Connect with us

News

SpaceX surprises after recovering spacecraft 'trunk' in one piece

In a total surprise, SpaceX has recovery Crew Dragon's trunk section and the expendable hardware appears to be almost fully intact. (Richard Angle - SpaceX)

Published

on

In a surprise twist, SpaceX has recovered an expendable ‘trunk’ that launched with Crew Dragon on its January 19th In-Flight Abort (IFA) test, in which the spacecraft successfully escaped from an exploding Falcon 9 rocket.

While recovering pieces of Dragon’s disposable trunk would not have been shocking, SpaceX has returned this particular Crew Dragon trunk to shore in a condition that can only be described as unscathed. The surprise came first on the evening of January 19th, when two separate SpaceX ships returned to Port Canaveral — first and foremost bringing Crew Dragon capsule C205 back to dry land for inspection and possible reuse. However, a separate ship – GO Navigator – followed the ship carrying Crew Dragon not long after, revealing a shockingly intact Dragon trunk on its deck.

At 10:30 am EST (15:30 UTC) on January 19th, Falcon 9 booster B1046, an expendable upper stage, and the newest Crew Dragon spacecraft lifted off from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A (Pad 39A) on the spacecraft’s second-ever integrated launch. Designed to push Crew Dragon’s abort systems to their limits, the spacecraft ignited its SuperDraco thrusters around 85 seconds after liftoff, soaring away from a supersonic Falcon 9 and triggering the rocket’s catastrophic (but expected) explosion around 10 seconds later.

A bit like pushing against a wall, Crew Dragon had to fight uphill against a continuous supersonic blast of air to escape the Falcon 9 rocket that launched it, likely adding tens of thousands of pounds (several dozen metric tons) of additional pressure spread out over the top of the capsule. The spacecraft and its detachable trunk section – carrying a solar array, radiators, and four fins – appeared to survive the experience without issue.

Advertisement
Crew Dragon C205 detaches its trunk section. (SpaceX)

The capsule’s SuperDraco engines shut off after about 10 seconds, leaving the integrated spacecraft to coast to an apogee of ~40 km (25 mi), where it finally detached its trunk (pictured above). Designed to be disposable, Crew Dragon features a trunk functionally similar to the one SpaceX has flown almost 20 times on Cargo Dragon (Dragon 1) missions. Crew Dragon’s trunk looks quite a bit different, stretching taller and featuring an interesting conformal solar array (vs. Dragon 1’s deployable panels), as well as radiators (white rectangular panels) the spacecraft needs to maintain thermal equilibrium while in space.

Nominally, Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon launch on Falcon 9, reach orbit, and go about their business of delivering astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS). After completing their given mission, the trunk section is eventually detached an hour or two before one last reentry burn, eventually returning the spacecraft to Earth. The trunk is thus left in low Earth orbit (LEO), eventually reentering on its own days, weeks, or months later and vaporizing into plasma before it hits Earth’s surface.

While it’s thus surprising that Crew Dragon C205’s trunk section – built primarily out of carbon composites like Falcon 9’s payload fairing and interstage – survived its In-Flight Abort mission more or less intact, the unexpected recovery sadly doesn’t mean that SpaceX has any plans to try to routinely recover or reuse the hardware. If Dragon trunks detached well before orbit, SpaceX might reconsider, but that would defeat their purpose of providing Dragons with power and thermal management while in orbit.

Surviving a terminal-velocity ocean splashdown is certainly no mean feat, but surviving an orbital-velocity atmospheric reentry is magnitudes more challenging, although SpaceX is certainly cognizant of the trade-off. Starship, for example, is expected to include thermal management and power generation systems as an integral part of the (nominally) fully-reusable spaceship and upper stage. At the scale of Crew Dragon, it’s just hard to rationalize doubling or tripling the mass of the spacecraft’s trunk just to tack on a complex recovery system.

All told, both NASA and SpaceX have since indicated that preliminary telemetry from Crew Dragon’s In-Flight Abort test paints an extremely positive picture and effectively confirmed that the test was a total success. With a little luck, it’s safe to say that Crew Dragon will be sacrificing a trunk section in orbit before returning NASA astronauts to Earth just a few months from now.

Advertisement

Check out Teslarati’s Marketplace! We offer Tesla accessories, including for the Tesla Cybertruck and Tesla Model 3.

Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

Advertisement
Comments

News

Lucid unveils Lunar Robotaxi in bid to challenge Tesla’s Cybercab in the autonomous ride hailing race

Lucid’s Lunar robotaxi is gunning for Tesla’s Cybercab in the autonomous ride hailing race

Published

on

By

Lucid Lunar robotaxi concept [Credit: Rendering by TESLARATI]

Lucid Group pulled back the curtain on its purpose-built autonomous robotaxi platform dubbed the Lunar Concept. Announced at its New York investor day event, Lunar is arguably the company’s most ambitious concept yet, and a direct line of sight toward the autonomous ride haling market that Tesla looks to control.

At Lucid Investor Day 2026, the company introduced Lunar, a purpose-built robotaxi concept based on the Midsize platform.

A comparison to Tesla’s Cybercab is unavoidable. The concept of a Tesla robotaxi was first introduced by Elon Musk back in April 2019 during an event dubbed “Autonomy Day,” where he envisioned a network of self-driving Tesla vehicles transporting passengers while not in use by their owners. That vision took another major step in October 2024 when, Musk unveiled the Cybercab at the Tesla “We, Robot” event held at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, where 20 concept Cybercabs autonomously drove around the studio lot giving rides to attendees.

