News
SpaceX Falcon 9 launch and landing scrubbed by wind as drone ship battles high seas
SpaceX’s CRS-19 Falcon 9 launch and landing has been scrubbed by wind conditions miles above the ground at the same time as the rocket’s drone ship landing platform battles high seas in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX decided to stand down from Wednesday’s launch attempt for NASA’s CRS-19 International Space Station (ISS) resupply mission due to unacceptably high upper-level winds. Previously scheduled to lift off around 12:51 pm ET (16:51 UTC) on December 4th, NASA and SpaceX have recycled the mission and are now targeting 12:29 pm ET (16:29 UTC) on December 5th, slightly different to account for the ever-changing position of the ISS.
In rocketry, upper-level winds have always been a bit of a problem: different air currents at different altitudes can produce an effect akin to running sideways along a series of treadmills, dramatically increasing the risk of a rocket’s structure failing under longitudinal loads. At the same time, drone ship Of Course I Still Love You – set to recover Falcon 9 booster B1059 shortly after its launch debut – is dealing with high seas in the Atlantic Ocean, raising the risk of the booster suffering damage during landing or even toppling off the deck.

CRS-19 features a flight-proven Cargo Dragon capsule (C106) that has visited the ISS not once, but twice. It previously completed SpaceX’s fourth and eleventh Commercial Resupply contract missions in 2014 and 2017 and will be the second time a twice-flown Dragon capsule heads to orbit for the third time. After berthing at the ISS around December 8th (assuming a Thursday launch), Dragon will depart the ISS and land in the Pacific Ocean sometime in early January, about a month after arriving at the station.
Along with a recycled Dragon capsule, the CRS-19 mission will feature a fresh-from-the-factory Falcon 9 booster – in this case, B1059.1. New Falcon 9 boosters have become a rarity in 2019, and this mission’s only flight-proven hardware will actually be the orbital spacecraft, Cargo Dragon.
B1059.1 is the first fresh Falcon 9 core to be flown since the STP-2 Falcon Heavy in June of 2019. The booster is expected to return for landing aboard the autonomous spaceport droneship Of Course I Still Love You.
Science On Board
Waiting patiently atop Falcon 9, Cargo Dragon is loaded with almost 5800 pounds (2650 kg) of cargo, including more than 250 science investigations and technology demonstrations to be performed on the ISS. Investigations include a look into the process of malting barley seeds (i.e. beer) in a microgravity environment to hopefully improve the process on Earth and explore possible nutritional use for future long-duration space missions.
Another prominent investigation – Rodent Research-19 or “Mighty Mice in Space” – is sending live mice to the ISS to investigate a preventative measure to prevent muscle and bone loss caused by long-term microgravity exposure, potentially aiding astronauts on long-duration space missions. According to NASA, “this therapeutic approach may be optimal in conditions characterized by both muscle and bone loss. Hence, this therapeutic strategy may have significant advantages for certain applications, including treatment of muscle and bone loss during spaceflight.”
SpaceX will provide a webcast of the launch attempt that will go live about 15 minutes prior to liftoff, NET 12:29 pm ET (16:29 UTC), December 5th.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX just combined Grok, Cursor, and X into one mega plan
SpaceXSI merges Grok, Cursor, and X Premium into one plan, raising questions for Tesla owners.
SpaceX Super Intelligence has rolled out The X Subscription, a single plan that combines Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor, and X Premium.
There are five levels, including a free plan that includes daily Grok access and a starter allowance for Cursor’s coding agents. Plus is $8 per month, Premium is $30, Super is $100, and Ultra is $200. Usage scales as you move up, with Premium offering four times the Plus allowance, Super 15 times, and Ultra 50 times. Annual billing brings the prices down a bit further, with Premium at $300 per year.
We’ve unified plans across Grok, Cursor, and X Premium.
Introducing The X Subscription. https://t.co/SvkrVvBa0p
— SpaceX Super Intelligence (@SpaceXSI) October 12, 2026
The $30 Premium tier is where SpaceXSI says it packs the benefits of SuperGrok, Cursor Pro, and X Premium+, which previously added up to $90 per month. Grok Bot, the agent that handles tasks like ordering food or managing a calendar, is included from Premium upward but not on Plus. Paid plans share one weekly usage pool across Grok and Cursor, and each plan includes at least twice the coding usage of the comparable Cursor plan. Third party models in Cursor remain available on Premium and above, but they are billed separately at API list prices.
That last detail matters because of what has happened around Cursor this year. SpaceX exercised its option to buy the company for $60 billion in June, and the deal closed in August. Weeks later, OpenAI said it will cut Cursor’s access to its models on November 12. Bundling Cursor with Grok usage gives SpaceXSI a reason to steer developers toward its own models.
Tesla integrates Grok Bot into its vehicles for the ultimate personal assistant
For Tesla owners, the connection is Grok Bot. Tesla brought it into its vehicles last month, and at that point access inside the car was limited to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. Grok Bot is now enabled across every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y Robotaxi fleet. Neither SpaceXSI nor Tesla has said how the new plans change inside the car access for owners, or whether a $30 Premium subscription now covers Grok Bot in a personal Tesla. That is the question owners will want answered first.
