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SpaceX says crew spacecraft abort test still on track for 2019 launch

On November 13th, SpaceX successfully static fired Crew Dragon's SuperDraco engines in anticipation of a critical In-Flight Abort (IFA) test. (SpaceX)

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NASA recently invited members of the media to apply for access to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in-flight abort (IFA) test and, as of December 5th, the company reaffirmed that the crucial test is still on track to launch just weeks from now.

In September, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that Crew Dragon’s IFA spacecraft and Falcon 9 was scheduled to arrive in Florida within a few weeks. Days later, NASA confirmed that the rocket and spacecraft arrived in Florida on October 3rd, sooner, in fact, than Musk had predicted. Over the next few weeks, SpaceX technicians and engineers effectively closed out Crew Dragon capsule C205, priming it for operations and installing its body panels.

On November 13th, about six weeks after arriving in Florida, SpaceX successfully tested Crew Dragon’s redesigned propellant plumbing and high-pressure gas systems by static firing its Draco thrusters and SuperDraco abort engines. The successful static fire test lasted around 9 seconds, mirroring the SuperDraco impulse and thruster inputs the spacecraft would need to demonstrate in an actual in-flight abort. Crew Dragon has four sets of two SuperDraco engines capable of producing a combined thrust of more than 130,000 lbs (570 kN), almost as much thrust as the original SpaceX Merlin 1D engines used on Falcon 9 in the early 2010s.

Meant to verify that SpaceX has successfully redesigned Crew Dragon after the spacecraft suffered a catastrophic explosion during a very similar static fire attempt, November 13th’s was followed by an exhaustive hardware inspection and data review, some of which is likely still ongoing. Although NASA’s media invite suggests that a given launch event could be just a month or so away, there is a ton of uncertainty when dealing with major launches of new hardware (like Crew Dragon), meaning delays are all but guaranteed.

During a pre-launch media briefing ahead of SpaceX’s CRS-19 Cargo Dragon launch, director of Dragon mission management Jessica Jensen answered a question about Crew Dragon’s IFA test, cautiously stating that SpaceX teams are “targeting [a] December” launch. During SpaceX’s December 5th CRS-19 launch webcast, Dragon Engineering Manager John Federspiel briefly brought up Crew Dragon, noting that SpaceX was completing “minor refurbishment” following its successful static fire.

Most notably, he stated the IFA test was “targeted for February of 2020”, while Crew Dragon’s subsequent ‘Demo-2’ astronaut launch debut was expected to follow no earlier than (NET) “the first quarter of [2020]”, implying either February or March.

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As it happened, SpaceX and several media outlets almost immediately attempted to correct the record, instead suggesting that Crew Dragon’s abort test is still tracking towards a launch later this month. Given that a senior Dragon engineering manager was the one to unblinkingly – and without correction – state that IFA is NET February 2020, there’s a strong possibility that he is technically correct but was not supposed to publicize the mission’s delay. At the same time, SpaceX appears to be firm on its claim that IFA is still aiming for a late-December launch. Delays would be no surprise – Crew Dragon’s Demo-1 launch debut took an agonizing three months to go from heading to the launchpad for the first to actually lifting off, almost entirely due to minor technical bugs and NASA paperwork.

Regardless, with less than four weeks left in 2019, SpaceX has an exceptionally tight schedule ahead of it to meet that December 2019 IFA launch goal and will effectively have to static fire IFA’s Falcon 9 before the end of the week or crush Crew Dragon’s inaugural processing time by at least a factor of four to achieve it. As such, a delay in 2020 should be all but expected at this point. With any luck, however, Crew Dragon will successfully perform its in-flight abort within the next 4-8 weeks, leaving SpaceX in a good place to prepare for its inaugural astronaut launch a few months later.

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Tesla Cybercabs narrowly miss deadly Amazon cargo plane crash

An Amazon cargo plane crash near Miami’s airport stopped feet from dozens of Tesla Cybercabs.

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Photorealistic depiction of the Amazon Prime plane crash in Miami on Sep 3, 2026 near a fleet of Tesla Cybercab
Photorealistic depiction of the Amazon Prime plane crash in Miami on Sep 3, 2026 near a fleet of Tesla Cybercab

An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo jet overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, killing five people and injuring five more. The jet, operated by North Carolina based carrier 21 Air as Flight 7598, touched down around 2 p.m. after arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, then crossed the airport perimeter, plowed across NW 67th Avenue and struck multiple vehicles before catching fire, according to the Associated Press.

Photos and video from the scene show the aircraft’s nose stopped within meters of a fenced staging lot holding dozens of gold painted Tesla Cybercabs, the steering wheel free robotaxi Tesla began putting on public roads in Austin last week. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has confirmed the plane struck “multiple vehicles” but has not said whether any Cybercabs were among them, and neither Tesla nor airport officials have addressed the fleet directly.

The Cybercabs had not yet entered commercial service in Miami. Tesla’s existing Robotaxi operation there runs on modified Model Y vehicles and has been unsupervised since Ashok Elluswamy confirmed the detail on X in July.


