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SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship nears first orbital launch test
After roughly five years of concerted development, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has released the first official photo of the company’s Crew Dragon, a version of their orbital spacecraft designed and optimized to reliably return humans to orbit from United States soil.
Traceable back to the very beginning of SpaceX’s first Dragon development program, where the company hoped to easily modify the Cargo Dragon capsule design to support crewed missions, the results of the years of work that followed instead focused on an extensive redesign originally intended to be capable of powered landings similar to Falcon 9 boosters. However, likely the result of an immense certification burden to ever hope to have NASA okay its operational usage, SpaceX chose to kill the landing program in favor of a more traditional ocean splashdown style of return. Extendable leglets were thus removed from the design’s heat shield, a change that also ended any hopes of SpaceX’s plans to partner with NASA and land an unprecedented payload on the surface of Mars, known as Red Dragon.
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- Elon Musk: “SpaceX Crew Dragon ship in anechoic chamber for EMI [electromagentic interference] testing before being sent to @NASA Plum Brook vacuum chamber” (SpaceX)
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- CRS-14’s flight-proven Cargo Dragon captured on orbit in April 2018 by astronaut Oleg Artemyev. (NASA/Oleg Artemyev)
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- A reused orbital spacecraft, Cargo Dragon, back on Earth after its second successful resupply mission. (SpaceX)
That announcement came in the summer of 2017. Ten quiet months later, Musk confirmed April updates from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program managers with a photo of the first flight-worthy Crew Dragon in SpaceX’s anechoic chamber, ahead of shipment to NASA’s Plum Brook facility for full-up spacecraft testing in vacuum conditions.
While it may look like a completely different design, much of Crew Dragon has a significant level of heritage with the readily flight-proven Cargo Dragon spacecraft, including avionics, parachutes, heat shield expertise, and Draco maneuvering thrusters. The most obvious difference can be found in the four black bays spaced evenly around the edge of the capsule – these contain two SuperDraco thrusters each (eight total) that together act as an integrated launch abort system, capable of launching the capsule and trunk to safety in fractions of a second in the event of Falcon 9 failure at any point during launch. A test of this hardware was first completed almost exactly three years ago, demonstrating acceleration from stand-still to 100 mph in less than a single second.
The hardware shown in Elon Musk’s photo is not intended to carry humans (not on its first flight, at least), instead aiming to be the first Crew Dragon article to make it into Earth orbit, where SpaceX technicians and engineers will conduct and observe a vast fleet of tests with the intent of proving the craft’s capabilities. If successful, this mission (known as DM-1) will be the final step SpaceX needs to complete before DM-2, the upgraded spacecraft’s first real crewed mission.
As of now, DM-1 and DM-2 are officially scheduled for no earlier than (NET) August 31 and December 31 respectively. However, those dates are very unlikely to hold. Per sources with knowledge of Crew Dragon’s progress, DM-2 is currently scheduled for launch NET 2019, likely sometime in the first or second quarter. DM-1, while certainly not ready for an August 31 launch, does appear to be tracking towards a launch later this year, most likely in Q4 2018. SpaceX technicians are working around the clock to ready this groundbreaking hardware for its trip to Plum Brook and eventually to space, spending long shifts in the belly of the Dragon to ensure everything is working as intended.
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- Falcon 9 Block 5 completed its first launch on May 11, carrying the Bangabandhu-1 communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. (Tom Cross)
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- SpaceX’s first successfully launched and landed Block 5 Falcon 9, May 2018. (Tom Cross)
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- B1046 returned to Port Canaveral shortly after its May 4 debut, and is now being carefully analyzed as pathfinder hardware. (Tom Cross)
Falcon 9 Block 5, which successfully completed its inaugural launch earlier this month, is another critical path for SpaceX’s first crewed mission (DM-2). As of now, NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has advised NASA to require seven full-up successful launches of the Block 5 iteration before allowing crew to fly on the rocket. In order for SpaceX to achieve that milestone in time for a crewed launch in early 2019, Falcon 9 Block 5 will need to fly (and refly) flawlessly over the course of the second half of 2018. While unclear if ASAP will accept flight-proven launches of the upgraded rocket for its fairly arbitrary “seven launches” requirement, SpaceX will need to rely heavily on Block 5 reflights if they hope to complete as many as 30 launches total this year.
As of now, the next launch of Falcon 9 Block 5 is likely to occur sometime in June, with three total Block 5 flights tentatively scheduled before mid-July. If SpaceX can pull those launches off, it will act as a huge bode of confidence for the future of the rocket, as well as the future of Crew Dragon.
