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Pictured here attempting its first landing in June 2020, Falcon 9 booster B1060 is about to launch twice in four weeks. (SpaceX) Pictured here attempting its first landing in June 2020, Falcon 9 booster B1060 is about to launch twice in four weeks. (SpaceX)

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SpaceX fires up Falcon 9 for first flight-proven ‘national security’ launch

Close sibling to B1060, pictured here, Falcon 9 booster B1062 is set to become the first commercial flight-proven rocket to launch a US 'national security' satellite later this week. (SpaceX)

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On June 12th, SpaceX successfully fired up a once-flown Falcon 9 booster in the lead-up to the company’s fourth launch of an upgraded GPS III navigation satellite for the US military.

Dating back several years, SpaceX has won a vast majority of GPS III launches thanks to Falcon 9’s exceptional combination of reliability and affordability, securing all five competitively-awarded contracts. The company aced its first GPS III launch in December 2019, expending a brand new Falcon 9 booster (B1054) due to customer – not performance – requirements necessary to ensure extreme margins in the event of some kind of anomaly or underperformance during launch.

In June 2020, SpaceX once again launched a GPS III satellite for the US military, though this time the company was allowed to attempt to land the Falcon 9 booster supporting the mission – which it successfully recovered without issue. Less than five months after GPS III SV03’s successful launch, SpaceX turned around and launched GPS III SV04 – again with an all-new Falcon 9 rocket – and recovered the booster at sea. A few months prior, however, the US Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) announced a contract modification that would allow SpaceX to begin reusing Falcon 9 boosters on National Security Space Launch (NSSL) missions – beginning with the company’s fourth GPS III launch.

Seven months later, SMC revealed that it has officially cleared SpaceX to begin launching GPS III (and other official NSSL) satellites on flight-proven Falcon rockets. Notably, that might include a Falcon Heavy launch – USSF-52 – planned as early as January 2022 that could reuse two new side boosters scheduled to debut on USSF-44 as early as October 2021.

In the meantime, though, GPS III SV05 – scheduled to launch no earlier than (NET) 12:09 pm EDT (16:09 UTC), Thursday, June 17th – is just two days away from becoming the first NSSL (formerly EELV) satellite to launch on a flight-proven commercial rocket. GPS III SV05 will reuse the same Falcon 9 booster (B1062) that successfully launched GPS III SV04 seven months prior.

While an extremely slow turnaround relative to any other modern Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy booster, those seven months mainly gave the US military margin to fully certify flight-proven Falcons and satellite manufacturer Lockheed Martin time to deal with shortage and coronavirus-related delays. On June 12th, after rolling out to SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral LC-40 launch pad, GPS III SV05’s Falcon 9 rocket completed a wet dress rehearsal that culminated in a successful several-second static fire of booster B1062.

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Now cleared for flight, Falcon 9 will be brought horizontal and roll back to LC-40’s integration hangar, where SpaceX will install the encapsulated GPS III SV05 satellite and payload fairing on top of the rocket’s expendable second stage.

The integrated payload assembly rolled from a nearby payload processing facility to LC-40 on June 13th, giving SpaceX four days to complete integration, roll Falcon 9 back out to the launch pad, and prepare the rocket for flight. Now alone on the East Coast for the first time in 12 months, drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) departed Port Canaveral for the GPS III SV05 booster recovery zone on the same day, followed by the latest in a line of temporary fairing recovery ships on June 14th to scoop the mission’s nosecone halves out of the Atlantic.

L-3 weather forecasts predict a 40% chance of delay on June 17th, improving to 30% on June 18th. Stay tuned for webcast details as SpaceX nears the first of many flight-proven launches for the US military.

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.

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Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley

Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.

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Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.

Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.

Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:

“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”

Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.

The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.

Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.

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Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.

In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”

The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”

Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner

SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.

Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.

The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.

It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”

The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.

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Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing

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(Credit: Starlink | X)

Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.

Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.

Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.

The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.

A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.

Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.

Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.

Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.

The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.

Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration

Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.

The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.

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