Connect with us

News

SpaceX drone ship completes 5000-mile journey from Florida to California

SpaceX drone ship OCISLY has safely arrived at Port of Long Beach, California. (@PanamaCanal)

Published

on

A bit less than four weeks after departing Central Florida’s Port Canaveral, SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) has completed a more than 5000-mile (~8000 km) journey to Port of Long Beach, California.

Around midnight on June 10th, the oldest operational ‘autonomous spaceport drone ship’ (ASDS) was towed out of the closest port to Cape Canaveral, where two SpaceX-leased pads support the vast majority of all Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. Around 12 months before OCISLY’s departure, drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) joined it on the East Coast with its first Atlantic Ocean booster recovery some ten months after the opposite journey – California to Florida.

Thanks in no small part to the presence of two operational drone ships stationed in Port Canaveral, SpaceX completed 32 successful East Coast launches and recovered 31 boosters at sea in those 12 months. However, at least as early as April 2021, plans were already in motion to send one of those two drone ships west.

Likely because it’s the most aging member of SpaceX’s booster recovery fleet, drone ship OCISLY was chosen to head to California and support the start of a few dozen dedicated polar Starlink launches. Thanks to limitations with SpaceX’s even older Vandenberg Air/Space Force Base (VAFB) SLC-4E launch facilities, it’s unlikely that the drone ship will ever need support more than one booster recovery per month, compared to two or even three per month operating out of Port Canaveral.

VAFB Space Launch Complex 4, November 2020. (SpaceX)

While SpaceX’s East Coast launch operation now has just one drone ship to work with, that might not be the case for long. Late last month, a tugboat frequently used by SpaceX to tow drone ships OCISLY and JRTI departed Port Canaveral and arrived at Port Fourchon, Louisiana on June 27th. Finn Falgout will ultimately tow brand new drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) – currently in the late stages of assembly at a Fourchon shipyard – to its new home in Port Canaveral, restoring SpaceX’s East Coast booster recovery fleet to two ships.

ASOG’s trip east could happen at any point this month, albeit only after several days to a week of sea trials expected before the shipyard hands off the vessel to SpaceX. At the moment, no East Coast launches of any kind appear to have been scheduled in the first half of July, hinting at unavoidable downtime either for SpaceX alone or the entire Eastern Range. In other words, ASOG could arrive in time to avoid any direct impact on launch cadence that a single drone ship might have.

Advertisement
-->

Still installed on the deck of transport ship Mighty Servant 1 (MS1), OCISLY will likely be offloaded – weather pending – later this week, after which SpaceX will be able to start the process of getting the drone ship ready for its first West Coast rocket recovery mission. That will likely take at least a week or two, potentially leaving OCISLY ready to support SpaceX’s first dedicated polar Starlink launch as early as late July. Simultaneously, it’s not inconceivable that drone ship ASOG will also be ready for its own rocket recovery debut around the same time, meaning that SpaceX could have three operational drone ships for the first time by next month.

Given SpaceX’s plans to quickly ramp up its VAFB facilities to support one launch per month and the impressive success of its East Coast pads in H1 2021, the company could feasibly complete another 21 or 22 launches between August and December.

Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

Advertisement
Comments

News

Tesla Model Y configurations get hefty discounts and more in final sales push

Published

on

Credit: Tesla

Tesla Model Y configurations are getting hefty discounts and more benefits as the company is in the phase of its final sales push for the year.

Tesla is offering up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard trims that are available in inventory in the United States. Additionally, Tesla is giving up to $2,000 off the Premium trims of the Model Y. There is also one free upgrade included, such as a paint color or interior color, at no additional charge.

Tesla is hoping to bolster a relatively strong performance through the first three quarters of the year, with over 1.2 million cars delivered through the first three quarters.

This is about four percent under what the company reported through the same time period last year, as it was about 75,000 vehicles ahead in 2024.

However, Q3 was the company’s best quarterly performance of all time, and it surged because of the loss of the $7,500 EV tax credit, which was eliminated in September. The imminent removal of the credit led to many buyers flocking to Tesla showrooms to take advantage of the discount, which led to a strong quarter for the company.