The company is also changing its name along the way. The rollout follows the rebrand Musk announced on October 4, when he said SpaceXAI would become SpaceXSI, and the plan page now carries that branding.
The X Subscription is available to new customers starting now, and SpaceXSI says it will reach everyone globally over the next few days. Existing SuperGrok, Cursor, and X Premium subscribers do not have to switch. The option to move will appear gradually in billing settings, with a prorated refund for the unused time on the old plan. Switching is permanent once the accounts are unified, and old plans are closed to new sign ups.
Energy
Taiwan power firm bets big on Tesla Megapacks as AI data center thirst grows
Taiwan’s Apollo Power orders 260 Tesla Megapacks, betting AI data centers will need more electricity.
A Taiwanese power company has ordered 260 Tesla Megapack 2XL units, roughly 1GWh of storage, betting that electricity rather than chips will decide how fast AI data centers come online. Apollo Power signed the contract with Tesla’s Taiwan energy arm on October 8, according to the company’s filing with the Taiwan stock exchange.
The filing says the units are meant for behind the meter storage and resilient grid projects, with delivery in batches from the end of 2027 and sites operating in 2028. Apollo and Tesla did not disclose a price, citing a confidentiality agreement. Apollo plans to pay for the equipment through a cash capital increase and bank financing, and it noted the purchase is not revenue and does not mean it holds firm orders from its partners.
Biggo reported that only about 33 units are under signed customer contracts, with roughly 150 more in negotiation. The same report put total project investment near NT$130 billion, but that figure includes installation work, with the equipment itself making up about 40 to 50 percent. In other words, a large share of this order is Apollo reserving supply ahead of demand. Apollo’s chairman told local media global large storage supply is tight, which is why the company locked in the units early, according to Yahoo Taiwan Finance.
Apollo also launched an AI data center and grid resilience alliance with Phison, Gigabyte and Shihlin Electric. The pitch rests on a pilot at Phison’s Zhunan plant, where Apollo and Tesla Energy Taiwan installed grid forming Megapack 2XLs in June. Tesla Energy Taiwan general manager Sun Hsiao-Han said the project went from demo to 1GWh in four months, and that Tesla Energy has deployed more than 50GWh worldwide.
Taiwan’s cabinet has approved amendments that would require large energy users to install their own generation and storage, which gives enterprise storage a regulatory tailwind.
The deal fits a pattern Teslarati has tracked. Tesla’s Megablock targets 1GWh commissioned in 20 business days, a pitch aimed squarely at fast moving data center builds. Megapacks already back xAI’s Colossus in Memphis and a 400MW AI campus in Brazil. Sun Media adds that Megapack 2XL was named among the first products in Nvidia’s DSX Ready qualification for battery storage in AI factories.
Deliveries are more than a year away, so the real test is how much of that 260 unit order turns into signed customer contracts.
Lifestyle
Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi’s real advantage won’t be the ride service
For a century, the car has asked the same thing of its owner, which is basically to pay attention. Even the best ride-hailing app like Uber or Lyft only moved the problem into someone else’s hands. You stopped driving, but you still sat in a stranger’s car, while half listening, and wondering whether to take a phone call in the car without being rude. The Cybercab has no wheel, no pedals and no driver. With Grok @bot now live inside it, it becomes something else entirely, and I think that matters more than the fleet count that everyone is tracking.
Grok @bot is an agent, not a voice assistant. A rider signs in once, and from then on can say what they need and watch it happen. Order dinner from a favorite restaurant. Fill the grocery cart. Move money, answer email, adjust a calendar, push a work project forward. Tesla engineer Yun-Ta Tsai confirmed it is enabled across every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y fleet, and Tesla’s own pitch is that Full Self-Driving handles the commute while Grok handles the errands.
Think about what that does to a thirty minute ride. Uber sells you a trip, while Waymo sells you the same trip in a more private setting. Tesla is selling the thirty minutes themselves, returned to you with an assistant attached. Errands that used to eat a Saturday get done between pickup and drop off. The ride stops being dead time between two places and becomes a place of its own.
Tesla integrates Grok Bot into its vehicles for the ultimate personal assistant
Best of all, your Bots follow you into any Cybercab, and presumably your own Tesla, then logs you out automatically when you step out. Anyone can bolt a chatbot onto a screen, but much harder to own the vehicle, the autonomy stack and the assistant at once. It also quietly ties SpaceX’s Super Intelligence business to Tesla’s fleet, after Tesla converted its xAI stake into SpaceX equity. The relationship between those two companies is getting harder to describe as separate.
This is also where the hard questions start, because an agent that can spend your money in a vehicle other people also ride in needs some answers. How does it handle a voice it shouldn’t trust? What gets recorded, who can see it, and for how long? What happens when a rider leaves halfway through a task?
If Tesla gets those answers right, the scoreboard changes. We have been counting Cybercabs and wait times. The more telling number may be what riders accomplish per trip. That is data almost no one else will ever have, and it is the real reason to watch Grok @bot.
What do you think? Leave me a comment.