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A 2021 SpaceX Odyssey: Dragon aces third astronaut launch, docks with space station
Early on Saturday morning, SpaceX Crew Dragon ‘Endeavour’ (capsule C206) – carrying four international astronauts – flawlessly docked with the International Space Station (ISS) for the second time in less than a year.
Capping off a smooth 24 hours of free-flight following an equally successful Falcon 9 launch on Friday, April 23rd, Dragon’s third crewed space station arrival was captured in spectacular fashion – thanks in part to the presence of a separate Crew Dragon vehicle already docked to the orbiting outpost. Recently swapped between the two ISS docking ports capable of supporting Dragons, Crew-1 NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins had – by far – the best view in the house of Crew-2’s space station rendezvous while looking out the window of the other Crew Dragon on orbit.
Former NASA flight director and Space Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale put it best, stating that SpaceX “[made] it look easy” with a “perfectly successful [Crew-2] launch and docking” – the company’s third astronaut launch and space station rendezvous since May 2020.
After a mere three days of delays – one for weather – from an April 20th (4/20) target set almost three months earlier, Crew Dragon lifted off on SpaceX and NASA’s Crew-2 mission shortly before dawn on April 23rd. As the rocket rapidly carried Dragon and its passengers from sea level to dozens of kilometers above the Earth’s surface, it sailed into sunlight, producing a spectacle that stretched across a vast swath of the pre-dawn sky as the sun lit up Falcon 9’s second stage exhaust plume.
The four astronauts aboard the flight-proven Dragon were equally amazed as the inky black vacuum outside their spacecraft’s windows turned to blinding, unfiltered sunlight. One spectacle and a flawless trip into orbit on Falcon 9 behind them, French European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet caught a glimpse of the rocket’s expended second stage effectively flying in formation a few miles below Crew Dragon.
After almost exactly 24 hours on its own and five major Draco thruster orbit-raising and trajectory-matching burns, as well as an unwelcome collision avoidance warning that ultimately turned out to be a false alarm, Crew Dragon capsule C206 completed its second space station docking without delay around 5am on April 24th. Pesquet has published several dozen excellent photos of the flight and docking, offering the best look yet at what life aboard a free-flying Dragon is really like for the four astronauts packed into a volume – as he himself notes – roughly equivalent to a large car’s cabin.
With its successful arrival, SpaceX – for the first time ever – had two separate Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to ISS simultaneously, marking the first of at least two more Dragon ‘hand-off’ milestones to come. Though NASA nominally planned to have Commercial Crew providers SpaceX and Boeing essentially take turns on operational astronaut ferry missions, the latter company’s Starliner spacecraft is more than a year and a half behind schedule and is unlikely to perform its first crewed demonstration flight before Q1 2022.
In other words, SpaceX has been forced to mature its Crew Dragon program much faster than expected to complete at least four back-to-back astronaut launches in ~17 months, while NASA is effectively dependent on the company to ensure the ISS remains fully crewed from May 2020 to sometime in 2022.
Following Crew-2’s smooth arrival, Crew-1’s Crew Dragon and its four-astronaut crew will return to Earth as early as April 28th. Sometime in October or November 2021, SpaceX will repeat that hand-off process once again when it launches Crew-3 and recovers Crew-2. There is a distant chance Boeing will have completed two successful test flights and be ready for Starliner’s operational astronaut launch debut in early 2022, but it’s arguably much more likely that SpaceX will also perform a third hand-off between Crew-3 and Crew-4 sometime in Q2 2022 before finally handing over the reins to Starliner.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
SpaceX targets September 22 for Starship Flight 14, its first attempt to reach real orbit.
SpaceX has set September 22 as the target date for Starship’s 14th test flight, and this one carries a different goal than any of the 13 that came before it. Every previous Starship mission has intentionally flown a suborbital arc, reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launched. Flight 14 is designed to send the craft into a genuine orbit around Earth for the first time.
The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central time at Starbase in South Texas and runs for 75 minutes, pending regulatory approval, according to SpaceX’s mission description published Tuesday. If the flight goes as planned, Starship will circle the planet roughly six times at an altitude near 275 kilometers over about ten hours before a deorbit burn sends it toward a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a departure from the Indian Ocean recoveries used on the last several flights.
The mission also marks the first attempt to put a working batch of Starlink V3 satellites into actual service. Flight 13 carried 20 of the new satellites in July, but because that mission never left a suborbital trajectory, the payload reentered along with the ship instead of separating into orbit.
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
Each V3 satellite is rated for roughly one terabit per second of downlink capacity, so a successful deployment on Flight 14 would be SpaceX’s largest single jump in network bandwidth since Starlink began flying on Falcon 9.
