SpaceX
SpaceX gives press exclusive access to Crew Dragon spacesuit and simulator [gallery]
SpaceX has given the press access to its Crew Dragon simulator and custom-built spacesuit for the first time, providing an extraordinary level of detail and even the freedom to take photos of almost every aspect of both items. SpaceX is using both items to extensively train the Commercial Crew astronauts that will travel to the International Space Station aboard Crew Dragon, with the first crewed mission planned as early as April 2019.
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- SpaceX’s Crew Dragon simulator, a near-exact replica of the spacecraft built for astronaut training. (Pauline Acalin)
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- A less exact model of Crew Dragon meant for display purposes. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX’s Crew Dragon simulator, a near-exact replica of the spacecraft’s actual cabin. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX’s Crew Dragon simulator, a near-exact replica of the spacecraft built for astronaut training. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX’s Crew Dragon simulator, a near-exact replica of the spacecraft built for astronaut training. (Pauline Acalin)
An incredible amount of work has gone into making SpaceX’s spacesuit as functional, lightweight, and astronaut-friendly as possible, and it’s eminently clear that the company’s exceptionally minimalist suit design is more than it seems once one dives into the suit’s actual capabilities. The slick and iconic helmet is one of the first things the eye gravitates towards when looking at the SpaceX spacesuit, and its aesthetic beauty has by no means come at the cost of functionality.
The majority of the helmet is 3D printed and SpaceX has used that capability to directly integrate valves, a number of complex mechanisms for visor retraction and locking, microphones, and even air cooling channels into the helmet’s structure. The fact that it looks so minimal and simple is only the case after a huge amount of effort was directed at simplifying the user experience for astronauts and ensuring extremely reliability and intuitive control and actuation mechanisms throughout.
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- SpaceX’s extraordinary custom spacesuit. Crew Dragon astronauts will wear this suit while inside the space capsule. (Pauline Acalin)
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- The helmet’s beautiful minimalism hides a huge amount of functionality. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX’s suit helmet is made largely of 3D-printed plastic, while the suit’s grey and white fabric are Nomex and Teflon, respectively. (Pauline Acalin)
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- The suit’s gloves feature conductive leather to allow astronauts to use Crew Dragon’s capacitive touch screen controls while suited up. (Pauline Acalin)
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- All of the suit’s materials were selected with fire retardance as a major priority, a necessity given the elevated oxygen environment that will be present aboard flightworthy Crew Dragons. (Pauline Acalin)
One of the most difficult challenges of the spacesuit’s design was bringing all necessary external connections (power, water, air, etc) into one single umbilical panel located in the middle of the suit’s right thigh, meaning that astronauts will only have to worry themselves with a single, simple connection point once inside Crew Dragon. Additionally, SpaceX wanted to ensure optimal mobility inside Crew Dragon’s cabin while still allowing for operations in the event of extreme emergencies and loss of cabin pressure on-orbit. As a result, the spacesuit has been designed to allow Dragon’s crew to work in even the most extreme emergency conditions, up to and including hard vacuum. The suits would still require some sort of backpack if they were ever needed for actual spacewalks outside the capsule or ISS, so that functionality is off the table for now.
Inside the Crew Dragon simulator, SpaceX has built a near-exact copy of the spacecraft cabin astronauts will find aboard the actual capsules they will ride into orbit, at least in terms of functionality and fit tests (comfort, seat design, etc). Relegated to sit on Earth forever, the simulator likely doesn’t feature the same sort of obsessive weight reduction measures that will be present on flight hardware, but everything else is almost certainly as close to identical as possible.
Stay tuned for more news from SpaceX’s Crew Dragon media event.
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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced today that the company will likely attempt to catch the Starship upper stage with its launch tower arms “in a few months.”
In a post on X, Musk wrote, “Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.” He added that the first reflight of a Starship vehicle is expected by the end of 2026 or early 2027, describing it as “a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars.”
Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.
First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the… https://t.co/O5g9pqrzyo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2026
Musk’s prediction comes amid ongoing progress toward full reusability of the Starship system, a two-stage rocket designed for rapid turnaround and dramatically lower launch costs. Catching the upper stage, known simply as “ship,” with the Mechazilla tower’s mechanical arms would mark a major milestone. It would allow both stages to return directly to the launch site for quick refurbishment and reuse, eliminating the need for ocean recovery.
Musk has previously signaled plans for a ship catch. In July, shortly after SpaceX’s wildly successful Starship 13 mission, he stated that the company would attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight unless problems emerged in the mission data review. Earlier comments also outline conditions such as successful soft ocean landings before attempting a land recovery to minimize risk.
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The latest update from Musk adjusts this timeline to a few months, reflecting the iterative nature of the test campaign.
SpaceX has already demonstrated the tower catch technique successfully with the Super Heavy booster on a couple of occasions. The first successful booster catch occurred during Flight 5 in October 2024, when the massive first stage returned to the Starbase pad in Texas and was plucked from the air by the tower arms.
Additional catches followed on later flights, including Flight 7, proving the concept for the booster and building confidence in the system as a whole.