Tesla unveils the Robovan at ‘We, Robot’ event

Fast forward to today, and Tesla’s ambitions are finally materializing, but not without friction. As we recently reported, the Cybercab is being spotted with increasing frequency on public roads and across the grounds of Gigafactory Texas, suggesting that the company’s road testing and validation program is ramping meaningfully ahead of mass production. Tesla already operates a small scale robotaxi service in Austin using supervised Model Ys, but the Cybercab is designed from the ground up for high-volume, low-cost production, with Musk stating an eventual goal of producing one vehicle every 10 seconds.

At Lucid Investor Day 2026, the company introduced Lunar, a purpose-built robotaxi concept based on the Midsize platform.

Into this landscape steps Lucid’s Lunar. Built on the company’s all-new Midsize EV platform, which will also underpin consumer SUVs starting below $50,000. The Lunar mirrors the Cybercab’s core philosophy of having two seats, no driver controls, and a focus on fleet economics. The platform introduces Lucid’s redesigned Atlas electric drive unit, engineered to be smaller, lighter, and cheaper to manufacture at scale.

Unlike Tesla’s strategy of building its own ride hailing network from scratch, Lucid is partnering with Uber. The companies are said to be in advanced discussions to deploy Midsize platform vehicles at large scale, with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi publicly backing Lucid’s engineering credentials and autonomous-ready architecture.

In the investor day event, Lucid also outlined a recurring software revenue model, with an in-vehicle AI assistant and monthly autonomous driving subscriptions priced between $69 and $199. This can be seen as a nod to the software revenue stream that Tesla has long championed with its Full Self-Driving subscription.

Tesla’s Cybercab is targeting a price point below $30k and with operating costs as low as 20 cents per mile. But with regulatory hurdles still ahead, the window for competition is open. Lucid’s Lunar may not have a launch date yet, but it arrives at a pivotal moment, and when the robotaxi race is no longer viewed as hypothetical. Rather, every serious EV player needs to come to bat on the same plate that Tesla has had countless practice swings on over the last seven years.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Brazil Supreme Court orders Elon Musk and X investigation closed

The decision was issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes following a recommendation from Brazil’s Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet.

Published

on

Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court has ordered the closure of an investigation involving Elon Musk and social media platform X. The inquiry had been pending for about two years and examined whether the platform was used to coordinate attacks against members of the judiciary.

The decision was issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes following a recommendation from Brazil’s Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet.

According to a report from Agencia Brasil, the investigation conducted by the Federal Police did not find evidence that X deliberately attempted to attack the judiciary or circumvent court orders.

Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet concluded that the irregularities identified during the probe did not indicate fraudulent intent.

Advertisement

Justice Moraes accepted the prosecutor’s recommendation and ruled that the investigation should be closed. Under the ruling, the case will remain closed unless new evidence emerges.

The inquiry stemmed from concerns that content on X may have enabled online attacks against Supreme Court justices or violated rulings requiring the suspension of certain accounts under investigation.

Justice Moraes had previously taken several enforcement actions related to the platform during the broader dispute involving social media regulation in Brazil.

These included ordering a nationwide block of the platform, freezing Starlink accounts, and imposing fines on X totaling about $5.2 million. Authorities also froze financial assets linked to X and SpaceX through Starlink to collect unpaid penalties and seized roughly $3.3 million from the companies’ accounts.

Advertisement

Moraes also imposed daily fines of up to R$5 million, about $920,000, for alleged evasion of the X ban and established penalties of R$50,000 per day for VPN users who attempted to bypass the restriction.

Brazil remains an important market for X, with roughly 17 million users, making it one of the platform’s larger user bases globally.

The country is also a major market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, which has surpassed one million subscribers in Brazil.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Elon Musk

FCC chair criticizes Amazon over opposition to SpaceX satellite plan

Carr made the remarks in a post on social media platform X.

Published

on

Credit: @SecWar/X

U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr criticized Amazon after the company opposed SpaceX’s proposal to launch a large satellite constellation that could function as an orbital data center network.

Carr made the remarks in a post on social media platform X.

Amazon recently urged the FCC to reject SpaceX’s application to deploy a constellation of up to 1 million low Earth orbit satellites that could serve as artificial intelligence data centers in space.

The company described the proposal as a “lofty ambition rather than a real plan,” arguing that SpaceX had not provided sufficient details about how the system would operate.

Advertisement

Carr responded by pointing to Amazon’s own satellite deployment progress.

“Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1,000 satellites short of meeting its upcoming deployment milestone, rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in orbit,” Carr wrote on X.

Amazon has declined to comment on the statement.

Amazon has been working to deploy its Project Kuiper satellite network, which is intended to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink service. The company has invested more than $10 billion in the program and has launched more than 200 satellites since April of last year.

Advertisement

Amazon has also asked the FCC for a 24-month extension, until July 2028, to meet a requirement to deploy roughly 1,600 satellites by July 2026, as noted in a CNBC report.

SpaceX’s Starlink network currently has nearly 10,000 satellites in orbit and serves roughly 10 million customers. The FCC has also authorized SpaceX to deploy 7,500 additional satellites as the company continues expanding its global satellite internet network.

Continue Reading