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SpaceX operational astronaut launch debut back on track after “nail polish” delay
In a new NASA briefing, SpaceX vice president of build and flight reliability Hans Koenigsmann was able to explain in far more detail why a recent last-second Falcon 9 launch abort happened and how it wound up delaying the company’s first operational astronaut launch.
Now scheduled to lift off no earlier than (NET) 7:49 pm EST (00:49 UTC) on Saturday, November 14th, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Crew-1 mission was originally expected to launch in late September, October 23rd, and October 31st. On October 2nd, however, a new Falcon 9 booster – sibling to Crew-1’s own new booster – automatically aborted its GPS III SV04 satellite launch attempt just two seconds before liftoff. The rare last-second abort was quickly blamed on “unexpected pressure rise in the turbomachinery gas generator” by CEO Elon Musk.
Likely built side-by-side with faulty GPS III SV04 Falcon 9 booster B1062 at SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California factory, Crew-1 Falcon 9 booster B1061 was almost immediately inspected to search for any commonality once the cause of the abort was better understood.
Just one week before the latest briefing, NASA human spaceflight program administrator and former Commercial Crew Program manager Kathy Lueders revealed in a statement on Twitter that SpaceX was still analyzing the cause of the abort but had already determined that at least one Crew-1 booster engine would need to be replaced, as well as one engine on Falcon 9 booster B1063.
Now, during NASA’s October 28th Crew-1 briefing, SpaceX’s Koenigsmann revealed that the company had ultimately decided to replace not one but two of Crew-1 booster B1061’s nine Merlin 1D engines. Thanks to Falcon 9’s namesake nine-engine booster design and SpaceX’s prolific rocket factory, that process was completed extraordinarily quickly, simply requiring the redirection of already qualified Merlin 1D engines from a fairly large pool. Based on Koenigsmann’s phrasing, SpaceX has already installed both replacement engines on the Crew-1 booster.
What, though, caused GPS III SV04’s launch abort and how did that affect Crew-1?
Rocket engine vs. “nail polish”
According to Koenigsmann, in the course of the rapid and complex mechanical and electrical ballet preceding Falcon 9 first stage ignition, the rocket’s autonomous flight computer observed that two of the GPS III SV04 booster’s nine Merlin 1D engines appeared to be running ahead of schedule, so to speak. The computer immediately halted the ignition process to avoid what could have otherwise been a “hard” (i.e. stressful or damaging) start. SpaceX quickly began inspecting the rocket within 24 hours but was unable to detect anything physically or electrically wrong with Falcon 9’s Merlin 1D engines and engine section.
Out of an abundance of caution, SpaceX removed both misbehaving engines and shipped them to its McGregor, Texas development and test facilities where – somewhat miraculously – the same premature startup behavior was replicated on the test stand. After a great deal of increasingly granular inspections, SpaceX finally narrowed the likely cause down to a tiny plumbing line feeding one of the engine’s gas generator relief valves. In a seemingly random subset of relatively new Merlin 1D engines, SpaceX eventually discovered that a supplier-provided relief valve line was sometimes clogged by a protective lacquer Koenigsmann likened to “red nail polish.”
Used to selectively exclude parts of the engine tubing during a surface finishing process known as anodization, the lacquer was either unsuccessfully removed on a random selection of engine parts or was accidentally channeled into a blockage by over-enthusiastic cleaning. Ultimately, for whatever, reason that miniscule blockage was enough to cause affected Merlin 1D engines to consistently attempt to ignite a tiny fraction of a second early.
Crucially, when SpaceX discovered the possible cause and cleaned out the blocked plumbing, each previously affected Merlin 1D engine performed perfectly, all but directly confirming both the cause and the cure for Falcon 9’s October 2nd abort.
Astronauts enter quarantine
In anticipation of SpaceX seemingly simple solution to the gas generator problem, NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich revealed that SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission astronauts – Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, and Mike Hopkins, and JAXA (Japanese) astronaut Soichi Noguchi – had begun routine prelaunch quarantine procedures in anticipation of a November 14th launch.
Stich also offered a more specific Crew-1 schedule, beginning with an integrated Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon static fire test NET November 9th and a full dry dress rehearsal on November 11th before the first launch attempt on November 14th. Notably, thanks to coincidental orbital dynamics, a successful launch on November 14th would enable Crew Dragon to raise its orbit and rendezvous with the International Space Station a brisk eight and a half hours after liftoff – three times quicker than the more common 27.5-hour transit.
Stay tuned for updates as the mission’s launch date approaches.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk and Tesla AI Director share insights after empty driver seat Robotaxi rides
The executives’ unoccupied tests hint at the rapid progress of Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi efforts.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and AI Director Ashok Elluswamy celebrated Christmas Eve by sharing personal experiences with Robotaxi vehicles that had no safety monitor or occupant in the driver’s seat. Musk described the system’s “perfect driving” around Austin, while Elluswamy posted video from the back seat, calling it “an amazing experience.”
The executives’ unoccupied tests hint at the rapid progress of Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi efforts.
Elon and Ashok’s firsthand Robotaxi insights
Prior to Musk and the Tesla AI Director’s posts, sightings of unmanned Teslas navigating public roads were widely shared on social media. One such vehicle was spotted in Austin, Texas, which Elon Musk acknowleged by stating that “Testing is underway with no occupants in the car.”
