News
SpaceX says Crew Dragon parachute upgrade nailed more than a dozen tests in a row
According to SpaceX, Crew Dragon’s upgraded ‘Mk3’ parachutes have successfully completed more than a dozen tests in a row, a feat accomplished by SpaceX engineers and technicians in a single week.
Although SpaceX will likely continue to test the upgraded parachutes over the next several weeks and months, Mk3’s success up to now – including a demonstration of an emergency landing scenario – likely means that the company is well on track for NASA to certify Crew Dragon for its first astronaut launch.
Known as Demo-2, SpaceX’s first crewed demonstration mission is tentatively scheduled to launch no earlier than the first quarter of 2020 and is almost entirely dependent upon NASA (and SpaceX, to a lesser extent) completing review and qualification paperwork. On October 8th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated that SpaceX itself – including all Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 hardware – would likely be ready to launch before the end of December 2019.
During an October 30th briefing from Commercial Crew Program manager Kathy Lueders, NASA essentially confirmed Musk’s estimate for Crew Dragon hardware readiness, estimating that the Crew Dragon Demo-2 spacecraft will be ready for flight around the end of December. The mission’s Falcon 9 booster has also completed testing in Texas, while SpaceX plans to ship the Falcon 9 upper stage to Texas for acceptance testing in November.
In recent months, NASA has indicated that the parachute systems of both Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon were a prominent concern after chute failures occurred on several occasions. In response, SpaceX redesigned Crew Dragon’s parachutes – supplied by Airborne Systems – to account for the failure modes experience, while also advancing the state of the art of computer modeling of parachute deployment and behavior.
In response to past failures, SpaceX chose to further upgrade and strengthen Crew Dragon’s parachutes, moving to a ‘Mk3’ variant with stronger Zylon risers (strips connecting Dragon to its parachute rigging), among other tweaks. Notably, in an October 2019 press conference with Musk, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine noted that SpaceX had plans to field and test those Mk3 parachutes at least 10 times before the end of 2019.
“We could see as many as 10 drop tests between now and the end of the year and depending on how the next 10 drop tests go, we will know how many more drops tests we are going to add.”
Jim Bridenstine, October 10th, 2019
In fact, during the latest stage of testing, SpaceX says it successfully completed thirteen consecutive tests of Crew Dragon’s new Mk3 parachutes, all of which were completed in less than two weeks. This essentially blows Bridenstine’s expectations out of the water, as SpaceX has surpassed his predicted 10 tests and done so barely three weeks into the tentative 12-week window he set. SpaceX now has plenty of time to either continue testing Crew Dragon’s parachutes or refocus its efforts on other equally important qualification challenges.
Prior to those thirteen consecutive successes, SpaceX suffered two failures during single-parachute Mk3 testing. The first two development tests of the Mk 3 design used loads much higher than the parachutes would ever see in operation in an effort to better understand overall design margins and system performance. After a period of rapid iteration with parachute provider Airborne Systems, the faults responsible for those two stress-test failures were resolved and subsequent drop tests confirmed that Mk3’s suspension lines – the numerous lines connecting the parachute to Crew Dragon – are far stronger than those on Mk2.
Perhaps most crucially, the most recent test – shown in the video shared by SpaceX on November 3rd – was the first multi-chute Mk3 demonstration and simultaneously proved that Crew Dragon will be able to safely land its astronaut passengers even if one of the spacecraft’s four parachutes fail to deploy. Despite those consecutive successes, SpaceX and Airborne will continue testing Mk3 parachutes as rapidly as possible and aim to provide NASA the data it needs to qualify Crew Dragon’s parachutes for crewed flight before the end of 2019.
Either way, the next several months are set to be a frenetic period for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. As early as November 4th, Boeing aims to attempt a pad abort test of its Starliner spacecraft, while SpaceX is set to static fire a Crew Dragon capsule on November 6th. If both tests are successful, SpaceX aims to launch Crew Dragon’s In-Flight Abort (IFA) test in early-December, while Boeing hopes to launch Starliner on its first uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) no earlier than December 17th.
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Tesla is starting to truly tease and hype its groundbreaking Cybercab event, which takes place tomorrow in Austin, Texas. It will be the first time members of the public will be able to ride in a Cybercab, a vehicle without any manual controls, on public roads.
Tesla has been dropping some hype on X over the past several days, but this morning, the excitement has truly started to build up for the event. Although Cybercab has been unveiled before, this is truly Tesla’s announcement that it is ready to start offering autonomous rides for public passengers in its new ride-hailing-geared vehicle for the first time.
The hype has started with a variety of different social media posts that are a true indication that Tesla is preparing for something big. Teasing so much of the potential of Cybercab, including its ability to truly revolutionize how people hail rides for local travel, is what the big idea for the event entails. The time that many Tesla owners, fans, and investors have been waiting for is potentially here:
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 2, 2026
The event has remained slim on details. Even invitees are still awaiting true details about what the event will entail, where they’ll go, and what is in store for the evening. This is pretty typical for an event run by Tesla; they keep things under wraps for the most part until the very last minute.
