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SpaceX says crew spacecraft abort test still on track for 2019 launch
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.
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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SpaceX just locked up a NASA record no other U.S. spacecraft can touch
SpaceX’s Crew-13 Dragon reached the ISS in under eight hours, and NASA confirmed a record.
SpaceX now owns every spot on the list of the five fastest trips a U.S. spacecraft has ever made to the International Space Station, and its newest entry beat the old mark by more than four hours.
Crew Dragon Grace docked to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:05 p.m. ET on October 1, just 7 hours and 55 minutes after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. NASA confirmed the milestone in a space station blog update, writing that the flight “marked the fastest launch‑to‑docking of a U.S. spacecraft in the history of the International Space Station.”
The previous U.S. record also belonged to Dragon. SpaceX’s uncrewed CRS-31 cargo mission reached the station in a little over 12 hours in November 2024. The fastest crewed trip before last week was Crew-11, which took 14 hours and 43 minutes in August 2025, according to Space.com.
A post that Elon Musk reposted on Monday filled out the rest of the ranking. Behind Crew-13, CRS-31 and Crew-11 sit Axiom’s Ax-2 mission at 15 hours and 35 minutes and NASA’s Crew-4 at 15 hours and 44 minutes. All five flew on Dragon.
SpaceX turned a heralding moment for Starship into its greatest
Crew-13 carried NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. NASA had projected a docking around 8 p.m. ET, as Teslarati reported the day before launch, and Dragon arrived nearly an hour early. Our launch day coverage noted that the flight was lined up to be the quickest Crew Dragon transit yet.
The speed came from timing more than hardware. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman said the station “was in an opportune spot in space,” which let Dragon start closing the gap almost immediately after reaching orbit. “This is close to the fastest it could be,” she added. Most Crew Dragon flights still take close to a day, using a series of Draco thruster burns to raise and phase their orbit before arrival.
Dragon’s next job at the station is a departure. NASA said Monday it is targeting 8:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, October 7, for Crew-12 to undock, setting up a splashdown off the coast of California around 11:34 a.m. on Thursday. Clearing that port makes room for CRS-35, a cargo Dragon carrying the final set of iROSA solar arrays.
Dragon remains NASA’s only operational ride to the station while Boeing’s Starliner stays grounded, and the agency recently added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s contract in a $946 million modification.
Elon Musk has acknowledged that early discussions with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could bring the company into his ambitious Terafab semiconductor project, signaling a possible partnership with the world’s leading contract chipmaker.
Musk confirmed that early talks are underway, but as of right now, they are “just discussions.” There is no confirmation of a deal nor dismissal of the possibility of one, leaving open the prospect of one of the largest advanced-chip collaborations under discussion in the U.S.
@wholemars Just discussions, but something may come of it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The report that speculated on potential discussions between Terafab and TSMC comes from Tim Culpan, who outlined a few ways the collaboration could operate. One is TSMC using the project as an “anchor customer” for future facilities in Texas, potentially contributing process expertise, operational know-how, or capacity while Terafab provides capital, long-term purchase commitments, or both.
Tesla and SpaceX jointly developed the Terafab project, with Intel already participating on the tech side. Elon Musk announced the project in March, and it intends to produce more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity annually once fully built.
Company statements place the first phase at approximately $16.8 billion in cost, with later filings pointing to a total that could reach well into the tens of billions across multiple stages.
Intel joined the effort in April 2026 and is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process for the full-scale plant.
Musk has said existing suppliers, including Samsung and TSMC, remain important for near-term needs; Tesla already has production arrangements with Samsung for AI5 and AI6 chips, but that future demand from Optimus robots, Cybercab vehicles, and planned space-based data centers will eventually exceed what the global industry can currently deliver.
Terafab is positioned as the long-term answer to that projected shortfall, and Tesla did something similar during COVID to avoid a chip shortage. This is just a much larger-scale solution.
If the partnership were to materialize, it would add TSMC’s industry-leading strategies to a project that already combines Tesla’s and SpaceX’s capital and offtake with Intel’s process technology. For now, the only public confirmation is Musk’s brief acknowledgement that conversations are occurring.
Tesla’s early strategy for charging units operating within its Robotaxi fleet reveals that the company surely has not lost any of that scrappy DNA that took it from an unlikely success story to the most valuable carmaker in the world.
An observer at a Tesla Supercharger in Austin spotted ten total Robotaxi vehicles arrive: one Cybercab and nine Model Y units. A Tesla employee was waiting at the lot and allowed each unit to park itself; every car that arrived had nobody in it.
Tesla wins FCC approval for wireless Cybercab charging system
The Tesla employee would walk around and plug each car in, adjusting the parking if needed:
So look at what I found. This is how Tesla charges unsupervised robotaxis at a public supercharger. Here is a driverless Cybercab showing up with no one in it. There are 9 other Model Ys that showed up too. A Tesla employee is walking around and plugging each of them in. She also moves the cars if they are not positioned well enough to charge. I love this process. One person charges multiple robotaxis at once
— Abhimanyu Yadav (@WorldlyReviewer) October 3, 2026
It’s a very interesting strategy, but extremely understandable at this early point in the Robotaxi program. It’s only been out for about 15 months, and Cybercab just entered the fleet in early September.
On top of that, Tesla is still working tirelessly on its wireless charging apparatus, and a new patent was just published regarding that product last week.
However, this is just another example of how Tesla still has plenty of that scrappy DNA leftover from the “production hell” days, when CEO Elon Musk slept on the floor of the factory, employees were working crazy hours, Tesla was building Sprung Structures to build cars in, and the company was tiptoeing on the brink of bankruptcy.
@Teslarati Sheer magnitude of the entire production system is hard to appreciate. Almost every element of production is >75% automated. Only wire harnesses & general assembly, which are <10% of production costs, are primarily manual.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
For now, Tesla is utilizing a simple system for recharging its ride-hailing vehicles, and that is a Tesla employee doing it manually until another solution presents itself. Sure, it’s not the most high-tech thing, and it certainly is not what people might have expected at this point in time, but it works, and it’s keeping the entire suite running.
SpaceX just locked up a NASA record no other U.S. spacecraft can touch
Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner
