Connect with us

News

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk details orbital refueling plans for Starship Moon lander

Published

on

After a much-anticipated GAO denial of Blue Origin and Dynetics protests over NASA’s decision to solely award SpaceX a contract to turn Starship into a crewed Moon lander, an in-depth (but heavily redacted) document explaining that decision was released on August 10th.

Aside from ruthlessly tearing both companies’ protests limb from limb, the US Government Accountability Office’s decision also offered a surprising amount of insight into SpaceX’s HLS Starship proposal. One of those details in particular seemed to strike an irrational nerve in the online spaceflight community. Specifically, in its decision, GAO happened to reveal that SpaceX had proposed a mission profile that would require as many as 16 launches to fully fuel a Starship Lander and stage the spacecraft in an unusual lunar orbit.

After around 24 hours of chaos, confusion, and misplaced panic, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk finally weighed in on the GAO document’s moderately surprising indication that each Starship Moon landing would require sixteen SpaceX launches.

Confirming many expectations, SpaceX’s solution to sending an entire single-stage Starship to the Moon, landing it on the lunar surface, and returning it to a lunar orbit (and maybe even Earth) goes as follows.

First, SpaceX will launch a custom variant of Starship that was redacted in the GAO decision document but confirmed by NASA to be a propellant storage (or depot) ship last year. Second, after the depot Starship is in a stable orbit, SpaceX’s NASA HLS proposal reportedly states that the company would begin a series of 14 tanker launches spread over almost six months – each of which would dock with the depot and gradually fill its tanks.

Advertisement

Third, once the depot ship is topped off, the actual Starship Moon lander would launch, dock with the depot, and be fully fueled. Finally, the fueled lander would fire up its Raptor engines and head to the Moon, where it would enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) – a weird high-altitude, elliptical orbit only necessary because NASA’s Orion spacecraft and SLS rocket are too underpowered to reach a more normal, functional orbit around the Moon.

After reaching NRHO, Starship would dock with Orion (or vice versa), receive its Artemis astronauts, land on the Moon for several days, and launch back to NRHO to return those astronauts to Orion. After its main mission is complete, it remains to be seen if Starship will have enough propellant left over to return to some kind of Earth orbit, where it could potentially be refueled and reused on future missions to the lunar surface.

In response to GAO revealing that SpaceX proposed as many as 16 launches – including 14 refuelings – spaced ~12 days apart for every Starship Moon lander mission, Musk says that a need for “16 flights is extremely unlikely.” Instead, assuming each Starship tanker is able to deliver a full 150 tons of payload (propellant) into orbit after a few years of design maturation, Musk believes that it’s unlikely to take more than eight tanker launches to refuel the depot ship – or a total of ten launches including the depot and lander.

But, as Musk notes, so long as Starship gets anywhere close to its design objectives, it would be a non-issue even if each Starship Moon lander mission somehow required 16 launches. A step further, assuming that SpaceX proposed 16 launches per mission out of an abundance of conservatism, it’s fair to assume that a 12-day gap between tanker launches is also an extremely conservative worst-case scenario. Per Musk and SpaceX, Starship’s design goals call for multiple reuses of ships and boosters per day. Even if SpaceX falls a full magnitude short of those ambitious goals, Starship tankers should feasibly be able to launch every few days or maybe every week.

But thanks to SpaceX’s relatively conservative proposal, the company now knows that NASA is more than happy with Starship even if it falls something like 50% short of its payload performance goals and two magnitudes short of its reusability goals.

Advertisement

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

Elon Musk

xAI’s Grok 3 partners with Oracle Cloud for corporate AI innovation  

Elon Musk’s xAI partners with Oracle to deliver Grok 3 to enterprise users via OCI. The move boosts Grok’s reach.

Published

on

Credit: Elon Musk | X

xAI’s Grok 3 is partnering with Oracle Cloud to deliver its advanced AI model to corporate customers.

Oracle announced its collaboration with xAI earlier this week. The partnership leverages Oracle’s robust infrastructure to offer xAI’s Grok 3, positioning it as a transformative tool for business applications.

“Today, we announced xAI has selected Oracle to offer xAI’s Grok models via OCI Generative AI service for a wide range of use cases and will use OCI’s leading AI infrastructure to train and run inferencing for its next-generation Grok models,” said Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, via LinkedIn.

Oracle’s cost-effective AI capabilities will support xAI’s demanding workloads, enabling faster processing for enterprise users.

Advertisement

Oracle’s Karan Batta told Reuters: “Our goal here is to make sure that we can provide a portfolio of models – we don’t have our own.” Oracle will host Grok 3 alongside models from Meta, Mistral, and Cohere, ensuring corporate data remains secure within existing Oracle protections.

Oracle’s strategy focuses on integrating popular AI models into corporate software, and xAI’s Grok 3 enhances this portfolio. The collaboration expands Grok’s reach to businesses seeking secure, high-performance AI solutions for diverse use cases.

Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grok 3 in February. It competes with models from DeepSeek and OpenAI. Grok 3 is free for all X users, but features are limited. X offers Premium and Premium+ subscribers access to Grok 3’s advanced capabilities like DeepResearch and Think modes. Users who are not paid subscribers have access to Grok 3’s basic features.

Elon Musk’s companies have a longstanding relationship with Oracle. In 2018, Tesla appointed Oracle founder Larry Ellison to its board, a move Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives called a “home run appointment.”

In 2023, Ellison–who is no longer on Tesla’s board but still close with Musk–revealed plans for a Tesla Cybertruck police car.

Advertisement

“Our next-generation police car is coming out very soon,” Ellison said at the 2023 Oracle CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas. “It’s my favorite police car. It’s my favorite car, actually. It’s Elon’s favorite car.”

Grok 3’s integration into Oracle Cloud strengthens xAI’s position in the corporate artificial intelligence market. By combining Oracle’s infrastructure with Grok’s cutting-edge capabilities, this collaboration could redefine enterprise AI adoption, driving innovation across industries.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Tesla Robotaxis are becoming a common sight on Austin’s public roads

Tesla Robotaxi sightings are becoming much more frequent ahead of its launch planned for this month.

Published

on

Credit: @Muzeishen | X

Tesla Robotaxis are becoming a common sight on the public roads of Austin, Texas, as yet another test mule has been spotted near the company’s target launch date.

Just over a week ago, the first public sighting of a driverless Tesla Robotaxi was reported. The vehicle was an updated version of the Tesla Model Y, which will be the initial model used in the public deployment of the Robotaxi platform.

Throughout the past week, sightings have been more common, as people in Austin have been looking for the unique decal Tesla is placing on car doors to recognize the driverless vehicles (After all, Robotaxis are not as easy to recognize as driverless vehicles without the LIDAR unit on the roof like Waymo).

Yet another sighting of a Robotaxi was shared on social media today, just two days before CEO Elon Musk’s proposed launch date of June 22:

It is easy to tell that there is nobody in the driver’s seat of this vehicle. Tesla is using its white interior on this particular mule, making it incredibly simple to recognize that no human is controlling the car.

Whether Tesla will still meet the June 22nd deadline remains to be seen, but it is no secret that the company is prioritizing safety ahead of offering public rides.

Tesla will initially roll out the Robotaxi platform in Austin, but it has already started the regulatory process in other areas, specifically California.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is also helping to streamline the process for companies developing driverless vehicles by giving exemptions to automakers. It will make things much more efficient, benefiting Tesla and other car companies that have similar plans.

Tesla Robotaxi just got a big benefit from the U.S. government

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Elon Musk teases Tesla Optimus Gen 3 capabilities: ‘So many improvements’

If you thought Optimus Gen 2 was impressive, Tesla might have a surprise for you.

Published

on

Credit: Tesla Optimus | X

Elon Musk has teased that huge improvements are coming to Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, which is arguably the product that the company is developing with the most potential for everyday use by consumers and valuation increases from a financial perspective.

Optimus is still in the development stages, but Tesla has made great strides in its development over the past several years. It started as a simple idea that was unveiled with a human being in a spandex suit.

Tesla posts Optimus’ most impressive video demonstration yet

Just a few years later, Tesla has developed several humanoid robot prototypes that have made their way to influencers and have lent a helping hand around the company’s manufacturing facilities.

Tesla has already introduced two generations of Optimus, as the most recent release featured a vast number of improvements from the initial version.

The following is a list of things Tesla improved upon with Optimus Gen 2 compared to Gen 1:

  • Tesla introduced a weight reduction of roughly 22 pounds, improving efficiency and agility
  • Optimus Gen 2 had a walking speed that improved by 30 percent over Gen 1
  • Tesla developed more capable hands that had 22 degrees of freedom, double that of Gen 1. This improved object handling
  • Optimus Gen 2 had a 2-degree-of-freedom neck, as Gen 1’s was fixed
  • Tesla integrated actuators and sensors for better performance. This includes things like foot force/torque sensing, articulated toe sections that are close to human foot geometry for better balance and movement
  • Optimus Gen 2 has 28 degrees of overall freedom, improving flexibility from the first generation
  • Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2 can do more than Gen 1, and has shown improved motor control and precision, doing things like squats, yoga poses, dancing, and even poaching an egg

These changes essentially brought Tesla closer to what will be the Optimus version that makes it to production. The company has plans to start production for the public in 2026, but some units will be manufactured for internal use within its factories as soon as this year. Tesla has said it could scale to 100,000 units or more by next year.

Musk also revealed to Teslarati recently that the company is in the process of building the production line that will bring manufacturing rates of Optimus to that level.

However, there is another design of Optimus coming, and Musk says it will feature “so many improvements”:

Tesla has said that Optimus will have the capability to perform tedious and time-consuming tasks like folding laundry, babysitting, cooking, walking the dog, and plenty of other things. However, it will be super impressive to see it do things that require true coordination, like threading a needle, for example.

Musk did not hint toward any specific developments that Tesla will aim for with Optimus Gen 3, but the sky is the limit, especially as it will be performing some manufacturing tasks across its factories.

Continue Reading

Trending