However, there is no secret about what the real intention of Tesla is for this event: it is going to be a huge reveal party for a vehicle that has no steering wheel and no pedals. It is a truly massive step for the company moving forward.
No steering wheel, no pedals
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) September 2, 2026
Speculation persists as to whether this is going to be an event that simply announces that rides will begin with the Cybercab, or it will be something more substantial. Tesla has said in the past that they plan to sell the Cybercab to the general public in what could become a great way to earn passive income by adding it to a more global fleet of Robotaxi-geared vehicles.
Tomorrow, the show begins in Austin, and the Cybercab goes live at some capacity; we just don’t know exactly how quite yet.
News
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
SpaceX filed with the FCC for Starship Flight 14, its first true orbital launch attempt.
SpaceX has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to fly Starlink terminals during Starship’s fourteenth flight test, and the filing lays out a genuine trip to orbit, something the program has never attempted.
Every Starship flight so far, including Flight 13’s successful splashdown in the Indian Ocean on July 24, has flown a suborbital arc that ends with the ship reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launches. The FCC paperwork describes a mission profile built around an actual orbital insertion instead.
The payload is the other half of the story. Flight 13 carried 20 production Starlink V3 satellites, but because that mission never reached orbit, the satellites reentered along with the ship rather than joining the constellation, something Teslarati covered in detail after SpaceX released footage shot from one of those satellites as it drifted away from Starship in space. Flight 14 is designed to close that gap. If the orbital insertion holds, the roughly 20 V3 satellites onboard would separate into an operational orbit and could eventually go into service, each one rated for about 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity by SpaceX’s own account.
SpaceX announces new Starbase for ‘thousands of Starship launches annually’
Elon Musk first flagged the orbital attempt during SpaceX’s August 4 earnings call, the company’s first as a public entity following its June IPO under the ticker SPCX. He also floated catching the ship with the Starbase tower on the same flight, an idea he walked back on August 20, saying the catch attempt would more likely come “in a few months,” as Teslarati reported at the time. Flight 14 will instead target a splashdown for the ship in the Indian Ocean, the same recovery method used since Flight 12.
Hardware has been catching up to the ambition. Booster 21 completed a full 33-engine static fire on August 28, and Ship 41 finished its own six-engine test the week before. An airspace briefing circulated to pilots on August 20 listed September 15 as the target date, later than the end of August window Musk mentioned on the earnings call, though SpaceX has not confirmed a launch date publicly and Starship schedules routinely slip while hardware and FAA paperwork line up.
The FCC filing itself does not guarantee a launch date. It covers communications authority, and not flight readiness, considering SpaceX still needs Ship 41 fully stacked and cleared by the FAA before Flight 14 can fly. But the filing is a real marker of intent and it puts a specific regulatory process behind what had so far only been Musk’s word on the earnings call.
Tesla is set to launch Cybercab on Thursday at an event in Austin, Texas, which will officially bring the company’s first steering wheel-less and pedal-less vehicle to a limited number of consumers for the first time.
The event, which is invite-only, is still thin on details: we’ll be there, and it seems the event will be held at Gigafactory Texas, but the launch of this vehicle truly relies on it being operational outside of the factory and on public roads.
🚨 Close-Up look at Tesla Cybercab without steering wheel: pic.twitter.com/9TXCDeDCz7
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 3, 2026
Nevertheless, there are some big things to expect, and other things to temper expectations on. For what it’s worth, we believe this event could be perhaps the biggest indication that Tesla is ready to truly enter a new phase and chapter in its historic story.
Tesla Cybercab’s First Foray into the Public with Real-World Riders
Cybercab will likely hit the streets of Austin and the surrounding areas, likely in the established geofence that Tesla has expanded on for the past 14 months. Just yesterday, Tesla expanded it once again by 9 percent.
Tesla will put, for the first time, a vehicle without any manual controls on public roads, likely without any help from teleoperators. This is a truly groundbreaking development if it comes through in this fashion: it would be groundbreaking for Tesla to roll out a truly driverless ride-hailing vehicle.
Cybercab Has Already Been Unveiled
This is not an unveiling event. Cybercab has been released for nearly two years, as Tesla first showed it to the public on October 10, 2024.
FIRST LOOK: Tesla ‘Cybercab’ Robotaxi makes its global debut
While there is some small speculation that Tesla could release the Roadster at the event as a surprise, it seems more likely the focus will be on the Cybercab and the huge accomplishment that will come with releasing a vehicle with no manual controls.
There Will Be a Lot of Hype
What’s important to remember about the Cybercab event is that Tesla will continue to prioritize safety and the rollout will likely be slow, just as it has been with Robotaxi.
One of the biggest complaints about Robotaxi is vehicle population, and the fact that the wait for a ride, at least in some instances, has been longer than most want to admit.
It will take time for this project to truly scale. It will take time for Tesla to roll this out in a large fashion. The important thing to note is that they are doing it, and they’re doing it with a vehicle that is completely engineered and built internally. That’s something no other ride-hailing service can say.
Tesla starts teasing and hyping groundbreaking Cybercab event
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
