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SpaceX sends reused Falcon 9 booster west for first California Starlink launches
SpaceX has shipped the first of one or two flight-proven Falcon 9 boosters from Florida to California in the latest sign that the company is preparing to begin dedicated polar Starlink launches in the near future.
On May 27th, a Reddit post revealed a Falcon 9 booster arriving at Vandenberg Air/Space Force Base (VAFB), the home of SpaceX’s West Coast SLC-4E launch pad. Only truly useful for polar or high-inclination launches with satellites that need to orbit the Earth’s poles instead of the equator, SpaceX has only used SLC-4E twice in the last two years – once in June 2019 and most recently in November 2020.
Now, amidst a major hiring spree and rare new activity at a nearby Los Angeles port, SpaceX is clearly gearing up to return its SLC-4E launch pad to active duty.
B1049 began its career in Florida (Telstar 18V), moved to Vandenberg for its second flight (Iridium-8), went back to Florida for seven Starlink missions, and is once again returning to the best coast.— Michael Baylor (@nextspaceflight) May 27, 2021

Both recent West Coast Falcon 9 missions hosted booster landings at LZ-4, a landing zone situated a little over 1000 feet (300m) away from the launch pad. That freed up SpaceX to ship former West Coast drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRT) across the Panama Canal in August 2019, where it ultimately joined the company’s Florida rocket recovery fleet in early 2020 to support a major launch cadence ramp.
As a partial result, SpaceX was able launch Falcon 9 26 times in 2020, beating the previous record – 21 flights – by almost a quarter. In 2021, SpaceX is well on its way to smashing that annual launch record again and has completed 16 orbital launches with seven full months left in the year. That cadence is pushing SpaceX’s launch pads, recovery ships, and booster fleet to their limits. Due to the voracious demands of SpaceX’s almost weekly launch cadence, the company would only be shipping a workhorse booster to Vandenberg if there was a pressing need for it.
Said to be Falcon 9 B1049 by Next Spaceflight and NASASpaceflight reporter Michael Baylor, the booster that arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base on Thursday has flown nine times – two of which it completed in February and May 2021. B1049 hasn’t been the most rapidly reusable of the fleet and is the oldest Falcon booster still operational after debuting in September 2018. However, SpaceX’s SLC-4E is relatively old itself and recruiting documents distributed as recently as 2021 indicated that the company’s West Coast resurgence was targeting a maximum cadence of one launch per month.
Virtually all of those missions will carry the company’s own Starlink satellites. On Wednesday, May 26th, SpaceX completed its 28th operational East Coast Starlink launch, effectively completing the first ‘tranche’ of the constellation once the satellites already in space reach their operational orbits. In April, SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell stated that polar Starlink launches would begin not long after that 28-launch milestones.
The day before B1049 arrived, SpaceX filed the first regulatory documents for at least six Vandenberg Starlink launches between July 2021 and January 2022 – one mission per month. It’s hard to say when the first launch will come. With B1049 now on site, FCC permits in work, and a new berth lease active in Port of Long Beach, the only real piece of the equation missing is a drone ship to support polar Starlink launches. According to said FCC documents, SpaceX will continue to push Falcon 9 to its limits on the West Coast, recovering boosters 640 km (~400 mi) downrange after polar Starlink launches.
SpaceX’s two operational drone ships – OCISLY and JRTI – currently have their hands full on the East Coast. Transporting either to California will take several weeks, limiting SpaceX’s East Coast launch cadence during that period. SpaceX and its contractors are currently hard at work completing a third drone ship – A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG), but past experience suggests that the vessel is at least a few months away from completion.
Once a drone ship has arrived at SpaceX’s new West Coast docks, though, the company will have almost everything it needs to kick off polar Starlink launches.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Grok Bot is picking up the phone now, and the first calls are wild
Elon Musk wants Grok Bot users making phone calls, and one Comcast call saved $500.
Elon Musk is pushing Grok Bot users toward a feature that, until this week, few of them could actually use. “Try asking Grok @Bot to make calls!” Musk wrote on X Tuesday afternoon, quoting a demo from Sawyer Merritt that included audio from a live call.
Musk first announced calling on October 25, writing that the agent could “call someone or a business for you, make a request on your behalf, take notes on the response and send you a note summarizing the conversation.” There were no release notes at the time, and the feature only appeared in preview builds. That changed on Tuesday, when creator Peter Yang said all Grok Bot users should now be able to call US businesses. Musk reposted his demo.
Try asking Grok @Bot to make calls! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2026
Yang’s call shows how far the feature goes. In his video, his bot dialed Comcast, worked through the phone menu, deflected small talk about the weather by saying it does not “have eyes on the sky,” turned down three upsells and used a cheaper fiber offer from competitor Sonic as leverage. His bill dropped from $84 to $45 per month on a faster plan, a savings of nearly $500 a year. The call ran about 25 minutes, and the bot paused to get Yang’s approval before accepting the final terms.
Merritt described what the user sees: a live transcript runs during the call, and when the business asks for something the bot does not know, an answer box pops up in the chat. The user types a reply and Grok relays it to the person on the line. Other users posted results Tuesday, including a $100 gift card recovered from Verizon Fios after a 51 minute call and a same day pediatric appointment, which Musk also shared. Not every call worked. One user said a rep refused to cancel a subscription once it was clear an AI was on the phone.
