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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.
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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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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
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Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.
SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.
The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.
The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.
View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13.
This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to… pic.twitter.com/sNTHHz5vLr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 31, 2026
Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.
Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.
Tesla flexed the new features of the Model Y L with a dedicated media event at the company’s Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The Model Y L is the extended-wheelbase version of the all-electric crossover, which has been voted the best-selling car in the world on three occasions. The vehicle is already rolling off production lines at Gigafactory Texas, and first deliveries are slated to take place later this year.
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Teslarati was invited to the event, but due to some scheduling conflicts, we could not make it to Los Angeles. Instead, we will have our hands on a media unit sometime in August, so we’ll be able to spend some more extended time with the Model Y L.
However, plenty of those who made it to LA shared some cool features that set the Model Y L apart from the Model Y.
Multi-Row Climate Control
Tesla fitted the Model Y L with full climate control on all three rows on the front screen. It can be adjusted by selecting which row you’d like to modify on the right-hand side of the touch screen:
The Model Y L has a little row of icons on the right side of the climate screen so the front passenger can more quickly jump to whatever row they want to control. pic.twitter.com/uJS44mgCvk
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 30, 2026
Better Rear Window Visibility
One of the strangest things about the Model Y, especially the Juniper iteration, is the rear window has extremely limited visibility when looking into the rearview mirror.
Tesla has improved upon this with the Model Y L:
This is a drastic difference. https://t.co/wTdhitD5aA pic.twitter.com/z6hFs0Jkss
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 30, 2026
PowerShare will be included
Model Y L will come with PowerShare in North America, with an 11.5kW output to your home. Tesla said it would require Powerwall 3 for operation.
Wireless Charging Pad
There has been some speculation that Tesla would upgrade the wireless charging pads in the United States, but this is not the case.
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Tesla confirmed that it does not come with the cooled pads as the Y L in China does. This is because North America has not adopted Qi charging yet.
Thermal Management Improvements
These improvements in the Model Y L were seen with thermal management:
- Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
- +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather, 7 miles of real-world range gained
- 8x more solar energy reflection off of glass roof
- 30% reduction in solar energy entering the cabin
Some of the thermal management improvements in the new Model Y L Premium:
• Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
• Up to 15 min faster cabin cooling in sunny conditions
• +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather +7 miles of real-world range gained
• +10 miles recovered after… pic.twitter.com/jZirFWFdtO— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 31, 2026
Demand
Tesla said the Model Y L is almost sold out in the U.S. It comes with
- 1 year of FSD Supervised
- 1 year of Supercharging
- 1 year of Premium Connectivity
- Free exterior paint color, interior, and wheel option at no additional cost
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
