News
SpaceX Crew-1 launch set for Sunday, ULA successfully launches spy satellite
On Friday evening, Nov. 13, NASA and SpaceX announced that the first operational Commercial Crew Program mission of the Crew Dragon would be delayed 24 hours to Sunday, Nov. 15, at 7:27 pm EST (0027 GMT 11/16). During a Crew-1 pre-launch news conference, SpaceX’s senior director of the Human Spaceflight Programs, Benji Reed, stated that the delay was driven by impacts on recovery efforts caused by tropical storm Eta, which had plagued Florida for days.
Just prior to the news conference, United Launch Alliance(ULA) successfully launched its Atlas V rocket after suffering delays of its own earlier in the week. The NROL-101 mission carried a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office of the U.S. government and successfully launched from Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 5:32 pm EST.
Florida weather caused multiple launch delays
Weather, especially that caused by tropical storm Eta, has caused a domino effect of delays for SpaceX and ULA over the last few weeks. The ULA Atlas V 531 rocket stacked with the secretive NROL-101 payload, initially set to liftoff on Nov. 3, was first delayed by damage sustained to environmental control system hardware of the upper stage.
According to company CEO, Tory Bruno, as the rocket was transported from ULA’s vertical integration facility (VIF) to the launchpad of SLC-41, very high winds caused damage to a duct that controlled the flow rate of an upper payload environmental control system. As a result, the rocket was returned to the VIF to have the duct replaced. A launch attempt scheduled for the following day on Wednesday, Nov. 4, was called off due to an unrelated problem with ground support equipment.
The NROL-101 mission was then set to launch on Sunday, Nov. 8, but that attempt was eventually called off due to the impending weather that would be brought across the Florida peninsula by then hurricane Eta. On Friday, Nov. 6, the Atlas V 531 rocket and payload for the National Reconnaissance Office was once again returned to the VIF for protection from the storm.
A final launch attempt was identified for Friday, Nov. 13, just 22 hours before the scheduled launch of the SpaceX, NASA Crew-1 mission from nearby Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Fortunately, the weather held out long enough for the ULA Atlas V 531 rocket to liftoff. Following liftoff and successful payload deployment the mission was later declared a full success by ULA.
Florida weather also caused offshore recovery delays, impacting crewed launch
Similarly, the SpaceX and NASA Crew-1 mission has also suffered setbacks due to inclement weather, although not at the launch site. Following the successful launch and landing of the B1062 Falcon 9 of the recent GPSII-SV04 mission on Thursday, Nov. 5, SpaceX recovery teams battled unsettled seas to return the booster and the recovery droneship, Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY), safely back to Port Canaveral.
After securing B1062 safely aboard OCISLY, the SpaceX recovery vessel GO Quest took refuge at the Port of Morehead City in North Carolina. The recovery crew would wait there to assist with the recovery of the B1061 Falcon 9 of the Crew-1 mission, rather than return to Port Canaveral in Florida. The droneship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) was intended to meet the crew of GO Quest at the Crew-1 booster recovery zone prior to the end of the week.
Due to high winds and rough seas churned up by tropical storm Eta, the OCISLY droneship took an exceptionally tedious 7-day journey hugging the eastern coast of the United States to return to Port Canaveral. The delay caused the crew transfer process from OCISLY to JRTI to be delayed which in turn hindered the departure of the JRTI droneship.
As tropical storm Eta moved out and away from Florida the waters of the Atlantic remained too rough for the JRTI droneship to make up for the lost time. Following the conclusion of SpaceX’s Crew-1 preflight launch readiness review on Friday, Nov. 13, it was announced that the delay in getting the recovery droneship to the B1061 landing zone would delay the Crew-1 launch attempt by 24 hours.
Recovering the Falcon 9 booster, of any mission, is a secondary mission objective. However, the recovery of the Crew-1, B1061 Falcon 9 is important to both NASA and SpaceX – enough so to delay a launch attempt. NASA and SpaceX have already designated this booster to be reused on the next Crew Dragon mission, Crew-2, targeted for no earlier than March 30, 2021. In order to reuse a booster to save on launch costs, it must first be successfully recovered.
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If all goes to plan, three NASA astronauts and one astronaut from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will climb aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience on Sunday, Nov. 15, and blast off to the International Space Station precisely at 7:27 pm EST (0027 11/16) from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
NASA and SpaceX will provide a hosted live broadcast of all Crew-1 events beginning at 3:15 pm EST on Sunday, Nov. 15, on NASA TV and on the SpaceX website.
Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes.
Tesla got its largest order for the all-electric Class 8 Semi yet, a 500-unit order from Einride AB, a Swedish trucking company.
Einride made the announcement this morning following its second-quarter earnings call. The company said it plans to use 500 Tesla Semi units on its fleet intelligence platform, called Saga AI. The deployments will serve large companies like Amazon and will extend Einride’s electric freight network across logistics routes in California, New Jersey, Texas, Illinois, and Georgia.
🚨 Tesla has received a MASSIVE order from Swedish freight company Einride AB, which placed an order for 500 Tesla Semi trucks
Tesla’s biggest order for the Semi yet! pic.twitter.com/PrtLp5yzvh
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 18, 2026
The deployment is being carried out in several phases over the next two years as Tesla ramps production of the Semi at its dedicated production facility in Sparks, Nevada. Einride will receive its first Semi units in September.
Saga AI
Saga AI is Einride’s dedicated fleet intelligence platform. It enables scaled adoption of electric trucks for freight use and allows shippers to integrate electric capacity without the operational burden or capital risks of managing a fleet. This helps integrate cost-efficient logistics and makes budgeting and forecasting much more accurate.
Tesla Semi’s Adoption
The Tesla Semi is now gathering large-scale clients past those who have helped the company operate a Pilot Program to gain initial information and feedback from real-world drivers.
Perhaps the biggest and most notable is that of Frito-Lay and PepsiCo., who have worked with Tesla for the past several years to dial in the finer details of the truck, including its efficiency and operation-related components.
Tesla Semi gets strange-but-understandable comparison from Jay Leno
There has been tremendous progress in that time, and it even catalyzed Tesla to make some design changes, which were unveiled earlier this year.
But Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli says his company’s partnership with Tesla will continue to push those things forward:
“This deployment is yet another proof point that we can execute at the scale our customers demand. Working closely with Tesla to bring next-generation Semis into active operations quickly and at scale is a testament to the strength of that partnership, and how quickly this technology is maturing from promise to daily operations.”
Additionally, Dan Priestley, the Director of the Semi Program at Tesla, said the partnership is ideal due to Einride’s focus on sustainable transport:
“Einride is at the forefront of sustainable freight, and we are thrilled to deepen our relationship with them through this order of 500 Semis. EV heavy trucks provide lower costs per mile from fuel savings, reduced maintenance, and better uptime over diesel trucks. These savings increase further through operational efficiency when deploying EV trucks at scale, and we are excited that Einride recognizes this and look forward to supporting their deployments.”
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
Tesla is preparing to launch the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, later this month, a new report claims. Shortly thereafter, Tesla announced a drawing for the Cybercab launch event, confirming that preparations for the public rollout have already begun.
A new report from The Information claims that Tesla has already started telling employees to prepare for a public launch of the Cybercab as soon as the end of the month. The vehicle will launch publicly to riders in Austin initially.
The two-seater has no pedals or steering wheel, and will rely completely on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to operate.
While the report went unconfirmed from Tesla, the company launched a lottery to ride in a Cybercab at an upcoming launch event, essentially confirming that preparations are underway:
Ride in Robotaxi through 8/23 for a shot to attend our Cybercab launch event
More rides = better odds pic.twitter.com/NxA4H9sWF2
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) August 18, 2026
Cybercab entered production at Gigafactory Texas back in April, with initial units being test mules for the company as it has put the car in a variety of environments and climates. Tesla has sent Cybercab to many states, including Texas, California, Nevada, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Washington, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
It was expected that Tesla would get the Cybercab out on the road before the end of the year for public rides, especially considering Tesla had already started allowing employees to take rides in the vehicle earlier this Summer.
Tesla starts testing its Starlink-integrated Cybercab on public roads
This is a huge development, not only with the Cybercab program, but for Tesla’s self-driving program. Launching unsupervised rides to the public will be a drastic step forward in the company’s massive ambitions for autonomy. It is a long time coming, too. Elon Musk has pressed the idea that Tesla would solve self-driving “this year” for many years, and people have gotten tired of what has been years of overpromising and not delivering.
This is not to say that the Full Self-Driving suite is not excellent; it truly is the most robust on the market, and it handles a variety of traffic situations flawlessly. It definitely has its faults, but generally, it is fantastic.
Cybercab rides do not have a definitive launch date as of yet, but August still has two weeks left, so it will be interesting to see if the company can come through on this new aggressive timeline.
Tesla Semi gets its largest order yet
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
