Connect with us

News

SpaceX set for third Starlink launch in a row [webcast]

Published

on

Update: SpaceX says that a Falcon 9 rocket is on track Starlink 4-11 from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) no earlier than (NET) 9:12 am PST (17:12 UTC) on Friday, February 25th. The mission will be the third of five back-to-back Starlink launches planned in February and March 2022.

In lieu of commercial missions that are ready to fly, SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets are currently scheduled to launch at least five batches of Starlink satellites in a row.

The streak won’t break the company’s record of seven back-to-back Starlink launches but it does highlight one beneficial side-effect of SpaceX’s relentless pursuit of vertical integration – the ability to create its own launch demand. Just shy of two full months into 2022, SpaceX has launched seven times – three for paying customers and four for Starlink. Before February is over, the company is scheduled to launch at least one more batch of Starlink satellites for a total of eight launches in the first two months of the year.

Up next, SpaceX is scheduled to launch Starlink 4-11 out of its California-based Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) SLC-4E facilities no earlier than (NET) 9:08 am PST (17:08 UTC), Friday, February 25th. Drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) departed the Port of Long Beach for the mission on February 22nd and is headed around 640 kilometers (~400 mi) southeast to a booster landing area just off the coast of Baja California. Falcon 9 booster B1063 is scheduled to support the mission – its fourth launch overall and first since it helped launch NASA’s DART asteroid redirection spacecraft into interplanetary space in November 2021.

Up next, another Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch Starlink 4-9 as early as “mid-morning” EST on Thursday, March 3rd from its Kennedy Space Center LC-39A pad. Booster B1060 is reportedly scheduled to support the mission and will become the third SpaceX first stage to singlehandedly support eleven orbital-class launches if it does. Starlink 4-9 could be the pad’s last mission for a few weeks to give SpaceX enough time to convert its rocket transporter/erector for the March 30th launch of Axiom-1, which will send four private astronauts to the International Space Station.

Finally, SpaceX plans to launch Starlink 4-10 NET Tuesday, March 8th from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) Launch Complex 40 (LC-40). It’s likely that SpaceX will launch at least one more Starlink mission next month but a firm date has yet to be settled on. All told, including Starlink 4-7 (February 3rd) and Starlink 4-8 (February 21st), SpaceX is on track to launch at least five Starlink missions in a row, hopefully placing around 240 satellites (~200 after losing most of Starlink 4-7 to a “geomagnetic storm”) in orbit in less than five weeks.

Advertisement
-
Falcon 9 B1063 is about a day away from its fourth launch. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Falcon 9 B1060 could launch for the eleventh time less than a week later. (SpaceX)

More a sign of a lack of commercial missions ready for flight than anything else, SpaceX’s record for uninterrupted Starlink missions – set from February to April 2021 – is seven launches. Technically, SpaceX actually managed 12 Starlink launches between February and March, with just one commercial mission – Crew-2 – separating the lot. Barring surprises, SpaceX is thankfully unlikely to be hit by a similar streak in 2022.

There’s a chance that SpaceX will launch a batch of three O3B mPower satellites for SES next month. At a minimum, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a trio of Dragon missions over the next two or so months, beginning with Ax-1 NET March 30th. Another Crew Dragon is scheduled to launch Crew-4 for NASA on April 15th, followed by Cargo Dragon 2’s CRS-25 space station resupply mission as early as May 1st. Excluding Starlink missions and on top of the three commercial launches SpaceX has already completed this year, there are as many as 38 more commercial Falcon launches tentatively scheduled before the end of 2022.

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

Energy

Tesla Model 3 and Model Y can now do what only Cybertruck could

Tesla Model 3 and Model Y can power your home with Powerwall 3 during outages.

Published

on

By

Tesla has turned its two top sellers into backup batteries for the house.

Tesla Energy announced on Tuesday that Powershare Home Backup is now available for new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles paired with a Powerwall 3, saying the car can “extend your home backup by over 2 days.” Minutes later, Tesla’s main account quoted the post with a broader pitch: “With Powerwall 3, every Tesla can now serve as your home’s backup battery.”

Until this week, the Cybertruck was the only Tesla that could send power back into a home, and that capability only began working alongside Powerwall 3 last month, after years of ambitious targets.

Tesla’s updated Powershare page says every Model 3 and Model Y ordered in the U.S. or Puerto Rico on or after October 1, 2026 can use the feature. Some, but not all, earlier cars also qualify. Owners can check on the touchscreen under Software, then Additional Vehicle Information, where a capable car shows “Powershare Support: Enabled.” As Electrek reported, bidirectional power on the two cars runs through an inverter Tesla calls PCS2 Lite, and the company has not said when that part entered production on each trim.

The home side is simpler. A house that already has a Powerwall 3 and either a Wall Connector 3 or Universal Wall Connector needs no additional equipment, and Tesla says compatibility is enabled through a software update. When the grid drops, the Powerwall and the car work together, with up to 11.52 kW of continuous power available. Tesla’s “over two days” estimate assumes a home using 30 kWh per day and a car starting at a 90 percent charge. Standard trims are rated for up to two days, while the Cybertruck adds more than three.

There are limits. Powerwall 2 and Powerwall+ support is listed as “coming soon.” Model S and Model X are not included, and Grid Support, the program that lets Cybertruck owners in Texas send power back to the grid during demand spikes for bill credits, is not available for Model 3 or Model Y.

The rollout also lines up with something Elon Musk said more than three years ago. At Tesla’s March 2023 Investor Day, Musk said, “I don’t think very many people are going to want to use bidirectional charging, unless you have a Powerwall.” Tesla has now shipped the feature for its volume cars with exactly that requirement attached.

The Powerwall pairing was the hard part on Cybertruck. Tesla told owners in December 2025 that Powershare with Powerwall had been pushed to mid 2026, and lead engineer Wes Morrill explained that two devices capable of forming a home’s grid have to negotiate which one leads during an outage, across multiple generations of hardware. With that work done for the truck, Tesla was able to extend it to the Model 3 and Model Y within a month.

Ford and GM have offered home backup from their EVs for several years, but both require a separate inverter and backup hardware. Tesla’s version leans on equipment many Powerwall 3 owners already have on the wall. Powershare for the two cars also ships as part of software update 2026.38.3, the same release that began delivering Halloween Mode on Tuesday.

Continue Reading

News

Tesla ships ‘spooky’ Halloween Mode with creepy and fun features

Published

on

Credit: Tesla

Tesla is now starting to ship a “Halloween Mode” that is filled with some creepy and fun features; the company says, “This spooky update turns your Tesla into a haunted house on wheels.”

The update is just the latest in a series of updates that Tesla typically ships out in a seasonal fashion. The Spring and Summer Updates provided some fun novelty items while also packing some cool features that are actually useful for the ownership experience.

This one seems to be more fun-forward, and there are not any updates to the Full Self-Driving suite or overall operation of the vehicle. Instead, these novelty features are geared toward getting you in the mood for the Fall and Halloween.

New Ghost Costume on Car Avatar

Driver Visualization will now show your vehicle as a ghost, as an all-white sheet is draped over the vehicle. Pedestrians are turned into mummies or skeletons, and other vehicles are all a spooky green:

Credit: Tesla

Additionally, the Park Scene with your Tesla now displays that ghost costume draped over your vehicle in the foreground of a scary backdrop with Jack-o-Lanterns and a haunted house:

Credit: Tesla

Trick or Treat Mode

Trick or Treat Mode will enable the vehicle to play spooky sounds and flicker the lights as visitors approach. This might be a nice touch for when you’re handing out candy to kids on Halloween Night.

Other Features

Tesla is also adding a new Light Show, new Wrap Options, and a new Lock Sound with this update.

Credit: Tesla

Additionally, Photobooth has a new Halloween option:

Credit: Tesla

You will also be able to speak remotely through the app and transmit your voice to people outside, which is not a new feature, but the car will say it in a voice of its own, which is a new feature with that bullhorn-like feature.

Continue Reading

Investor's Corner

SpaceX reveals how its 1 Million AI satellite network will work and prevent space collisions

SpaceX reveals plans for one million Starmind AI satellites and calls out operators hiding maneuvers.

Published

on

By

Concept rendering of SpaceX Starmind constellation via Grok
Concept rendering of SpaceX Starmind constellation via Grok

SpaceX has put the largest satellite count it has ever published into writing, and it says that plan only works if every other operator in orbit starts sharing what it knows.

In a new Space Safety page highlighted Tuesday morning by Sawyer Merritt on X, SpaceX said it “plans to operate up to 100,000 Starlink satellites and up to 1 million Starmind AI satellites to meet the growing demand for broadband and supercompute.” Starlink has a little over 11,000 satellites in orbit today, so the target alone implies roughly a ninefold expansion of the broadband network.

Starmind is SpaceX’s orbital AI compute constellation. Elon Musk confirmed the Starmind name in June after an xAI trademark filing surfaced, and in August SpaceX said it was working with Nvidia on the compute payload. The FCC accepted the filing for up to one million satellites back in February.

FCC accepts SpaceX filing for 1 million orbital data center plan

SpaceX also released a new render of what a full Starmind constellation could look like. Alongside it, SpaceX VP Michael Nicolls explained why the satellites will not operate on their own. “We need to operate clusters of satellites in tight formation to get enough coherent compute to run AI models efficiently,” Nicolls said. “A cluster will be 10-ish satellites connected with 10 terabits or so of bandwidth between them, and interconnected to the broader constellation.”

That is the most specific detail SpaceX has given on how Starmind will be built. Instead of a million independent servers, the network would work as tightly packed groups of about 10 satellites acting as one compute unit, with Starlink’s laser links carrying results back to Earth.


Packing satellites that close together, at that scale, makes collision avoidance the central problem, and most of the Space Safety page is aimed at other operators. SpaceX said Starlink encountered collision risks with about 650 unique maneuvering third party satellites in 2026, and only about half of them shared data. Over six months, Starlink recorded roughly 164,000 more collision risks where the closest approach came within four hours of an unannounced maneuver.

Some operators keep maneuver plans private over proprietary concerns, while others cannot get government permission to share them. SpaceX called those policies “counterproductive,” saying they “largely only serve to create preventable collision risk between satellites.” Starlink is also offering a free ephemeris sharing and screening platform that returns risk results within a minute, backed by its Stargaze network of 30,000 optical sensors.

The push comes as the Starmind application draws opposition from astronomers and environmental groups. In a September filing with the FCC, SpaceX said each Starmind satellite could weigh up to 4,000 kg, nearly seven times the mass of a Starlink V2 Mini. Musk has brushed off crowding concerns before, telling viewers in June that “space is enormous” and that SpaceX already knows how to run very large constellations safely.

SpaceX’s Starmind page says its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, is designed to produce AI satellites at scale, with deployment of thousands of units starting as soon as late 2027.

Continue Reading