News
SpaceX Starship blew its top during rocket fueling test (updated)
Update: SpaceX has released an official statement indicating that Starship Mk1’s November 20th failure came after a decision to intentionally pressurize the rocket prototype to its limits. This likely means that the test was to max flight pressures and not an intentional burst test, so Starship’s dome failure is still a significant concern and was definitely not planned.
More importantly, SpaceX says that it had already decided to retire Starship Mk1 before any kind of flight testing, treating the vehicle as a pathfinder. Instead, SpaceX will build and use Starship Mk3 – the next Boca Chica prototype – for Starship’s first attempted skydiver-style landing and 20 km (12 mi) flight test.
SpaceX statement on the above test and incident: pic.twitter.com/r1ReRYhUhz— Michael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) November 21, 2019
SpaceX’s first full-scale Starship prototype has suffered a significant failure during testing, destroying or severely damaging large sections of the rocket. However, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has already commented on the anomaly and is not all that concerned.
On November 20th, SpaceX – having canceled a planned road closure the day prior – unexpectedly requested a last-second road closure and entered into a much more serious round of testing with Starship Mk1, the rocket’s first full-scale prototype. This followed testing on November 18th that concluded with Starship Mk1’s very first ‘breath’ – some venting activity near the end of a tank proof test. SpaceX technicians spent the next 36 or so hours inspecting and working on Mk1, presumably looking for and patching minor leaks along its tank section.
The November 20th testing progressed far faster than the previous round of tests and Starship Mk1 was quickly venting again. Soon after that, frost began to appear on the exterior of its steel liquid oxygen and methane tanks, a telltale sign that some form of cryogenic testing was ongoing. Based on a distinct lack of activity at the nearby flare stack, SpaceX was using liquid oxygen (LOX) or liquid nitrogen (LN2) to verify that Starship performs as expected when filled with supercool propellant.
After initial venting and visible frost formation, SpaceX appeared to push forward, rapidly loading Starship Mk1 with LOX or LN2. This progress was easily visible thanks to the fact that the mass and pressure of all that cryogenic liquid made quick work of the slight imperfections on the exterior of Starship’s steel hull, turning the vehicle’s reflection from a speckled patchwork to an almost mirror-like finish. Roughly half an hour later, the otherwise peaceful scene was interrupted by the rapid failure of Starship Mk1’s upper LOX tank dome, instantly thrown several hundred feet into the air.
Seconds later, the crumpled upper half of Starship Mk1’s tank section appeared out of the clouds created and began hemorrhaging a huge volume of liquid oxygen, immediately boiling and vaporizing as it was exposed to the Earth’s comparatively white-hot atmosphere. Impressively, Starship appeared to remain functional after its top quite literally blew off, and the vehicle rapidly detanked and appeared to safe itself. Some ten minutes after the overpressure event, the freed liquid oxygen had boiled to nothing and Starship appeared to be quiet.
By all appearances, Starship Mk1 appeared to perform extremely well as an integrated system up to the point that its upper tank dome failed. The first frame from LabPadre’s stream with anything visibly amiss explicitly implicates the weld connecting the LOX dome to the cylindrical body of Starship’s LOX tank, point to a bad weld joint as the likeliest source of the failure. Although that hardware failure is unfortunate, Mk1’s loss will hopefully guide improvements in Starship’s design and manufacturing procedures.
Moving forward
Minutes after the anomaly was broadcast on several unofficial livestreams of SpaceX’s Boca Chica facilities, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk acknowledged Starship Mk1’s failure in a tweet, telegraphing a general lack of worry. Of note, Musk indicated that Mk1 was valuable mainly as a manufacturing pathfinder, entirely believable but also partially contradicting his September 2019 presentation, in which he pretty clearly stated that Mk1 would soon be launched to ~20 km to demonstrate Starship’s exotic new skydiver landing strategy.
