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SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft caught on camera during NASA astronaut spacewalk
SpaceX’s first astronaut-proven Crew Dragon spacecraft has been caught on camera by one of the two NASA astronauts that piloted it during a routine spacewalk to repair the orbital International Space Station (ISS).
While outside the station to replace aging lithium ion batteries tasked with storing solar energy and powering the ISS during orbital night, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken was also able to take photos. Documenting the complex task that must be done during extravehicular activities (EVAs/spacewalks) is a routine and crucial part of ensuring that things go according to plan and knowing what went wrong when they don’t.
As an excellent side effect of that important work, some of those same photos can be less technical and more whimsical, capturing spectacular views of the orbital outpost. For the current crew, the location of the batteries that needed to be replaced luckily coincided with the location of most US docking and berthing ports, creating an opportunity for the two NASA astronauts to capture photos of the newest addition to the space station.
SpaceX’s historic Crew Dragon spacecraft has now spent more than a month in orbit since its May 30th astronaut launch debut and May 31st space station arrival. Crew Dragon is the seventh US spacecraft ever to launch astronauts into orbit in more than half a century of human spaceflight, making NASA’s photos of the vehicle all the more significant.
While decidedly less significant, as of July 3rd, Crew Dragon capsule C206 is also just 5-6 days away from breaking SpaceX’s record for a longest-duration orbital spaceflight – currently held by Cargo Dragon C111 and C112 after ~39.5 days spent in orbit.
Short of a major emergency, the Demo-2 Crew Dragon is all but guaranteed to smash that record. According to current plans, the spacecraft is scheduled to attempt the second, equally critical half of its demonstration mission – safely returning NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to Earth – no earlier than (NET) August 2nd. NASA has to balance its competing needs for Crew Dragon to complete its Demo-2 mission sooner than later and the completion of several critical maintenance tasks (several involving spacewalks like the one on July 1st) while the space agency has a full crew compliment aboard the ISS.
When Behnken and Hurley depart the ISS in August, NASA will have just one crew member – Chris Cassidy – aboard the station until SpaceX and the space agency are ready for their second Crew Dragon astronaut mission. Known as Post Certification Mission 1 (PCM-1) or Crew-1, a brand new Crew Dragon is scheduled to launch four astronauts – three NASA and one JAXA (Japan’s space agency) – no sooner than six weeks after Demo-2 successfully splashes down. If things don’t go perfectly during Crew Dragon’s first crewed reentry, descent, and landing, that gap will grow significantly.
Either way, it’s likely that Crew Dragon C206 will spend at least 60-70 days in orbit before SpaceX and NASA attempt to return Behnken and Hurley to Earth. For now, the historic Dragon spacecraft will get to enjoy at least a few more weeks at the International Space Station.
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Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
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— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS –Â $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues –Â $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow –Â $1.444 billion
- Profit –Â $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
