pieces including large steel rings, a large bulkhead, and an array of assembly tools will need to be secured. Luckily a newly constructed wind guard structure covered in a white canvas material seemingly just reached completion and may be used to house the largest section of Starship if teams can manage to move it inside before storm conditions arrive.
Although it is surely going to suffer some damage from hurricane-force winds, the tent structure should offer some limited protection for any hardware that can be moved inside it. While Starship is being fabricated to withstand the stresses of launch and re-entry conditions, it may not be able to stand against the fury of a hurricane in its current fragile state.
Been here before…
SpaceX has faced damage to Starship prototypes at the hand of wind before. The first prototype – now known as Starhopper – constructed at their testing facility in Boca Chica, TX originally featured a tall nose cone portion that was ultimately lost. A storm that brought 50mph (80 km/h) wind gusts blew through and knocked the fairing piece off of its concrete stand and resulted in a completely crumpled heap of steel mess. The loss of the nose cone ended up being purely aesthetic and caused little to no setback to Starhopper testing – delayed instead by issues with Raptor engines.
Any damage suffered in Cocoa as an effect of Hurricane Dorian will almost certainly cause setbacks for SpaceX. Even if SpaceX gets extremely lucky and suffers no direct damage from a glancing blow, disruption to local infrastructure (power, waste, water, industry) could significantly hamper production operations. In the event that Dorian makes landfall at or near Cape Canaveral, Starship Mk2 and the many Super Heavy-related steel rings and facilities situated around the Cocoa campus could easily be destroyed or damaged beyond salvage, owing to the fact that they are made out of relatively thin and lightweight metal and have expansive, sail-like surface areas.
On the plus side, if any of the above does occur, SpaceX is simultaneously building a second near-identical prototype – Starship Mk1 – at its Boca Chica, Texas facilities. Disruption is undesirable, but SpaceX and its Starship program will likely (and hopefully) be largely unharmed. Additionally, SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 launch out of Florida is an internal Starlink mission scheduled no earlier than late October, leaving at least 1.5-2 months for clean-up and any necessary repairs.
Check out Teslarati’s Marketplace! We offer Tesla accessories, including for the Tesla Cybertruck and Tesla Model 3.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Elon Musk’s Boring Company says Vegas Loop stations will double by year end once again.
The Boring Company says the Vegas Loop’s station count will double by the end of the year, tying the target to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers in Las Vegas. “Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!” the company wrote in a post on X, attaching listings for a Loop driver and a senior Loop operations manager.
The number checks out against what’s already public, with the Vegas Loop currently running 14 operational stations, while the Boring Company’s own project page lists 28 as the target for the end of 2026.
Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!
Urgently hiring exceptional and enthusiastic Drivers and Ops Managers.
Apply here!
Driverhttps://t.co/ZUPXBYTONb
Senior Loop Ops Managerhttps://t.co/mV6V22V8jH pic.twitter.com/IZ9FqIw8WY
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) September 14, 2026
Much of that growth is tied to tunnels that are already built and waiting on an opening date. A roughly two-mile dual tunnel system under Paradise Road, connecting Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, is expected to open in stages over the coming weeks, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief executive Steve Hill told the Review-Journal last week. New stations at 4744 Paradise, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, and the former Gordon Biersch site would come online with it, several of them built to speed up rides to Harry Reid International Airport ahead of Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Clark County entitled Vegas Loop for 123 stations after approving 19 more in August, as Teslarati reported at the time. Entitlement and construction move at different speeds on this project, so county approval alone does not guarantee a station opens on any particular schedule.
Clark County approved 18 additional stations back in 2023, part of a plan that pushed the system’s target to 69 stations across 65 miles, doubling the network on paper for the first time. The target kept climbing after that, to roughly 93 stations by the end of that year and 104 by last year, before August’s vote pushed it to 123. This week’s announcement is the first time that doubling language has been attached to stations actually running rather than stations merely approved on a county map.
Ridership gives some sense of what a denser network could carry. Boring Company executive Mike Baier said in July that the Vegas Loop already moves around 40,000 passengers on busy convention days, a total that tops most light rail systems in the country despite the system running on a fraction of its planned tunnel mileage. Company leadership has projected ridership could triple or quadruple once the airport connector tunnels fully open.
Boring Company did not say which stations beyond those already under construction would open by year end, or whether the hiring push points to a fleet expansion alongside the new stops.
Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.
Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”
The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.
Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.
Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.
Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.
Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.
Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done
Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence
