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SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule arrives in Florida for next NASA astronaut launch

A photograph of the Demo-2 Crew Dragon capsule as it was delivered to a SpaceX processing facility in Florida in February 2020. (SpaceX)

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The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule destined to complete the company’s first operational mission to the International Space Station (ISS) – designated Crew-1 – has been delivered to SpaceX processing facilities in Florida. As previously reported by Teslarati, the C207 capsule was in the final stages of wrapping up integration at the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, CA in early August. Over the weekend, capsule C207 completed the trek from California to Florida and arrived at SpaceX facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday, August 18 according to a NASA Commerical Crew blog post.

Ahead of shipment from California, capsule C207 was outfitted with a trunk section featuring upgraded solar panels intended to extend Crew Dragon’s previous limitation of ~120 days in orbit. The upgraded solar panels should extend the limitation and mitigate the amount of solar cell degredation that occurs while in orbit allowing the Crew Dragon – and astronauts – to remain in orbit for as long as six months meeting NASA’s long-duration mission requirements.

The capsule was also equipped with all necessary hardware including the re-entry heat shield, Super Draco emergency ascent abort thruster system, and parachute landing mechanisms prior to shipping out to Florida. The capsule will undergo final check outs and testing – such as acoustic testing – while at SpaceX’s Florida processing facilities prior to being mated with its Falcon 9 booster in SpaceX’s Horizontal Integration Facility at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39-A.

Ahead of its debut crewed mission to the ISS in May 2020, the Demo-2 Crew Dragon capsule was photographed prior to acoustic testing as part of its final prelaunch processing in a SpaceX facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in February 2020. (SpaceX)

The arrival of the astronaut capsule follows the delivery of a brand new Falcon 9 booster. The booster (B1061) made the trek from SpaceX testing grounds in McGregor, Texas back in July before arriving at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Before shipment the booster successfully passed a static fire acceptance test of its nine Merlin 1D engines on a test stand at the Mcgregor facility.

Falcon 9 B1061 completed a static fire acceptance test in Texas in April 2020 and arrived in Florida for Crew Dragon’s next NASA astronaut launch on July 14th. (SpaceX)
Falcon 9 B1061, the booster NASA refers to above, arrived in Florida on July 14th ahead of SpaceX’s second astronaut launch ever. (SpaceX)

In the blog post, NASA also stated that the Falcon 9’s second stage outfitted with a single Merlin Vacuum engine also passed acceptance test firing at the McGregor facility on Tuesday August, 18. The MVac engine of the second stage was previously succesfuly static fired back in April as confirmed on the company’s Twitter account. The recently test fired completed second stage is expected to ship to Florida in the coming weeks. The arrival of the second stage will mark the delivery of all SpaceX Crew-1 flight hardware.

The Crew-1 Crew Dragon capsule will fly three NASA astronauts, commander Michael Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Shannon Walker, as well as mission specialist Soichi Noguchi of Japan’s space program JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to the ISS and safely return them home for a splashdown landing.

NASA and SpaceX are currently targeting no earlier than October 23rd for the launch of Crew-1. As previously reported by Teslarati, the late October launch date is a slip of a few weeks from the previously identified no earlier than late-September timeline. The extra time is likely a result of neccessary testing and time needed for NASA to complete the operational status certification of SpaceX’s human spaceflight system.

Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most

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Rendering of Elon Musk overlooking a Starship fleet (Credit: Grok)

SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.

Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.

SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles

The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”

When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.

The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.

None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.

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The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it

Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.

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Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.

The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.

The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville

The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.

Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.

For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.

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