News
SpaceX releases photo of NASA astronauts testing in Crew Dragon spaceship
In a rare instance of publicity, SpaceX has given the public the first detailed glimpse of a NASA astronaut practicing inside a mockup of Crew Dragon’s cockpit, wearing a sleek spacesuit designed and built by private rocket company.
Taken just over a month ago, the photos show astronauts Doug Hurley and Suni Williams familiarizing themselves with the most recent iteration of Crew Dragon’s cockpit, with a focus on the control systems and display system unique to SpaceX’s spacecraft. Boeing, for example, went with a more traditional set of controls, featuring a joystick and panels of physical buttons and switches alongside a pair of small screens, largely reminiscent of cockpits one might find in the many military and civilian aircraft the company’s non-space branches assemble.
- Boeing’s Starliner Pad Abort Test Vehicle is prepping for a test of its launch abort engines to prove that the vehicle can safely perform an abort maneuver in the event of an emergency on the launchpad or during flight. (Boeing)
- Elon Musk: “SpaceX Crew Dragon ship in anechoic chamber for EMI [electromagentic interference] testing before being sent to @NASA Plum Brook vacuum chamber” (SpaceX)
- NASA Astronaut Suni Williams, fully suited in SpaceX’s spacesuit, interfaces with the display inside a mock-up of the Crew Dragon spacecraft in Hawthorne, California, during a testing exercise on April 3. (SpaceX)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently showed off the first official photo of the company’s first flight-ready Crew Dragon capsule preparing for Demo Mission-1 (DM-1), an uncrewed orbital test flight of the brand new spacecraft intended to prove out its capabilities ahead of a true crewed test flight several months after. While officially showing launch dates no earlier than August 31 (DM-1) and December 31 (DM-2), sources familiar with the Commercial Crew Program say that SpaceX is currently tracking towards its first two demo flights sometime in Q4 2018 and H1 2019 respectively, and Musk’s brief comment that the DM-1 Crew Dragon was scheduled for shipment to the launch site (Kennedy Space Center) around August 2018.
SpaceX Crew Dragon ships to the Cape in about 3 months
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 2, 2018
Arrival at the launch site will entail its own series of extensive tests, many focusing on integrated the vehicle with its Falcon 9 Block 5 launch vehicle, perhaps the first time a flightworthy Crew Dragon is attached to a SpaceX rocket. The upgraded Falcon 9s (both new) tasked with launching those first two demonstration missions are themselves already under construction at SpaceX’s Hawthorne, CA factory: the rocket intended to launch the first crewed mission is having its propellant tanks welded, while the vehicle aiming to launch an uncrewed test later this year is likely on its way to final integration and easily recognizable as a rocket.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, shown in an older render and a more recent graphic featured in NASA’s March 2018 Commercial Crew update. (SpaceX/NASA)
In fact, what can only be the second Block 5 Falcon 9 booster (B1047) was captured on May 30 by a member of the /r/SpaceX subreddit on the last leg of its journey from McGregor, Texas to Cape Canaveral, Florida, indicating that a Block 5 booster recently glimpsed at SpaceX’s Texas testing facilities is likely a separate rocket, B1048. The booster meant for Crew Dragon’s first flight was confirmed by NASA officials to be B1051 in a March 2018 briefing, and the sighting of B1047 bodes very well for B1051’s shipment from the Hawthorne factory to Texas for static fire testing in the next two or three months, followed by its own journey from Texas to Florida before launching the first Crew Dragon spacecraft into orbit.
Falcon 9 B1047 is believed to be preparing to launch the Telstar 19V communications satellite sometime next month. Meanwhile, SpaceX is currently targeting 12:27am EDT on June 1 for the launch of the SES-12 satellite aboard one of the company’s final three operational flight-proven Block 4 rockets, although mediocre weather conditions place the risk of a scrub at ~60%.
Elon Musk
SpaceX (SPCX) IPO is live today at $135: Here’s exactly what you need to know
SpaceX priced its historic IPO at $135 per share today, raising a record $75 billion.
