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SpaceX on track for new launch every other week after CRS-12 success
After Dragon successfully docked to the ISS Wednesday, the station’s crew wasted no time opening the hatch to distribute ice cream for all. The initiation of unloading marked CRS-12’s success, with the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 launch vehicle performing nominally.
The launch of CRS-12 debuted SpaceX’s first Block 4 Falcon 9, carrying with it a variety of small upgrades and improvements. Most importantly, it is understood that the vehicle utilized Merlin engines that have been qualified for higher thrust, although that capability was not used on Monday. The upgrade in thrust, expected to add an additional 10% to the vehicle’s quoted “7,607 kN” thrust at sea level, will enable SpaceX to pursue recoveries during the launch of even heavier payloads. As is now almost routine, SpaceX also recovered the first stage at LZ-1, following some considerably dramatic aerobatics during the return.
Block 4 is a necessary incremental improvement as SpaceX looks to Block 5, which will feature far more visible and significant modifications. Block 5 is expected to conduct its first launch sometime in 2018, and signs point to its debut flight being the launch of SpaceX’s first Commercial Crew demonstration flight, scheduled for NET (No Earlier Than) February 2018.
Focusing on the nearer future, SpaceX will proceed into its first static fire attempt tomorrow ahead of the launch of Formosat-5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), expected to lift off on Thursday, August 24. If all goes well during that campaign, the next milestone will be a static fire ahead of the company’s launch of a USAF experimental spaceplane on September 7, with the static fire for that mission expected approximately a week before. SpaceX appears as dedicated as ever to a regular biweekly launch cadence, which was demonstrated earlier this year, culminating in the launch of three Falcon 9s in less than two weeks. Looking later into September, the only launch with a known date is Iridium-3, which will see SpaceX orbit the next 10 Iridium NEXT satellites from VAFB. The mission is tentatively scheduled for September 30th.
While completing the missions of customers as quickly as possibly is SpaceX’s clear priority, the company also has multiple other goals that will likely make a consistent biweekly cadence more difficult. LC-40 is nearing readiness after a long campaign of refurbishment. Once complete, the pad will likely take over all commercial Falcon 9 launches. Following its activation, LC-39A will proceed through a period of modifications in anticipation of Falcon Heavy and Commercial Crew launches of Falcon 9. This is expected to take at least 60 days. Regardless, SpaceX has repeatedly made it clear that the goal is no launch downtime during the transition between pads. Info recently made public has indicated that SES-11, likely launching on a refurbished Falcon 9, would be the first mission to launch from LC-40 after its reactivation. SES-11 has since been delayed from sometime in September into “Q4 2017”, meaning that LC-40’s return to flight will likely happen no earlier than October.
Aside from Iridium-3’s launch, Elon Musk is also set to present a significant update to SpaceX’s Mars colonization efforts on September 29th. However you look at it, the last several months of 2017 leave fans of spaceflight with a vast array of milestones to look forward to.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s X goes down as users report major outage Friday morning
Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.
Elon Musk’s X experienced an outage Friday morning, leaving large numbers of users unable to access the social media platform.
Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.
Downdetector reports
Users attempting to open X were met with messages such as “Something went wrong. Try reloading,” often followed by an endless spinning icon that prevented access, according to a report from Variety. Downdetector data showed that reports of problems surged rapidly throughout the morning.
As of 10:52 a.m. ET, more than 100,000 users had reported issues with X. The data indicated that 56% of complaints were tied to the mobile app, while 33% were related to the website and roughly 10% cited server connection problems. The disruption appeared to begin around 10:10 a.m. ET, briefly eased around 10:35 a.m., and then returned minutes later.

Previous disruptions
Friday’s outage was not an isolated incident. X has experienced multiple high-profile service interruptions over the past two years. In November, tens of thousands of users reported widespread errors, including “Internal server error / Error code 500” messages. Cloudflare-related error messages were also reported.
In March 2025, the platform endured several brief outages spanning roughly 45 minutes, with more than 21,000 reports in the U.S. and 10,800 in the U.K., according to Downdetector. Earlier disruptions included an outage in August 2024 and impairments to key platform features in July 2023.
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Tesla wins top loyalty and conquest honors in S&P Global Mobility 2025 awards
The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.
Tesla emerged as one of the standout winners in the 2025 S&P Global Mobility Automotive Loyalty Awards, capturing top honors for customer retention and market conquest.
The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.
Tesla claims loyalty crown
According to S&P Global Mobility, Tesla secured its 2025 “Overall Loyalty to Make” award following a late-year shift in consumer buying patterns. This marked the fourth consecutive year Tesla has received the honor. S&P Global Mobility’s annual analysis reviewed 13.6 million new retail vehicle registrations in the U.S. from October 2024 through September 2025, as noted in a press release.
In addition to overall loyalty, Tesla also earned the “Highest Conquest Percentage” award for the sixth consecutive year, highlighting the company’s continued ability to attract customers away from competing brands. This achievement is particularly notable given Tesla’s relatively small vehicle lineup, which is largely dominated by just two models: the Model 3 and Model Y.
Ethnic market strength and conquest
Tesla also captured top honors for “Ethnic Market Loyalty to Make,” a category that highlighted especially strong retention among Asian and Hispanic households. According to the analysis, Tesla achieved loyalty rates of 63.6% among Asian households and 61.9% among Hispanic households. These figures exceeded national averages.
S&P Global Mobility executives noted that loyalty margins across categories were exceptionally narrow in 2025, underscoring the significance of Tesla’s wins in an increasingly competitive market. Joe LaFeir, President of Mobility Business Solutions at S&P Global Mobility, shared his perspective on this year’s results.
“For 30 years, this analysis has provided a fact-based measure of brand health, and this year’s results are particularly telling. The data shows the market is not rewarding just one type of strategy. Instead, we see sustained, high-level performance from manufacturers with broad portfolios. In the current market, retaining customers remains a critical performance indicator for the industry,” LaFeir said.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft is heading to jury trial
The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.
OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft will face a jury trial this spring after a federal judge rejected their efforts to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit, which accuses the artificial intelligence startup of abandoning its original nonprofit mission. The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.
As noted in a report from Bloomberg News, a federal judge in Oakland, California, ruled that OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft failed to show that Musk’s claims should be dismissed. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated that while the evidence remains unclear, Musk has maintained that OpenAI “had a specific charitable purpose and that he attached two fundamental terms to it: that OpenAI be open source and that it would remain a nonprofit — purposes consistent with OpenAI’s charter and mission.”
Judge Gonzalez Rogers also rejected an argument by OpenAI suggesting that Musk’s use of an intermediary to donate $38 million in seed money to the company stripped him of legal standing. “Holding otherwise would significantly reduce the enforcement of a large swath of charitable trusts, contrary to the modern trend,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
The judge also declined to dismiss Musk’s fraud allegations, citing internal OpenAI communications from 2017 involving co-founder Greg Brockman. In an email cited by the judge, fellow OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis informed Musk that Brockman would “like to continue with the non-profit structure.”
Just two months later, however, Brockman wrote in a private note that he “cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit. don’t want to say that we’re committed. if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”
Marc Toberoff, a member of Musk’s legal team, said Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling confirms that “there is substantial evidence that OpenAI’s leadership made knowingly false assurances to Mr. Musk about its charitable mission that they never honored in favor of their personal self-enrichment.”
OpenAI, for its part, maintained that Musk’s legal efforts are baseless. In a statement, the AI startup said it is looking forward to the upcoming trial. “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial. We remain focused on empowering the OpenAI Foundation, which is already one of the best-resourced nonprofits ever,” OpenAI stated.