2024 was the first year in the 2020s when Tesla did not experience a year-over-year delivery growth, as it saw a 1 percent slide from 2023. The previous years saw huge growth, with the biggest coming from 2020 to 2021, when Tesla had an 87 percent delivery growth.

This year, it is expected to be a second consecutive slide, with a drop of potentially 8 percent, if it manages to deliver 1.65 million cars, which is where Grok projects the automaker to end up.

Tesla will likely return to its annual growth rate in the coming years, but the focus is becoming less about delivery figures and more about autonomy, a major contributor to the company’s valuation. As AI continues to become more refined, Tesla will apply these principles to its Full Self-Driving efforts, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot project.

Will Tesla thrive without the EV tax credit? Five reasons why they might

These discounts should help incentivize some buyers to pull the trigger on a vehicle before the year ends. It will also be interesting to see if the adjusted EV tax credit rules, which allowed deliveries to occur after the September 30 cutoff date, along with these discounts, will have a positive impact.

Continue Reading

News

Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’

“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026.”

Published

on

Credit: Tesla

Tesla Full Self-Driving’s newest model is coming very soon, and from what it sounds like, it could be “the last big piece of the puzzle,” as CEO Elon Musk said in late November.

During the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk was available for a Q&A session, where he revealed some details about Robotaxi and Tesla’s plans for removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors, and some information on a future FSD model.

While he said Full Self-Driving’s unsupervised capability is “pretty much solved,” and confirmed it will remove Safety Monitors in the next three weeks, questions about the company’s ability to give this FSD version to current owners came to mind.

Musk said a new FSD model is coming in about a month or two that will be an order-of-magnitude larger and will include more reasoning and reinforcement learning.

He said:

“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL (reinforcement learning). To get to serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”

It rings back to late November when Musk said that v14.3 “is where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.”

With the advancements made through Full Self-Driving v14 and v14.2, there seems to be a greater confidence in solving self-driving completely. Musk has also personally said that driver monitoring has been more relaxed, and looking at your phone won’t prompt as many alerts in the latest v14.2.1.

This is another indication that Tesla is getting closer to allowing people to take their eyes off the road completely.

Along with the Robotaxi program’s success, there is evidence that Tesla could be close to solving FSD. However, it is not perfect. We’ve had our own complaints with FSD, and although we feel it is the best ADAS on the market, it is not, in its current form, able to perform everything needed on roads.

But it is close.

That’s why there is some legitimate belief that Tesla could be releasing a version capable of no supervision in the coming months.

All we can say is, we’ll see.

Continue Reading

Investor's Corner

SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms

However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon. Musk replied, basically confirming it.

Published

on

elon musk side profile
Joel Kowsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Elon Musk confirmed through a post on X that a SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) is on the way after hinting at it several times earlier this year.

It also comes one day after Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was aiming for a valuation of $1.5 trillion, adding that it wanted to raise $30 billion.

Musk has been transparent for most of the year that he wanted to try to figure out a way to get Tesla shareholders to invest in SpaceX, giving them access to the stock.

He has also recognized the issues of having a public stock, like litigation exposure, quarterly reporting pressures, and other inconveniences.

However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon.

Musk replied, basically confirming it:

Berger believes the IPO would help support the need for $30 billion or more in capital needed to fund AI integration projects, such as space-based data centers and lunar satellite factories. Musk confirmed recently that SpaceX “will be doing” data centers in orbit.

AI appears to be a “key part” of SpaceX getting to Musk, Berger also wrote. When writing about whether or not Optimus is a viable project and product for the company, he says that none of that matters. Musk thinks it is, and that’s all that matters.

It seems like Musk has certainly mulled something this big for a very long time, and the idea of taking SpaceX public is not just likely; it is necessary for the company to get to Mars.

The details of when SpaceX will finally hit that public status are not known. Many of the reports that came out over the past few days indicate it would happen in 2026, so sooner rather than later.

But there are a lot of things on Musk’s plate early next year, especially with Cybercab production, the potential launch of Unsupervised Full Self-Driving, and the Roadster unveiling, all planned for Q1.

Continue Reading