Musk says that instead of repairing Starship Mk1, SpaceX’s Boca Chica team will move directly to Starship Mk3, a significantly more advanced design that has benefitted from the numerous lessons learned from building and flying Starhopper and fabricating Starship Mk1. The first Starship Mk3 ring appears to have already been prepared, but SpaceX’s South Texas focus has clearly been almost entirely on preparing Starship Mk1 for wet dress rehearsal, static fire, and flight tests. After today’s failure, it sounds like Mk1 will most likely be retired early and replaced as soon as possible by Mk3.
Above all else, the most important takeaway from today’s Starship Mk1 anomaly is that the vehicle was a very early prototype and SpaceX likely wants to have vehicle failures occur on the ground or in-flight. As long as no humans are at risk, pushing Starship to failure (or suffering unplanned failures like today’s) can only serve to benefit and improve the vehicle’s design, especially when the failed hardware can be recovered intact (ish) and carefully analyzed.
A step further, SpaceX is simultaneously building a second (and third) Starship prototype at its companion Cocoa, Florida facilities, and Starship Mk2 is nearly finished. Coincidentally, technicians installed its last tank dome – the same dome that failed on Mk1 – just days ago, and any insight that the Boca Chica team can gather from Mk1’s troubles will almost certainly be applied to Mk2, whether that means reinforcing its existing domes or fully replacing the upper dome with an improved design.
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Elon Musk
Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK
Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at Thursday’s White House summit.
Elon Musk is set to receive the highest honor the U.S. government gives to scientists and engineers.
President Donald Trump will present Musk with the National Medal of Science on Thursday at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit, Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday. Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su will receive the same medal, while Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A White House official later confirmed the list to Reuters.
“The Trump administration is grateful for the contributions of these incredible leaders in science and technology. These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News.
FIRST ON FOX: Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at the White House Thursday.
Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su will also receive the science medal, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella will receive the technology medal.
It marks Trump’s first time presenting the awards across either administration.
Full story here https://t.co/omnrLV0EwS
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) October 7, 2026
It will be the first time Trump has presented either medal in his two terms. Congress created the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation, which administers it, says 529 scientists and engineers have received it since. A presidential committee reviews nominees, but the president makes the final call.
Thursday’s group of medalists run or founded companies, and three of them sit at the center of the Super Intelligence hardware race that Musk competes in. Huang’s Nvidia supplies the GB300 chips filling SpaceX’s Colossus 2 cluster, while Su’s AMD is Nvidia’s biggest rival in data center GPUs.
Worth noting that Trump’s uncle, MIT physicist John G. Trump, received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan for his work on ionizing radiation and its uses in medicine and industry.
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
For Musk, the medal is the latest sign of how far his relationship with Trump has come since their 2025 split over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and his exit from DOGE. Last week, he sat at Trump’s left during a White House lunch where AI executives signed a voluntary safety accord, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named him to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare. Musk has also adopted the administration’s new vocabulary, saying on Sunday that SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump ordered federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.”
Musk has collected science honors before, including the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2019.
Lifestyle
Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life
Tesla shares dashcam footage of FSD Supervised stopping mid intersection to avoid a T-bone crash.
Tesla is putting another Full Self-Driving save in front of its 24.8 million followers on X.
On Tuesday morning, Tesla’s main account shared a dashcam clip with the caption “FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash.” The footage came from an owner posting as TheNewGrid, who described what happened at a stop sign: “I looked at the car coming to the stop sign figured they would stop, my car went, then came to a stop mid intersection as they flew by. Had I been manually driving this would have resulted in a crash.”
The sequence is the notable part. FSD had already started crossing when the other driver ran the stop sign. Instead of pressing on, the car braked hard in the middle of the intersection and let the crossing vehicle pass in front of it. By the owner’s own account, they had made the same assumption the software initially made, that the other car would stop, and would not have corrected in time.
FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 6, 2026
The clip is the latest in a run of safety posts Tesla has amplified over the past several days. On Saturday, the company shared a video from Selling Sunset star Jason Oppenheim, who sold his Bentley for a Model Y and said he was buying Teslas with FSD for 10 of his employees. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla AI, followed up by writing that Tesla self-driving “reacts to other people cutting into your path with super-human response times.” On Monday, a Cybertruck owner posted footage of FSD moving across three lanes from a red light to clear a path for an ambulance approaching from behind.