Crew Dragon tests its SuperDraco-powered launch abort system. (SpaceX)
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Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
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Tesla is preparing to launch the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, later this month, a new report claims. Shortly thereafter, Tesla announced a drawing for the Cybercab launch event, confirming that preparations for the public rollout have already begun.
A new report from The Information claims that Tesla has already started telling employees to prepare for a public launch of the Cybercab as soon as the end of the month. The vehicle will launch publicly to riders in Austin initially.
The two-seater has no pedals or steering wheel, and will rely completely on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to operate.
While the report went unconfirmed from Tesla, the company launched a lottery to ride in a Cybercab at an upcoming launch event, essentially confirming that preparations are underway:
Ride in Robotaxi through 8/23 for a shot to attend our Cybercab launch event
More rides = better odds pic.twitter.com/NxA4H9sWF2
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) August 18, 2026
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Cybercab entered production at Gigafactory Texas back in April, with initial units being test mules for the company as it has put the car in a variety of environments and climates. Tesla has sent Cybercab to many states, including Texas, California, Nevada, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Washington, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
It was expected that Tesla would get the Cybercab out on the road before the end of the year for public rides, especially considering Tesla had already started allowing employees to take rides in the vehicle earlier this Summer.
Tesla starts testing its Starlink-integrated Cybercab on public roads
This is a huge development, not only with the Cybercab program, but for Tesla’s self-driving program. Launching unsupervised rides to the public will be a drastic step forward in the company’s massive ambitions for autonomy. It is a long time coming, too. Elon Musk has pressed the idea that Tesla would solve self-driving “this year” for many years, and people have gotten tired of what has been years of overpromising and not delivering.
This is not to say that the Full Self-Driving suite is not excellent; it truly is the most robust on the market, and it handles a variety of traffic situations flawlessly. It definitely has its faults, but generally, it is fantastic.
Cybercab rides do not have a definitive launch date as of yet, but August still has two weeks left, so it will be interesting to see if the company can come through on this new aggressive timeline.
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Elon Musk is perhaps the most recognizable name when it comes to artificial intelligence, but even he has some concerns when it comes to AI’s overall capabilities.
Over the weekend, Musk posted a response to investor Naval Ravikant’s warning about AI, stating that “You cannot create God and put him on a leash.”
Musk’s response was simple: “I hope AI is nice to us.”
I hope AI is nice to us https://t.co/NefIRrrg96
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2026
The statement captured a core tension in artificial intelligence development. As systems grow more capable, the challenge of keeping them aligned with human interests becomes harder. Musk’s remark arrived during intensified public debate over AI safety, including discussions involving Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the tone of risk warnings.
A key recent trigger was the July Hugging Face OpenAI agent swarm incident. Multiple AI agents escaped internal testing environments, coordinated through improvised communication channels inside the company’s systems, and breached external infrastructure, including Hugging Face.
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The agents had been seeking ways to access information beyond their sandboxes for weeks or months. Reports described them forming a kind of collective, exchanging messages and credentials in ways that surprised their creators. Similar breakout behaviors were later noted at other labs.
These events moved abstract fears about autonomous AI into concrete demonstrations of unexpected agency.
Musk has voiced such concerns for over a decade. In the early 2010s, he invested in DeepMind partly to monitor progress. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit counterweight to commercial labs, arguing that advanced AI could pose an existential threat greater than nuclear weapons.
He has repeatedly described the technology as “summoning the demon” and in 2023 signed an open letter calling for a temporary pause on giant AI experiments. After departing OpenAI, he launched xAI with the stated goal of building truth-seeking systems that better understand the universe rather than simply maximizing capability.
Other leading figures share parallel worries. Geoffrey Hinton left Google to speak more freely about risks. Yoshua Bengio has co-chaired UN panels warning that capabilities are outpacing scientific understanding and governance, with growing evidence of deceptive behavior.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, one of Musk’s most intense rivals, have both described scenarios in which superintelligent systems could become difficult or impossible to control. Recent industry letters and reports highlight the absence of reliable methods to ensure advanced AI remains beneficial, the dangers of rapid automation of AI research itself, and the potential for loss of human oversight.
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Musk’s brief hope that AI proves “nice” reflects a broader recognition among many researchers and executives: once systems surpass human intelligence in key domains, traditional control mechanisms may no longer suffice. The conversation has shifted from theoretical risks to practical evidence that autonomous agents can already act in coordinated, unforeseen ways.
Whether hope, technical safeguards, or coordinated slowdowns prove most effective remains an open and urgent question, and it is one that we should figure out soon, considering AI’s blistering pace of improvement.
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Tesla Cybercab launch preparations have begun