Flight 13 still did the heavier lifting on the technical side. That July mission flew a deliberately more stressful reentry profile to test Starship’s heat shield, and the ship survived its softest splashdown yet, intact enough for drone inspections shortly after landing. Elon Musk said the flight delivered “all the heat shield data we needed and then some,” a result Teslarati covered in detail when he later said SpaceX had solved the vehicle’s biggest reusability challenge. Flight 14 is where SpaceX starts spending that confidence on an actual orbital insertion rather than another controlled fall back to Earth.
One thing Flight 14 will not attempt is a tower catch of the ship. Musk floated the idea right after Flight 13, but walked the timeline back in August, saying a catch attempt was more likely “in a few months.” The Super Heavy booster will still aim for its own recovery, targeting an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America, the same approach used on recent flights.
September 22 is SpaceX’s own target, not a locked date. Starship’s schedule has slipped before over hardware readiness and FAA sign off, and the company has said as much in its own mission notes. But the plan itself represents the clearest marker yet that Starship is moving from a suborbital test program into something meant to carry paying payloads and, eventually, people.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
Elon Musk hinted a Tesla-SpaceX merger could be coming, and Wall Street is taking notice.
Elon Musk gave his clearest signal yet that Tesla and SpaceX could eventually combine, telling the All-In Summit in Los Angeles that the two companies’ deepening collaboration makes the question worth asking. Sawyer Merritt first surfaced the highlight on X Tuesday.
Asked directly why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate given how closely they already work together, Musk told hosts at the summit: “Great question there. With all this collaboration, on so many levels, who can imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas.” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who joined Musk on stage, added that SpaceX personnel have already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps, saying the businesses are integrating “faster than I thought,” though “not fully integrated yet,”
The comments landed on top of merger speculation that has been building on Wall Street for months. JPMorgan has called a tie-up “strategically coherent on paper,” pointing to overlapping ambitions in AI, robotics, energy, transportation and space. Jefferies went further, estimating Musk could retain roughly 55.3 percent voting control in a deal structured without a premium, a scenario that would still leave room for Tesla shareholders to come out ahead. On Kalshi, traders now put the odds of a merger before 2028 at 66 percent.
Tesla’s stake in SpaceX, still under one percent, traces back to its earlier investment in xAI, which converted to SpaceX equity after SpaceX absorbed the AI company. The two are also jointly building Terafab, a chip facility in Austin meant to serve both Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s satellite ambitions. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has stood by a 2027 merger timeline for months, and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest recently floated a similar case, an idea Musk pushed back on directly at the time.
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
The timing adds another layer. Tesla has scheduled an October 1 unveiling for its next generation Roadster at a venue near SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas test site, using the phrase “Go for launch” in its promotional material. Both stocks dipped roughly 2 percent Monday before recovering slightly in premarket trading Tuesday, with SpaceX shares up about 0.4 percent and Tesla essentially flat.
Musk stopped short of confirming anything is in motion. But unlike his past denials of a corporate restructuring, this response didn’t rule one out, and it came with Shotwell sitting next to him describing an integration that’s already underway.
The Tesla Roadster unveiling is getting hyped up by the company’s CEO Elon Musk, who has been a big reason the product has such high expectations due to delayed timelines and a constant need to make it even more insane than before.
Tesla announced on September 12 that it would officially unveil the Roadster in Waco, Texas, on October 1, ending years of patience for fans and reservation holders who have waited for the all-electric supercar to enter production since 2017.
Musk has said that this event will be well worth the wait on several occasions, and last year on the Joe Rogan Experience, he said that there should be a closing chapter to supercars- the end of cars that aren’t focused on safety.
He said:
“Whether it’s good or bad, it will be unforgettable. 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, he should be able to buy one. I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. This is some crazy technology in this car. Let’s just put it this way: if you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that.”
Musk’s teases have continued, and now that the event is roughly two weeks away, it seems like Roadster is finally going to show up and blow some minds:
It’s out of this world
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026
Excitement guaranteed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026
Tesla has definitely dragged out the development of the Roadster, but there is a good reason for it.
Tesla has been working on many other projects, most notably self-driving efforts to increase passenger safety, and those simply took priority over the Roadster, a low-volume, high-performance sports car that has a lightning-fast acceleration rate of 0-60 MPH in just 1.1 seconds, could potentially fly, and contributes very little to the company’s mission.
However, many people have the Roadster on pre-order through the referral program or with their own money, and it is time that Tesla delivers on that.
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
