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SpaceX debuts converted Falcon Heavy booster on spectacular Italian satellite launch

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For the first time, SpaceX has converted a flight-proven Falcon Heavy side core into a Falcon 9 booster and successfully launched the reborn rocket, carrying an Italian Earth observation satellite to orbit with one of the most visually spectacular Falcon launches in recent memory.

After a tortured campaign of four scrubbed or aborted launch attempts between January 27th and 30th, Falcon 9 finally lifted off from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 pad at 6:11 pm EST (23:11 UTC) on Monday, January 31st. The converted Falcon Heavy booster performed perfectly on its first solo mission, successfully carrying a Falcon upper stage and Italy’s CSG-2 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Earth observation satellite to an altitude of 70 km (~45 mi) and a velocity of ~1.7 km/s (Mach 5) – effectively the edge of space.

Liftoff. (Richard Angle)
Falcon 9 produces an iconic artificial nebula as its two stages ignite and head in opposite directions. (Richard Angle)

Thanks to near-perfect weather and the timing of the launch about 15 minutes after sunset, Falcon Heavy side core B1052’s first mission as a Falcon 9 booster wound up producing some of the best views of a SpaceX launch in the company’s history. As the rocket ascended, the sky continued to darken for local ground observers. It wasn’t long before Falcon 9’s shiny, white airframe ascended into direct sunlight, which created some extraordinary contrast against the darkening sky for tracking cameras near the launch site.

MECO, stage separation, second stage startup, and first stage boostback. (SpaceX)

Thanks to the near-perfect conditions and the skill of one particular camera operator, webcast viewers were left with some of the best remote views of booster main engine cutoff (MECO), stage separation, and second stage startup ever recorded – let alone broadcast live. Additionally, the timing of the launch worked out such that the dusk Florida sky was still lit up when booster B1052 touched down at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Landing Zone (LZ-1) for the third time.

Falcon booster B1052 stuck its third successful land-landing. (SpaceX)

Almost exactly an hour after liftoff, Falcon 9’s upper stage successfully deployed CSG-2 into a polar sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) around 600 km (375 mi) above Earth’s surface, capping off SpaceX’s fourth launch this year. Known as Starlink 4-7, SpaceX’s next launch could occur as early as 1:56 pm EST (18:56 UTC) on Tuesday, February 1st – potentially less than 20 hours after CSG-2. Just ~25 hours after that Another Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to attempt to launch the United States’ NROL-87 spy satellite(s) from SpaceX’s West Coast launch site around 12:18 pm PST (20:18 UTC), Wednesday, February 2nd. A third Falcon 9 mission – Starlink 4-7 – is also expected to launch sometime later this week.

Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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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.

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Credit: Linda Yaccarino/X

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.

Credit: Downdetector

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.

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Credit: Tesla Malaysia/X

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.

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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.

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Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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.”

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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.

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