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SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft shown off in photo ahead of next launch
NASA has published a new SpaceX photo of the next Crew Dragon spacecraft scheduled for launch and confirmed that the mission is now scheduled to lift off on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than (NET) January 18th.
Known as an In-Flight Abort (IFA) test, the exceptionally challenging mission will represent a major milestone for Crew Dragon regardless of the results. Meant to simulate an abort at the (near) worst possible time during launch, Crew Dragon will ignite its SuperDraco abort thrusters around 60-90 seconds after liftoff, subjecting the spacecraft to even more extreme stresses around the same time both it and Falcon 9 are passing through Max Q – “the moment of peak mechanical stress”. If the test is unsuccessful, SpaceX Demo-2 – Crew Dragon’s first NASA astronaut launch – would almost certainly be delayed several months.
If successful, however, it could pave the way for Crew Dragon’s first astronaut perhaps just a month or two later, although Q2 2020 is much more likely. Simultaneously, while difficult to rationally explain, Boeing appears confident that its Starliner spacecraft – having lost control and failed to reach the International Space Station (ISS) barely more than a week ago and suffered a parachute deployment failure on a pad abort test one month prior – is still on track for its first astronaut launch (“Crewed Flight Test”, CFT) just a handful of months from now. In line with the special treatment NASA seems fated to bestow upon Boeing, it appears that Crew Dragon and Starliner’s unofficial race to become the first commercial spacecraft to launch astronauts is as close as it’s ever been.
Regardless, January 18th represents a delay of one week since SpaceX and NASA’s last launch date announcement – NET January 11th, 2020 as of December 18th, 2019. January 11th was itself a week delay from January 4th, the first specific In-Flight Abort launch target released on December 6th, 2019. The date of Crew Dragon’s IFA test has thus technically slipped 14 days in the last 31 days, although it has also technically slipped 7 days in the last 19.
In other words, as previously discussed on Teslarati, those two weeks of delays mean that Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon will almost certainly launch sometime in January 2020 – a significant improvement in schedule assurance compared to Crew Dragon’s Demo-1 launch debut, which suffered some three months of delays despite its hardware being ready for flight throughout.
With any luck, thrice-flown Falcon 9 booster B1046 – all but guaranteed to be destroyed by Dragon’s abort test – could launch new Crew Dragon capsule C205 and an expendable trunk section perhaps just a single week after performing a routine static fire and wet dress rehearsal at Pad 39A. That would represent an almost sixfold improvement relative to the timing of the spacecraft’s first Falcon 9 launch, which took some six weeks to go from static fire to liftoff.
NASA says that the delay from January 11th to January 18th “allows additional time for spacecraft processing”, although the reality is almost certainly a pretty even split between SpaceX processing and NASA’s plodding review process (i.e. paperwork). Regardless, now standing just 11 days from the latest launch date, Crew Dragon’s second Falcon 9 launch is rapidly converging on a liftoff sometime in the last two weeks of January 2020.
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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 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— 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