Achieving a similar catch for the upper stage would represent a significant step forward. The ship returns from much higher speeds and greater heat loads after orbital or near-orbital flight. Success would advance SpaceX’s goal of full and rapid reusability, potentially reducing the cost of access to orbit by a factor of 100 or more and supporting ambitions for frequent satellite deployments, lunar missions, and eventual Mars flights.
Musk has long emphasized that true reusability, refueling rather than discarding hardware, is essential for making humanity a multi-planetary species.
As SpaceX continues refining Starship through successive test flights, the coming months will test whether the ambitious catch timeline can be met. The combination of prior booster successes and improving ship landing precision suggests the company is steadily closing in on this historic capability.
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SpaceX has achieved an incredible milestone by launching its 11,000th Starlink satellite into orbit.
This accomplishment occurred during the Starlink Group 17-50 mission, which lifted off on August 19 at 04:01 UTC from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Falcon 9 launches 24 @Starlink satellites from California pic.twitter.com/UscpmAxDls
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 19, 2026
A Falcon 9 rocket carried 24 Starlink V2 Mini satellites on this flight, successfully deploying them into low Earth orbit approximately one hour after liftoff. The first stage booster, identified as B1097 on its twelfth flight, landed successfully on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific Ocean.
According to tracking data compiled around that date, this deployment brought the total number of Starlink satellites in orbit to just over 11,000.
The Starlink program began with test satellites known as Tintin A and B, launched on February 22, 2018. The first operational batch of 60 Starlink satellites followed on May 24, 2019, when a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Those initial satellites marked the start of a rapid expansion that has continued for more than seven years.
SpaceX has conducted hundreds of dedicated Starlink missions since then, routinely launching batches of 20 to 30 satellites at a time using reusable Falcon 9 rockets. By mid-2026, the company had already surpassed 12,000 total satellites launched across all versions, with continuous replacements for units that deorbit as designed to manage space debris.
Looking ahead, SpaceX continues to expand the Starlink constellation to enhance global broadband coverage, capacity, and speed. The network already serves millions of users across more than 160 countries and supports applications ranging from residential internet to maritime, aviation, and emergency services.
Future plans center on next-generation hardware, including larger V3 satellites capable of delivering substantially higher throughput, which require the increased payload capacity of the Starship vehicle currently under development and testing.
In July, SpaceX submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission seeking authority for a Gen3 constellation of up to 100,000 satellites. These spacecraft would operate in very low Earth orbit shells at altitudes near 325 kilometers and 475 kilometers. The filing requests use of existing Ku, Ka, V, and E band spectrum along with new greenfield W and D band frequencies between 92 and 275 GHz.
SpaceX states that the expanded system aims to deliver multi-gigabit symmetrical broadband to consumers, enterprises, governments, and billions of AI-powered devices worldwide while handling a majority of global internet traffic. Approval and subsequent deployment would depend on regulatory review and the operational readiness of Starship for high-volume launches.
This ambitious scale reflects SpaceX’s ongoing commitment to providing ubiquitous high-speed connectivity from space.
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SpaceX just launched a secret payload from California
SpaceX launched a classified Space Force mission from Vandenberg, revealing almost nothing about its payload.
SpaceX launched a classified Falcon 9 mission for the U.S. Space Force from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday night, and the government released almost nothing about what was on board. The mission, designated USSF-366, lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E with a window that opened at 9:52 p.m. ET and ran into the early hours of Sunday, according to SpaceX’s own mission page, which described the payload only as classified. SpaceX confirmed the launch on its X account and pointed viewers to a livestream that began roughly ten minutes before liftoff.
Watch Falcon 9 launch the USSF-366 mission from pad 4E in California https://t.co/FFEzeYOds1
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 16, 2026
The lack of detail did not stop analysts from filling in the blanks. Independent tracking of the rocket’s stage drop zones matched the pattern SpaceX has used on previous Starlink Group 15 missions, according to reporting from Outer Space Today, which pointed to Starshield as the likely payload rather than a one off government satellite. Starshield is SpaceX’s national security product, a version of the Starlink satellite bus built to Pentagon specifications for earth observation, communications and hosted payloads. Unlike consumer Starlink, government agencies do not have to disclose what Starshield satellites are actually doing once they reach orbit.
USSF-366 is the latest entry in a steady flow of classified and semi classified work between SpaceX and the Space Force. The company picked up a $178.5 million task order in April to launch missile tracking satellites for the Space Development Agency, as Teslarati reported at the time, and followed that in July with a $1.6 billion award covering 18 more Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg through the end of 2027, also detailed by Teslarati. Add those contracts up and SpaceX’s Pentagon business for 2026 alone tops $8 billion.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
The Falcon 9 that flew Saturday landed back near the launch site, producing the sonic booms that have become routine for residents near Vandenberg. What is less routine is how little the public will likely ever learn about what the rocket carried. SpaceX and the Space Force have not confirmed the Starshield connection, and government satellite programs built on commercial buses rarely get identified beyond a mission number and a general orbit. For a company that live streams almost everything else it does, from Starship test flights to Optimus robot demos, USSF-366 is a reminder that some of SpaceX’s busiest work now happens entirely out of public view.
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