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SpaceX sets Dragon reuse record, debuts drone ship on first launch in two months
Update #2: After a 24-hour weather delay, conditions were far more favorable on August 29th, allowing a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to lift off for the first time in almost two months and send a cargo-filled Dragon spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station (ISS).
Aside from marking the end of SpaceX’s longest launch hiatus in two years, CRS-23’s successful liftoff also means that the company has smashed the world record for fastest orbital space capsule reuse. As part of Cargo Dragon 2’s first reuse ever, SpaceX launched Dragon C208 just seven and a half months (227d) after its first orbital reentry and splashdown, handily beating the previous record of 328 days. Additionally, flying for the fourth time, Falcon 9 booster B1064 became the first rocket to land on brand new SpaceX drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) after sending Dragon C208 on its way to the ISS.
Getting a nice view of CRS-23's trunk as it separates, confirming no trunk cargo on this flight. pic.twitter.com/ZeJjviKqFE— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) August 29, 2021
Update: Although the weather forecast has worsened, SpaceX remains on track to attempt its first launch in eight weeks – a mission that will also smash one of the company’s orbital spacecraft reusability records.
While mostly mundane, a system preceding Tropical Storm Ida is producing conditions less than optimal for rocket launches, raising the risk of in-flight lightning strikes and the chances of Falcon 9 and Dragon flying through clouds containing precipitation (rain/ice/etc). Ultimately, that means that there’s just a 40% chance (down from 50% in the last few days) that weather conditions will be favorable for SpaceX to launch CRS-23. Regardless, barring a surprise announcement in the next few hours, it appears that there’s enough of a chance that SpaceX and NASA will still make an attempt.
If all goes according to plan, a flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket will send an upgraded Cargo Dragon on the way to orbit for the second time in seven months – almost twice as fast a turnaround as SpaceX’s ~340-day record for orbital spacecraft reuse. Tune in below around 3:20am EDT (07:20 UTC) to catch the hopeful launch live.
For the first time in more than nine weeks, SpaceX has completed a routine Falcon 9 preflight test known as a static fire and verified that the rocket is ready to launch later this week.
Save for at least one booster qualification test completed at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas development facilities, Falcon 9’s August 25th static fire is the first since June 22nd. The upgraded Cargo Dragon space station resupply mission the rocket will support will also be SpaceX’s first launch since June 30th – the company’s longest hiatus between launches since a three-month pause that began two years ago.
Now, just a few days before that drought is expected to end, a SpaceX executive has partially explained why the company hasn’t launched a single Falcon rocket in ~60 days after completing a record 20 orbital launches in the first half of 2021.
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Speaking at the 2021 Space Symposium on August 24th, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell revealed that the company had chosen to pause Starlink missions (representing the vast majority of its 2021 launches) and focus on preparing a new generation of satellites for flight. Believed to be called Starlink V1.5, those new satellites represent a relatively small design change save for one crucial addition: multiple lasers.
All the way back in mid-2018, SpaceX launched its very first pair of Starlink prototype satellites – spacecraft that largely functioned as expected and provided a wealth of data but were almost nothing like the Starlink V0.9 and V1.0 spacecraft SpaceX would eventually start launching in 2019. Nevertheless, they did carry sets of small lasers generally known as optical intersatellite links or OISLs for short. Not radically dissimilar to the hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet, lasers operating in the vacuum of space can effectively mirror the extraordinary bandwidth and performance offered by fiber connections – but wirelessly.
Instead of carefully insulated cables filled with tiny threads of glass, which really just serve as a controlled environment for light-based communications, OISLs enable a similar feat by replacing cables with extraordinarily precise mechanisms capable of aiming lasers with sub-millimeter precision from dozens or hundreds of miles away. As a result, laser interlinks are fairly complex and expensive devices – not something currently economical to install on thousands of satellites mainly focused on affordability.
SpaceX, of course, has wanted to install unprecedentedly affordable laser interlinks on thousands of Starlink satellites for as long as the constellation has been publicly discussed. If realized, it would create an extraordinary orbital mesh network that would allow Starlink to self-route a large portion of user communications without the need for a colossal network of tens of thousands of ground stations covering every inch of Earth – land, sea, ice, and all. A Starlink constellation with near-universal laser interlinks could also potentially allow the constellation to not only match – but beat by a large margin – the latency of best-case terrestrial fiber-optic connections.
After effectively completing Starlink’s first ‘shell’ of satellites earlier this year, SpaceX shifted its focus to preparing for polar Starlink launches from both its west and east coast facilities. While the first shell lacked interlinks entirely, SpaceX appears to have decided that all polar Starlink satellites will be launched with its own custom-built space lasers, even if that means delaying Starlink launches until those lasers are ready for action. Due to the fact that the vast majority of SpaceX’s launches as of late have been its own Starlink missions, the company’s Falcon rockets simply haven’t had anything to launch.
That should change on August 28th, when a thrice-flown Falcon 9 booster launches a refurbished spacecraft on its second orbital space station resupply – a first for SpaceX’s upgraded Cargo Dragon 2 vehicle. A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG), SpaceX’s newest drone ship, will also be supporting its first Falcon landing ever as part of CRS-23, hopefully recovering Falcon 9 booster B1064 for a fifth launch later this year.
Tune in around 3:20am (07:20 UTC) on Saturday, August 28th to watch SpaceX’s first launch in two months live.
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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