SpaceX officially priced its initial public offering at $135 per share, offering 555,555,555 shares of Class A common stock and raising $75 billion in what is the largest IPO in stock market history. Shares are set to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Friday, June 12, under the ticker symbol SPCX. The previous record holder was Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering at $29 billion, followed by Alibaba’s $22 billion offering in 2014.
At $135 per share and roughly 555.6 million shares, the implied valuation sits near $1.75 trillion, which would make SpaceX roughly the seventh largest company in the United States, just above Tesla’s current market cap. Regular investors can request shares at the IPO price through Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and E*TRADE, though the deal is heavily oversubscribed and most retail allocations will be partial or unfilled. Once trading opens June 12, anyone with a brokerage account can buy SPCX on the open market.
SpaceX’s amended S-1 is sparking a major Tesla merger conversation
The valuation is anchored primarily by Starlink. Starlink crossed 10 million subscribers as of February 2026 and is adding 750,000 to 1.5 million new users per month, with the connectivity segment already posting a $1.19 billion profit last quarter. The offering also bundles in xAI following SpaceX’s all-stock merger earlier this year, adding Grok and the Colossus supercomputer to the investment thesis. As Teslarati reported, Starlink ended 2025 with $10 billion in revenue, a figure analysts project could reach $24 billion by end of 2026.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has been vocal in his support. “I think the time is right,” Ives said, adding that the offering expands the Elon Musk ecosystem rather than competing with Tesla. An average 12-month price target of $165 per share represents roughly 22% upside from the IPO price. Not everyone agrees – Motley Fool noted xAI is spending $1 billion per month playing catch-up to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a single stated purpose. “Elon founded SpaceX with a goal to change humanity, to make us a multi-planet species,” CFO Bret Johnsen said in the company’s retail roadshow video this week. Musk himself has been more direct: “We are building the systems and technologies necessary to provide global connectivity on Earth and beyond, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
News
Tesla stuns with another FSD approval in Europe, its second in two days
Tesla has stunned by gaining yet another approval for its Full Self-Driving suite in Europe, its second in two days and its fifth overall.
Belgium will be the latest country to allow Tesla owners to utilize FSD on public roads in Europe, joining a quickly growing list that started with the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Estonia.
On Tuesday, Denmark announced its approval of the FSD suite, which has now been followed by Belgium just one day later.
The country’s Minister of Mobility, Annick De Ridder, announced the approval on her X account, stating that she had just signed the approval of Tesla FSD. It now goes to the country’s homologation department for the last step of the approval process.
De @Tesla community houdt hier al geruime tijd de vinger aan de pols over de toelating voor de FSD-technologie op onze Vlaamse en Belgische wegen.
Uit waardering voor jullie niet-aflatende interesse (en aanmoediging 😉), krijgen jullie hierbij de primeur: ik heb net de toelating… pic.twitter.com/Yrps4OHTj8— Annick De Ridder (@AnnickDeRidder) June 10, 2026
The Belgian approval is one of mighty importance because it truly shows how quickly countries in Europe could greenlight the FSD suite consecutively. Approvals are already coming in relatively quickly, which is a great sign.
Perhaps the next big development that could come from FSD approvals in Europe is an approval from a country like England, Italy, France, Spain, or Germany. It would be something to see how FSD would perform in a major European metro, such as London, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Rome, or Berlin.
Getting Full Self-Driving in Spain and England will be such huge milestones for Tesla. I am so excited to see how FSD performs in Madrid, Barcelona, and London, specifically.
The ultimate test will always be Mumbai or New Delhi. Excited for India’s eventual approval! https://t.co/paw9Ch1qmL pic.twitter.com/9RdDERVSSJ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 9, 2026
Full Self-Driving does an excellent job of roaming around major U.S. cities like New York and Los Angeles, but other high-profile international cities of significance would truly mark a line in the sand for Tesla, which can simply enable any vehicle in its customer-owned fleet to run FSD with the correct approvals.