This recent clip also lands a few weeks after Tesla began shipping Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD v14.3.9, a feature that can activate FSD on the driver’s behalf when a frontal collision is imminent or the driver appears distracted. Elluswamy said in September that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” are coming with v15, the release Tesla has tied to round the clock Robotaxi operation.
The safety messaging matters beyond social media. Tesla has said FSD Supervised was 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on European roads, and it has been putting those figures in front of regulators. Eight EU countries have now approved FSD Supervised, with Croatia the most recent, but the EU’s bloc-wide vote originally set for October 6 has been pushed to December at the earliest.
FSD Supervised is still a Level 2 system, and the driver remains responsible at all times. Even heavy users find reasons to step in. Teslarati’s Joey Klender, who uses FSD for about 76 percent of his driving, laid out five recurring issues on Tuesday that still prompt him to intervene. Clips like this one show the other column of that ledger: moments where the software caught a mistake a human was about to make.
Energy
Tesla Model 3 and Model Y can now do what only Cybertruck could
Tesla Model 3 and Model Y can power your home with Powerwall 3 during outages.
Tesla has turned its two top sellers into backup batteries for the house.
Tesla Energy announced on Tuesday that Powershare Home Backup is now available for new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles paired with a Powerwall 3, saying the car can “extend your home backup by over 2 days.” Minutes later, Tesla’s main account quoted the post with a broader pitch: “With Powerwall 3, every Tesla can now serve as your home’s backup battery.”
Until this week, the Cybertruck was the only Tesla that could send power back into a home, and that capability only began working alongside Powerwall 3 last month, after years of ambitious targets.
Tesla’s updated Powershare page says every Model 3 and Model Y ordered in the U.S. or Puerto Rico on or after October 1, 2026 can use the feature. Some, but not all, earlier cars also qualify. Owners can check on the touchscreen under Software, then Additional Vehicle Information, where a capable car shows “Powershare Support: Enabled.” As Electrek reported, bidirectional power on the two cars runs through an inverter Tesla calls PCS2 Lite, and the company has not said when that part entered production on each trim.
The home side is simpler. A house that already has a Powerwall 3 and either a Wall Connector 3 or Universal Wall Connector needs no additional equipment, and Tesla says compatibility is enabled through a software update. When the grid drops, the Powerwall and the car work together, with up to 11.52 kW of continuous power available. Tesla’s “over two days” estimate assumes a home using 30 kWh per day and a car starting at a 90 percent charge. Standard trims are rated for up to two days, while the Cybertruck adds more than three.
There are limits. Powerwall 2 and Powerwall+ support is listed as “coming soon.” Model S and Model X are not included, and Grid Support, the program that lets Cybertruck owners in Texas send power back to the grid during demand spikes for bill credits, is not available for Model 3 or Model Y.
The rollout also lines up with something Elon Musk said more than three years ago. At Tesla’s March 2023 Investor Day, Musk said, “I don’t think very many people are going to want to use bidirectional charging, unless you have a Powerwall.” Tesla has now shipped the feature for its volume cars with exactly that requirement attached.
The Powerwall pairing was the hard part on Cybertruck. Tesla told owners in December 2025 that Powershare with Powerwall had been pushed to mid 2026, and lead engineer Wes Morrill explained that two devices capable of forming a home’s grid have to negotiate which one leads during an outage, across multiple generations of hardware. With that work done for the truck, Tesla was able to extend it to the Model 3 and Model Y within a month.
Ford and GM have offered home backup from their EVs for several years, but both require a separate inverter and backup hardware. Tesla’s version leans on equipment many Powerwall 3 owners already have on the wall. Powershare for the two cars also ships as part of software update 2026.38.3, the same release that began delivering Halloween Mode on Tuesday.
Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK
Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life
