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SpaceX readies for astronaut capsule recovery backup plan as rocket drone ship deploys to landing zone

The SpaceX autonomous spaceport drone ship Of Course I Still Love You returns empty to Port Canaveral following a Starlink mission missed landing attempt. (Credit: Richard Angle for Teslarati)

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Mission objectives of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 test flight, have already commenced days ahead of the scheduled launch attempt. On Wednesday, May 27th at 4:33 pm EDT, Elon Musk’s rocket launching – and landing – company, SpaceX, will set out to achieve more firsts than it has ever attempted in one launch. The final Crew Dragon test flight will shuttle NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station for the very first time. Along with the primary mission objective to deliver the astronauts safely, many secondary objectives are built into the mission profile. One of which is autonomously turning the Falcon 9 booster around shortly after launch to land on a floating barge in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

During the late hours of Saturday, May 23rd, a trusted veteran member of the SpaceX fleet of recovery vessels, Tug Hawk, returned to Port Canaveral to transport SpaceX’s autonomous spaceport drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) to the designated booster recovery zone some 510km downrange. It seems that Tug Hawk and its crew returned specifically to assist with the recovery efforts of SpaceX’s highest-profile launch to date as there was already another tug at Port Canaveral available to assist that was not used. The arrival was captured by long-time port activity documenter, Julia Bergeron, and reported by the unofficial Twitter SpaceX recovery vessel tracking account, SpaceXFleet.

The SpaceX recovery fleet portion of the Demo-2 mission got underway on the morning of Sunday (May 24th). Space Coast local Greg Scott was at Port Canaveral to capture Tug Hawk’s departure with OCISLY in tow just twelve hours after arriving. About an hour later, the OCISLY support vessel that carries cargo and crew essential for booster recovery efforts, GO Quest, departed. It will take Tug Hawk and OCISLY approximately two days to travel to the recovery zone, arriving about 24 hours before the launch attempt.

The propulsive landing of a booster at sea is not a new concept for SpaceX. However, it is a practice that can be somewhat tricky to get right every time due to a multitude of factors. Recently, SpaceX suffered the loss of the Falcon 9 boosters B1056 and B1048 following recent Starlink satellite launches. Both boosters suffered unrelated issues with high winds and software glitches resulting in failed attempts to stick the landing on OCISLY. However, SpaceX successfully demonstrated the reliability of the Falcon 9 landing capability with the flawless launch and landing of the April 22nd Starlink Falcon 9 B1051 booster.

A special circumstance of the Demo-2 mission is the added recovery requirements of the Crew Dragon capsule. With Crew Dragon launching from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and splashdown designated for the Atlantic Ocean, various recovery zones span almost the entire length of the United States’ eastern seaboard and across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland. Special recovery zones also are located throughout the Gulf of Mexico.

Typically, the recovery of a crew capsule would only be thought to occur upon mission end when it is on approach for splashdown after re-entry. However, the specially equipped SpaceX Crew Dragon recovery vessels, GO Searcher and GO Navigator, are required to be able to respond to a number of locations during launch and through the entire duration of Crew Dragon’s time on orbit chasing down the International Space Station prior to docking – for Demo-2 that will be nineteen hours. This is to ensure that in the unlikely event of Crew Dragon experiencing an emergency pad or launch abort scenario, the crew aboard can be safely rescued.

To this end, GO Searcher departed Port Canaveral days ago destined for the Naval Air Station in Pensacola on Florida’s west coast. GO Navigator will remain at Port Canaveral until Crew Dragon returns for a splashdown following the conclusion of Demo-2. Dual Dragon recovery vessels stationed on either side of Florida ensures that Hurley and Behnken can be rescued should they require emergency recovery.

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Should Demo-2 pass SpaceX’s upcoming final Launch Readiness Review scheduled for Monday, May 25th, all will proceed toward the launch attempt on Wednesday, May 27th at 4:33 pm EDT.

Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes.

Space Reporter.

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Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end

Elon Musk’s Boring Company says Vegas Loop stations will double by year end once again.

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the boring company's vegas loop entrance

The Boring Company says the Vegas Loop’s station count will double by the end of the year, tying the target to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers in Las Vegas. “Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!” the company wrote in a post on X, attaching listings for a Loop driver and a senior Loop operations manager.

The number checks out against what’s already public, with the Vegas Loop currently running 14 operational stations, while the Boring Company’s own project page lists 28 as the target for the end of 2026.

Much of that growth is tied to tunnels that are already built and waiting on an opening date. A roughly two-mile dual tunnel system under Paradise Road, connecting Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, is expected to open in stages over the coming weeks, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief executive Steve Hill told the Review-Journal last week. New stations at 4744 Paradise, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, and the former Gordon Biersch site would come online with it, several of them built to speed up rides to Harry Reid International Airport ahead of Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.

Clark County entitled Vegas Loop for 123 stations after approving 19 more in August, as Teslarati reported at the time. Entitlement and construction move at different speeds on this project, so county approval alone does not guarantee a station opens on any particular schedule.

Clark County approved 18 additional stations back in 2023, part of a plan that pushed the system’s target to 69 stations across 65 miles, doubling the network on paper for the first time. The target kept climbing after that, to roughly 93 stations by the end of that year and 104 by last year, before August’s vote pushed it to 123. This week’s announcement is the first time that doubling language has been attached to stations actually running rather than stations merely approved on a county map.

Ridership gives some sense of what a denser network could carry. Boring Company executive Mike Baier said in July that the Vegas Loop already moves around 40,000 passengers on busy convention days, a total that tops most light rail systems in the country despite the system running on a fraction of its planned tunnel mileage. Company leadership has projected ridership could triple or quadruple once the airport connector tunnels fully open.

Boring Company did not say which stations beyond those already under construction would open by year end, or whether the hiring push points to a fleet expansion alongside the new stops.

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Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence

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Credit: Tesla Asia | X

Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.

Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”

The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.

Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.

Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.

Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.

Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.

Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done

Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.

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Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook

Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.

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X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.

X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.

The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.

Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity

The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.

Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.

The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.

xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.

OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.

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