Based on his Christmas Eve post, Musk seemed to have tested an unmanned Tesla himself. “A Tesla with no safety monitor in the car and me sitting in the passenger seat took me all around Austin on Sunday with perfect driving,” Musk wrote in his post.
Elluswamy responded with a 2-minute video showing himself in the rear of an unmanned Tesla. The video featured the vehicle’s empty front seats, as well as its smooth handling through real-world traffic. He captioned his video with the words, “It’s an amazing experience!”
Towards Unsupervised operations
During an xAI Hackathon earlier this month, Elon Musk mentioned that Tesla owed be removing Safety Monitors from its Robotaxis in Austin in just three weeks. “Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point. So there will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them. Not even anyone in the passenger seat in about three weeks,” he said. Musk echoed similar estimates at the 2025 Annual Shareholder Meeting and the Q3 2025 earnings call.
Considering the insights that were posted Musk and Elluswamy, it does appear that Tesla is working hard towards operating its Robotaxis with no safety monitors. This is quite impressive considering that the service was launched just earlier this year.
Elon Musk
Starlink passes 9 million active customers just weeks after hitting 8 million
The milestone highlights the accelerating growth of Starlink, which has now been adding over 20,000 new users per day.
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service has continued its rapid global expansion, surpassing 9 million active customers just weeks after crossing the 8 million mark.
The milestone highlights the accelerating growth of Starlink, which has now been adding over 20,000 new users per day.
9 million customers
In a post on X, SpaceX stated that Starlink now serves over 9 million active users across 155 countries, territories, and markets. The company reached 8 million customers in early November, meaning it added roughly 1 million subscribers in under seven weeks, or about 21,275 new users on average per day.
“Starlink is connecting more than 9M active customers with high-speed internet across 155 countries, territories, and many other markets,” Starlink wrote in a post on its official X account. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell also celebrated the milestone on X. “A huge thank you to all of our customers and congrats to the Starlink team for such an incredible product,” she wrote.
That growth rate reflects both rising demand for broadband in underserved regions and Starlink’s expanding satellite constellation, which now includes more than 9,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites designed to deliver high-speed, low-latency internet worldwide.
Starlink’s momentum
Starlink’s momentum has been building up. SpaceX reported 4.6 million Starlink customers in December 2024, followed by 7 million by August 2025, and 8 million customers in November. Independent data also suggests Starlink usage is rising sharply, with Cloudflare reporting that global web traffic from Starlink users more than doubled in 2025, as noted in an Insider report.
Starlink’s momentum is increasingly tied to SpaceX’s broader financial outlook. Elon Musk has said the satellite network is “by far” the company’s largest revenue driver, and reports suggest SpaceX may be positioning itself for an initial public offering as soon as next year, with valuations estimated as high as $1.5 trillion. Musk has also suggested in the past that Starlink could have its own IPO in the future.
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NVIDIA Director of Robotics: Tesla FSD v14 is the first AI to pass the “Physical Turing Test”
After testing FSD v14, Fan stated that his experience with FSD felt magical at first, but it soon started to feel like a routine.
NVIDIA Director of Robotics Jim Fan has praised Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14 as the first AI to pass what he described as a “Physical Turing Test.”
After testing FSD v14, Fan stated that his experience with FSD felt magical at first, but it soon started to feel like a routine. And just like smartphones today, removing it now would “actively hurt.”
Jim Fan’s hands-on FSD v14 impressions
Fan, a leading researcher in embodied AI who is currently solving Physical AI at NVIDIA and spearheading the company’s Project GR00T initiative, noted that he actually was late to the Tesla game. He was, however, one of the first to try out FSD v14.
“I was very late to own a Tesla but among the earliest to try out FSD v14. It’s perhaps the first time I experience an AI that passes the Physical Turing Test: after a long day at work, you press a button, lay back, and couldn’t tell if a neural net or a human drove you home,” Fan wrote in a post on X.
Fan added: “Despite knowing exactly how robot learning works, I still find it magical watching the steering wheel turn by itself. First it feels surreal, next it becomes routine. Then, like the smartphone, taking it away actively hurts. This is how humanity gets rewired and glued to god-like technologies.”
The Physical Turing Test
The original Turing Test was conceived by Alan Turing in 1950, and it was aimed at determining if a machine could exhibit behavior that is equivalent to or indistinguishable from a human. By focusing on text-based conversations, the original Turing Test set a high bar for natural language processing and machine learning.
This test has been passed by today’s large language models. However, the capability to converse in a humanlike manner is a completely different challenge from performing real-world problem-solving or physical interactions. Thus, Fan introduced the Physical Turing Test, which challenges AI systems to demonstrate intelligence through physical actions.
Based on Fan’s comments, Tesla has demonstrated these intelligent physical actions with FSD v14. Elon Musk agreed with the NVIDIA executive, stating in a post on X that with FSD v14, “you can sense the sentience maturing.” Musk also praised Tesla AI, calling it the best “real-world AI” today.
Elon Musk and Tesla AI Director share insights after empty driver seat Robotaxi rides
Starlink passes 9 million active customers just weeks after hitting 8 million