Elon Musk offered the briefest of reactions. Replying to a Zero Hedge post about the Cybercabs sitting so close to the wreckage, he wrote a single word: “Weird.” He has not commented further, and Tesla has not issued a statement.

The timing puts Tesla’s newest vehicle near an unrelated but highly visible tragedy just days after its Austin debut, a launch that had already drawn scrutiny from federal regulators. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit how Tesla certified the Cybercab as compliant with federal vehicle safety standards, a process Teslarati covered after the vehicle’s September 3 launch event. That inquiry concerns the car’s lack of a steering wheel and pedals, not the Miami crash.

Investigators from the FAA and NTSB are focused on the plane, not the parking lot beside it. Flight data reviewed by outlets including Simple Flying show the 767 touched down around 170 knots, well above the 135 to 140 knot range typical for the aircraft, though investigators have not determined a cause. Amazon said it is working with authorities and that its priority is the safety of everyone affected.

Whether any Cybercabs were damaged, and what Tesla plans for the fleet parked near one of the country’s busiest airports, remain open questions.

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Tesla crosses major Unsupervised Self-Driving milestone

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla has reached a notable benchmark in its autonomous driving program after its Robotaxi fleet surpassed one million miles of unsupervised operation. The company made the announcement during its Cybercab event in Austin on September 3.

Tesla Vice President of AI Ashok Elluswamy told attendees he was happy to report the fleet had achieved one million miles of unsupervised Robotaxi operation as a testament to safety.

The new total marked a sharp increase from the 380,000 unsupervised miles Tesla disclosed during its second-quarter 2026 earnings update in late July.

In roughly six weeks, the company added about 620,000 miles. That acceleration followed Tesla’s decision to remove in-vehicle safety monitors from most of its operations outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

Credit: Tesla

Tesla first launched Robotaxi service in Austin in June 2025 with safety drivers present. It later began fully unsupervised rides and expanded into Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. The San Francisco Bay Area remains the exception, where a safety monitor still rides in the vehicle under California permitting rules.

The company has not released a city-by-city breakdown of the one million unsupervised miles.

The milestone arrived as Tesla began offering public Cybercab rides in Austin. The purpose-built vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals and is designed only for autonomous ride-hailing. Production versions joined the existing fleet of modified Tesla vehicles already operating in the service.

Tesla’s unsupervised mileage is growing at a double-digit weekly rate according to earlier company comments, yet its fleet size remains modest compared with established competitors. Waymo has accumulated more than 200 million fully autonomous rider-only miles. Tesla has described its own unsupervised operations as having recorded zero notable incidents in the period leading up to the July update.

The one-million-mile figure reflects Tesla’s shift from supervised testing to broader driverless service in multiple states. It also highlights the company’s strategy of using both existing Model Y vehicles and the new Cybercab to scale its network.

Credit: Tesla

Whether the rapid recent growth continues will depend on further city expansions, regulatory approvals, and the performance of the purpose-built Cybercab in everyday paid rides. Tesla has not specified how many of the latest miles involved the new vehicle versus the rest of the fleet.

The announcement underscores Tesla’s progress toward a larger robotaxi network while illustrating the remaining gap in total autonomous experience relative to longer-operating rivals.

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Tesla Robotaxi will be a 24/7 service: here’s when

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Credit: @AdanGuajardo/X

Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy said this week that 24-hour Robotaxi service is close. Replying on X to a rider who wanted Cybercab trips all night, he wrote that the capability would arrive “next month or so” once “the next tech to merge on the v15 plan” is ready.

The comment landed on September 4, one day after Tesla opened public Cybercab rides in Austin. It is the clearest near-term timeline yet for overnight unsupervised operation. Tesla’s paid Robotaxi network currently runs from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week across Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa.

That 16-hour window is shorter than the 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. schedule the company used for much of the prior year.

Elluswamy did not name the specific feature or say whether the change would apply first to purpose-built Cybercabs, the existing Model Y fleet, or both. He also offered no city-by-city rollout list. The link to Full Self-Driving v15 is nevertheless significant.

Tesla has described v15 as a step-change architecture with seven parallel improvement tracks and roughly ten times more parameters than earlier builds. Early versions of that software already operate on the Robotaxi fleet and contain about 40 percent of the planned gains.

By July 2026, the unsupervised fleet had logged more than 380,000 miles across six cities in two states with what the company called an impeccable safety record and no notable incidents caused by the vehicles themselves. Tesla has repeatedly argued that camera-based end-to-end neural networks, rather than extra sensors, are the core of the solution.

Overnight service would test that claim in lower-light conditions and would also raise vehicle utilization, a key variable for Robotaxi unit economics. The company has already begun using public Superchargers at night and is building dedicated Robotaxi charging sites.

Riders have asked why software must change if the cars already drive in the dark. The practical answer appears to be reliability and scale: Tesla has held back mass expansion until more of the v15 stack is merged, citing the need for higher confidence before putting thousands of unoccupied vehicles on streets around the clock.

If the next module arrives on the timetable Elluswamy sketched, 24-hour service could begin in October 2026 in at least some markets.

That would mark a shift from a daytime-bounded pilot to a service that can run whenever demand exists, including the late-night hours that have so far remained out of reach.

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