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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claims Starship will be ready for first orbital launch in July
CEO Elon Musk claims that SpaceX could be ready to attempt Starship’s first orbital launch as early as July.
While SpaceX has been making slow and steady progress preparing the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster nominally assigned to that launch debut, the odds that even just one of those two stages will be fully qualified for flight before the end of July are quite small. Musk’s claims about what will happen after that rocket is ready are even loftier.
According to Musk, after SpaceX is done preparing a Starship and Super Heavy booster for their inaugural orbital launch attempt sometime “next month,” the company will have a second ship and booster pair “ready to fly in August” and another pair every month after that. If SpaceX rapidly completes the dozens of environmental mitigations assigned to it on June 13th and receives an FAA license or experimental permit for orbital Starship launches, the company does theoretically have permission for five orbital launches out of South Texas in 2022, but the same is also true for all 12 months of 2023.
However, there is very little evidence that SpaceX is on the cusp of being able to complete a new orbital-class Starship and Super Heavy booster every month. While SpaceX is working on future Starships and is almost done assembling a second orbital-class Super Heavy booster, the pace of that work appears to be about the same as it’s been for the last 12+ months. Yes, SpaceX is almost done stacking Booster 8 and has begun stacking Ship 25. Sections of Ship 26, Ship 27, and Booster 9 have also been spotted at Starbase. But SpaceX has been unable to finish stacking Booster 8 over the last few months it’s been focused on Ship 24 and Booster 7.
Ship 24 and Booster 7, meanwhile, are making good progress but are still incomplete. Both recently completed several mostly successful cryogenic and structural proof tests and returned to SpaceX’s assembly bays, where workers have begun installing Raptor engines and applying finishing touches.
After a month of work, it appears that Super Heavy B7 may finally be preparing to return to Starbase’s launch site on Thursday, June 16th. Since it returned to the factory on May 14th, SpaceX has been installing 33 new Raptor 2 engines, applying thermal protection to those engines, buttoning up the booster’s aft end, installing control surfaces known as grid fins, and completing a few other unfinished tasks. If all of that work is complete when it rolls out again, B7 could kick off the next phase of its qualification testing – wet dress rehearsals and static fires – shortly after returning to the orbital launch site.
SpaceX has never attempted a full-scale Super Heavy wet dress rehearsal, in which the largest rocket booster ever built will be fully filled with more than three thousand metric tons of flammable cryogenic propellant and put through a simulated launch countdown. SpaceX has also never come close to conducting a full Super Heavy static fire, though it did fire three outdated Raptors on an outdated booster prototype a single time in July 2021.
Ship 24’s position is slightly more favorable, as it only needs six Raptor 2 engines installed. Thanks to Ship 20, which successfully completed several wet dress rehearsals and several static fires that ignited all six engines, Ship 24 will also be heading into terrain that is slightly less uncharted. Still, the Starship’s heat shield needs several hundred more tiles installed, one of four flap aerocover ‘caps’ is missing, and thermal protection will need to be installed around its Raptors.
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Once Booster 7 and Ship 24 are both fully outfitted and installed on their respective test stands, there’s still little reason to believe that either prototype has any chance of completing all the tests needed for flight qualification by the end of July. In fact, for B7 and S24 to be truly ready for flight before the end of July, they’d likely need to wrap up qualification testing well before the end of the month to conduct another series of tests after the pair is fully stacked. If SpaceX does not proceed with at least some degree of caution and a plan to thoroughly test both stages before a launch attempt, it will significantly increase the risk of catastrophic launch pad damage that could easily take half a year or more to fix.
More realistically, it’s reasonable to assume that Ship 24 and Booster 7 will both run into some minor issues during their first wet dress rehearsals and static fire tests, possibly requiring Raptor replacements or even minor repairs. Instead of a few weeks, serious flight qualification could take a few months. It’s also arguably far likelier that one or both stages will need to be entirely replaced by Ship 25 or Booster 8 than it is that both will be ready to launch six weeks from now. Both Booster 4 and Ship 24 suffered some degree of damage during proof tests that are in many ways much easier than the wet dress and static fire tests they’ll soon face.
Still, despite the many reasons for pragmatism and expectation management, SpaceX has never been closer to Starship’s orbital launch debut, and the odds of that debut occurring sometime in 2022 have never been better.
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
Tesla is preparing to launch the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, later this month, a new report claims. Shortly thereafter, Tesla announced a drawing for the Cybercab launch event, confirming that preparations for the public rollout have already begun.