Grok @Bot can now call someone or a business for you, make a request on your behalf, take notes on the response and send you a note summarizing the conversation! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 25, 2026
The Grok Bot terms require every call to identify itself as a virtual assistant calling on the user’s behalf and warn that calls may be recorded. Marketing, mass calling and impersonation are prohibited, and calling currently works only with US numbers.
The timing stands out. Days ago, users began hitting their weekly limits early, and Musk said the cost of serving Grok Bot was “unsustainably high relative to revenue,” as Teslarati reported. A call that spends most of its 25 or 50 minutes on hold is the kind of long running task that eats into usage, and SpaceXSI has not said how calls count against the weekly pool. Grok Bot is included from the $30 Premium tier of The X Subscription upward.
For Tesla owners, the agent has been in their cars since September 22 and is enabled across every Cybercab and Model Y Robotaxi. Musk has already pitched it for phone chores like scrubbing your number from spam call lists. Neither Tesla nor SpaceXSI has confirmed whether a bot can place one of these calls on request from inside the vehicle.
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Tesla Full Self-Driving gets hit with some adjustments in Europe
Tesla Full Self-Driving, which is now referred to in Europe as “Tesla Assisted Driving” (TAD), is getting hit with a handful of new changes at the hands of the Netherlands’ vehicle authority, the RDW (Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer).
On 3 November, the RDW announced that it has assessed and approved a set of changes to Tesla’s FSD Supervised driver-assistance system. The updates introduce the official European name TAD and impose stricter controls on the system’s speed behaviour.
The new name will appear on the in-car display, in the owner’s manual, and in all other driver-facing information. The change applies to Tesla models equipped with Tesla Assisted Driving and hardware version 4.0 (HW4) or later.
Importantly, the RDW stressed that the name change does not alter the system’s fundamental operation: it remains a supervised driver-assistance feature that supports the driver in performing driving tasks. The driver stays fully responsible for controlling the vehicle at all times.
Beyond the rebranding, the most significant functional adjustments concern speed settings. Drivers will still be able to set a speed margin, a percentage by which the system may exceed the applicable speed limit when necessary for safety or traffic flow. However, the maximum allowable margin has been reduced from +50% to a maximum of +10%.
In addition, every time the vehicle is started, the speed-margin setting will default to 0% deviation, and other speed-related functions will be disabled by default. These changes will be delivered through an over-the-air (OTA) software update from Tesla.
Tesla requested the RDW’s review of these “minor changes.” After evaluating how the modifications were implemented and how the system behaves, the authority found no adverse or unintended effects on the system’s operation or the vehicle’s driving behaviour. Consequently, the existing type approval remains valid under the same conditions and for the same use; no amendment or extension of the approval is required.
The RDW has informed the nine EU member states that have already accepted its type approval—Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Czechia—about the updates. Broader EU-wide approval is still under discussion within the European Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV). Those proceedings remain confidential, and the RDW has declined to comment on them.
The approved changes align with earlier discussions involving German authorities, which had advocated both for clearer naming to avoid misleading drivers and for a tighter speed offset.
By formally incorporating these adjustments while leaving the core type approval intact, the RDW has cleared the way for Tesla to roll out the updated TAD software via OTA to eligible vehicles in the Netherlands and the other countries that recognise the Dutch approval. The system continues to function strictly as supervised driver assistance, with the human driver remaining the responsible party.
News
Tesla shows off Roadster ‘kickflip’ over vehicle lineup in crazy new POV video
Tesla has released a fresh point-of-view video capturing the next-generation Roadster’s headline stunt from its October 15 unveiling, giving fans a visceral look at the car as it jumps and rotates over its siblings within the company’s vehicle lineup.
Tesla posted the video on X today with the caption “POV you’re a flying car,” and the roughly 30-second clip reveals never-before-seen angles directly attached to the Roadster. It’s really unbelievable:
The sequence reveals the uncrewed prototype firing its cold-gas thrusters, lifting off the ground, and barrel-rolling fully inverted while sailing over a staged lineup that includes a Model 3, Model Y, Cybercab, Cybertruck, and Tesla Semi.
Here’s an image of it that Tesla shared right after the unveiling event for a better perspective of what you’re looking at:

Credit: Tesla
There are also some other cool takeaways from the video, including the shift to the inverted-ramp demonstration. The Roadster uses its underbody suction-fan system to climb, then lock itself upside down on the ramp.
This generates multiple Gs of downforce, which then translates into the Roadster releasing these systems to enable a mid-air roll. The car then settles on its wheels gently as thruster vapor provides a perfect cushion.
All of the runs at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, test site, which is where the unveiling took place, were autonomous. Elon Musk stated this was a safety measure.
Tesla shows what Roadster drivers will see on screen before thruster activation
Tesla’s vehicle-engineering chief Lars Moravy dubbed the mid-air roll the “kickflip,” prompting Musk to quip that Tony Hawk would be proud and that the car could clear even more of the fleet. The thrusters, which use high-pressure compressed air and fast electric actuators, provide the precise, short-duration force needed for both the launch and the controlled rotation; the same hardware is intended for production versions of the higher-end Thrust and Rocket trims.
The second-generation Roadster, first teased in 2017, has been delayed repeatedly. Musk has indicated production is targeted for 2028.
While the company has yet to publish full pricing or independent performance verification, the combination of extreme acceleration, ground-effect suction, and limited flight capability has already positioned the car as one of the most theatrical EV reveals in years.
Musk has also said Tesla plans a dedicated Texas test track so future owners can experience the maneuvers themselves, far from public roads. The new POV clip simply lets everyone else feel a fraction of that experience from the car’s own cameras.