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SpaceX rocket sails into California port after interplanetary launch
The first SpaceX Falcon 9 booster to help launch a payload directly into interplanetary space has safely arrived at a California port.
On November 24th, Falcon 9 B1063 lifted off from SpaceX’s West Coast SLC-4E launch site for the second time in about a year, successfully sending an expendable upper stage and NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft on their way to interplanetary space. Aside from marking the first time SpaceX has sent a paying customer’s functional spacecraft beyond the gravity ‘well’ of the Earth-Moon system, SpaceX did so with a flight-proven Falcon booster – a first for NASA’s Launch Service Program (LSP).
For Falcon 9 B1063, it was also the first time the booster performed a landing and recovery in the Pacific Ocean, touching down on recently-relocated drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) about 650 km (~400 mi) southeast of the central California coast.
Towed behind tug Scorpius, Falcon 9 B1063 sailed into Port of Long Beach (adjacent to Port of Los Angeles) on drone ship OCISLY a brisk two and a half days after touchdown. SpaceX’s oldest and most storied drone ship, OCISLY supported 52 Falcon booster recovery attempts off the East Coast (45 successful) before the company chose to transfer the vessel to its West Coast recovery fleet. In its relatively old age, OCISLY is underpowered and relatively finicky to operate and maintain in comparison to newer ships Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) and A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG). That makes it a perfect fit for SpaceX’s California launch facilities, which are also relatively old and only capable of supporting one Falcon launch per month.
In comparison, JRTI and ASOG are designed to support at least one or two Falcon booster landings every two weeks, while SpaceX’s more modern LC-39A and LC-40 Florida pads have both supported two back-to-back Falcon 9 launches in ten days or less. On the other hand, SLC-4E’s record turnaround is 36 days – almost four times slower – and SpaceX’s best-case goal for the recently reactivated pad is to average one West Coast launch per month. Perhaps due to Starlink production shortages and/or issues with the new V1.5 satellite design, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that SpaceX will be able to get close to that pace in 2021.
There are still some reasons for optimism, though. Even if SpaceX were to ‘merely’ tie its previous 36-day Vandenberg turnaround record, that would technically preserve the possibility of a launch on December 30th or 31st. More importantly, photos from NASA’s DART launch campaign recently revealed that SpaceX already has an entire second Falcon 9 rocket fully integrated (sans payload) inside its SLC-4E hangar. That rocket – Falcon 9 booster B1051 with a new upper stage already installed – was originally scheduled to launch Starlink 2-3 (polar-orbiting laser-linked satellites) on October 17th.
Several weeks of delays – most likely involving the mission’s Starlink payload – precluded an October launch and ultimately pushed the launch to December once it came within four or five weeks of NASA’s DART mission, which took priority. With any luck, SpaceX has fixed whatever issues grounded the mission in the last six weeks, potentially enabling a West Coast Starlink launch just one month after DART – around the last full week of December.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?'”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
