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SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ties turnaround record, nears 1000 Starlink satellites launched

SpaceX has successfully launched its 895th Starlink satellite while simultaneously tying Falcon 9's booster turnaround record. (SpaceX)

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SpaceX has successfully completed its 14th Starlink v1.0 launch less than a year after operational flights began and simultaneously tied its own world record for orbital-class rocket turnaround.

On the heels of an unusual 48-hour delay SpaceX says it used to double check that a minor Falcon 9 second stage camera issue was not indicative of deeper flaws, the rocket ultimately lifted off at 11:31 am EDT (15:31 UTC) from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) LC-40 pad. As usual, 60 Starlink v1.0 satellites – weighing some 16 metric tons (~35,000 lb) – were loaded inside the payload fairing installed atop Falcon 9’s expendable second stage.

Two and a half minutes after liftoff, Falcon 9 booster B1060 shut down its nine Merlin 1D engines and detached from the second stage, immediately flipping itself around to face those engines towards its landing target. The second stage ignited its Merlin Vacuum (MVac) engine seconds later, burning towards an initial low Earth parking orbit for a six minutes. Thirty seconds prior to second engine cutoff (SECO-1), booster B1060 ignited its center Merlin 1D engine and slowed itself to a bullseye landing aboard drone ship Just Read The Instructions – tying the SpaceX-held world-record for orbital-class rocket turnaround.

Falcon 9 booster B1060 streaks through vacuum towards drone ship JRTI as the rocket’s payload fairing jettisons to expose 60 new Starlink satellites, followed by MVac’s burn towards orbit. (SpaceX)

For reusable rockets, that turnaround record refers to the time between two orbital-class launches with the same vehicle – in this case, Falcon 9 booster B1060. The SpaceX rocket managed to launch two separate Starlink missions – Starlink-11 and Starlink-14 – just 51 days, 2 hours, and 45 minutes, narrowly missing Falcon 9 booster B1058’s record by a measly 37 minutes.

Had SpaceX managed to avoid three days of delays, Starlink-14 would have seen B1060 break B1058’s record by three days. Ultimately, the competition is almost entirely symbolic, given that SpaceX effectively has a monopoly over reusable orbital-class launch capabilities and will almost inevitably continue to beat its own records as it grows to become the world’s foremost expert in reusable rocketry.

B1058 set the current world record when it launched ANASIS II just 51.08 days after sending Crew Dragon and two NASA astronauts on their way to orbit. (Richard Angle)

B1060’s Starlink-14 launch and landing represents the 63rd time SpaceX has successfully landed a Falcon booster, as well as the 55th orbital launch to include a successful booster landing and 43rd mission to use a flight-proven rocket. Including Falcon 1 and Falcon Heavy, Starlink-14 also marked SpaceX’s 100th successful launch since the company’s first success in September 2008.

As of October 24th, SpaceX has now launched an incredible 895 Starlink satellites in 17 months. (SpaceX)

If all 60 Starlink-14 satellites manage to boost up to their final orbits, SpaceX will soon have a constellation of more than 800 operational communications satellites – perhaps just three launches away from crossing the 1000-satellite mark. Typically averaging a boost of 6 km (3.7 mi) in orbital altitude every day, each batch of Starlink satellites takes approximately 30-60 days to reach their operational orbits and join the rest of the fleet. SpaceX has already indicated that the first public Starlink beta tests will begin to rollout once Starlink-13 satellites are operational – a milestone they will likely cross in November.

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 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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