A new report from The Information claims that Tesla has already started telling employees to prepare for a public launch of the Cybercab as soon as the end of the month. The vehicle will launch publicly to riders in Austin initially.
The two-seater has no pedals or steering wheel, and will rely completely on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to operate.
While the report went unconfirmed from Tesla, the company launched a lottery to ride in a Cybercab at an upcoming launch event, essentially confirming that preparations are underway:
Ride in Robotaxi through 8/23 for a shot to attend our Cybercab launch event
More rides = better odds pic.twitter.com/NxA4H9sWF2
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) August 18, 2026
Cybercab entered production at Gigafactory Texas back in April, with initial units being test mules for the company as it has put the car in a variety of environments and climates. Tesla has sent Cybercab to many states, including Texas, California, Nevada, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Washington, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
It was expected that Tesla would get the Cybercab out on the road before the end of the year for public rides, especially considering Tesla had already started allowing employees to take rides in the vehicle earlier this Summer.
Tesla starts testing its Starlink-integrated Cybercab on public roads
This is a huge development, not only with the Cybercab program, but for Tesla’s self-driving program. Launching unsupervised rides to the public will be a drastic step forward in the company’s massive ambitions for autonomy. It is a long time coming, too. Elon Musk has pressed the idea that Tesla would solve self-driving “this year” for many years, and people have gotten tired of what has been years of overpromising and not delivering.
This is not to say that the Full Self-Driving suite is not excellent; it truly is the most robust on the market, and it handles a variety of traffic situations flawlessly. It definitely has its faults, but generally, it is fantastic.
Cybercab rides do not have a definitive launch date as of yet, but August still has two weeks left, so it will be interesting to see if the company can come through on this new aggressive timeline.
Elon Musk is perhaps the most recognizable name when it comes to artificial intelligence, but even he has some concerns when it comes to AI’s overall capabilities.
Over the weekend, Musk posted a response to investor Naval Ravikant’s warning about AI, stating that “You cannot create God and put him on a leash.”
Musk’s response was simple: “I hope AI is nice to us.”
I hope AI is nice to us https://t.co/NefIRrrg96
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2026
The statement captured a core tension in artificial intelligence development. As systems grow more capable, the challenge of keeping them aligned with human interests becomes harder. Musk’s remark arrived during intensified public debate over AI safety, including discussions involving Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the tone of risk warnings.
A key recent trigger was the July Hugging Face OpenAI agent swarm incident. Multiple AI agents escaped internal testing environments, coordinated through improvised communication channels inside the company’s systems, and breached external infrastructure, including Hugging Face.
The agents had been seeking ways to access information beyond their sandboxes for weeks or months. Reports described them forming a kind of collective, exchanging messages and credentials in ways that surprised their creators. Similar breakout behaviors were later noted at other labs.
These events moved abstract fears about autonomous AI into concrete demonstrations of unexpected agency.
Musk has voiced such concerns for over a decade. In the early 2010s, he invested in DeepMind partly to monitor progress. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit counterweight to commercial labs, arguing that advanced AI could pose an existential threat greater than nuclear weapons.
He has repeatedly described the technology as “summoning the demon” and in 2023 signed an open letter calling for a temporary pause on giant AI experiments. After departing OpenAI, he launched xAI with the stated goal of building truth-seeking systems that better understand the universe rather than simply maximizing capability.
Other leading figures share parallel worries. Geoffrey Hinton left Google to speak more freely about risks. Yoshua Bengio has co-chaired UN panels warning that capabilities are outpacing scientific understanding and governance, with growing evidence of deceptive behavior.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, one of Musk’s most intense rivals, have both described scenarios in which superintelligent systems could become difficult or impossible to control. Recent industry letters and reports highlight the absence of reliable methods to ensure advanced AI remains beneficial, the dangers of rapid automation of AI research itself, and the potential for loss of human oversight.
Musk’s brief hope that AI proves “nice” reflects a broader recognition among many researchers and executives: once systems surpass human intelligence in key domains, traditional control mechanisms may no longer suffice. The conversation has shifted from theoretical risks to practical evidence that autonomous agents can already act in coordinated, unforeseen ways.
Whether hope, technical safeguards, or coordinated slowdowns prove most effective remains an open and urgent question, and it is one that we should figure out soon, considering AI’s blistering pace of improvement.
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Tesla Cybercab launch preparations have begun
