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SpaceX Falcon Heavy payload arrives in Florida for the first time in years
For the first time in almost three years, a spacecraft meant to launch on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket has arrived in Cape Canaveral, Florida and begun to prepare for flight.
Known as Psyche, the scientific mission is designed to venture hundreds of millions of miles from Earth to explore a namesake asteroid that’s believed to be almost entirely metallic. Psyche will also mark NASA’s first operational use of Falcon Heavy, which offers performance far superior to other existing and soon-to-be-retired rockets and at a fraction of their cost.
However, even though Psyche is now the first payload (officially confirmed) to have arrived in Florida for a Falcon Heavy launch since May or June 2019, that doesn’t guarantee that it will be first to launch.
That uncertainty is the result of multiple chronically delayed US military payloads that were both supposed to launch on different Falcon Heavy rockets as early as late 2020. In June 2018, just four months after Falcon Heavy’s iconic launch debut, the US military purchased its first operational launch on the rocket. Known as AFSPC-52 and later renamed USSF-52 after the US government cobbled together a few loosely-related military groups and rebadged them as the “Space Force,” the mission was expected to launch as early as September 2020. In February 2019, the military announced that another Falcon Heavy rocket had been chosen to launch AFSPC-44 (USSF-44) as early as late 2020 or early 2021.
About a year ago, for unknown reasons, USSF-44 took USSF-52’s place as the US military’s first operational Falcon Heavy launch. Now, between three and four years after their initial launch targets, USSF-44 is scheduled to launch NET late June 2022 (a delay of ~18 months) and USSF-52 is set to follow as soon as October 2022 (a delay of ~25 months).
On April 29th, NASA’s Launch Service Program (LSP) revealed that the ~2600-kilogram (~5700 lb) Psyche spacecraft had completed the journey from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Pasadena, California assembly facilities to Kennedy Space Center, Florida. After several years of work spent designing, manufacturing, and assembling Psyche, the spacecraft ultimately arrived at on time, leaving it on track to launch on Falcon Heavy as early as August 1st, 2022.
At the moment, that makes Psyche’s launch far more likely to happen before USSF-44, which has repeatedly gotten within a few months of a purported launch target before the US military acknowledged additional delays. Like USSF-44, Psyche’s Falcon Heavy rocket – three boosters, an upper stage, and a fairing – will be entirely new. Due to the high performance required for each mission and the fact that both will be the first operational use of the rocket for NASA and the USSF, each brand-new Falcon Heavy center core will be intentionally expended.
If it launches more or less on time, USSF-44 will be SpaceX and Falcon Heavy’s first direct launch to geostationary orbit (GEO), requiring the rocket’s upper stage to survive a roughly six-hour-long coast and perform a lengthy orbit circularization burn around ~42,500 kilometers (~26,400 mi) above Earth’s surface. With a payload that weighs around four tons (~8800 lb), it’s little surprise that Falcon Heavy’s center core will be expended. Psyche, on the other hand, is headed into deep space on a trajectory that NASA’s own ELVPerf calculator – supplied with official performance data from SpaceX – says Falcon Heavy can launch more than four tons (~8800 lb) to while still recovering all three boosters. It’s unclear why NASA would need a 50-70% safety margin.
Regardless, the second half of 2022 could be quite the spectacle of Falcon Heavy launches after a more than three-year hiatus. On top of USSF-44, Psyche, and USSF-52, Falcon Heavy is tentatively scheduled to launch a ViaSat-3 communications satellite directly to GEO in Q3 2022 and, even more tentatively, the Space Force’s USSF-67 mission in November 2022.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
News
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
SpaceX launched three final O3b mPower satellites Sunday, finishing a lesser known SES satellite network.
SpaceX had an 87 minute window opening at 2:49 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to fly a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying the final three satellites for SES’s O3b mPower constellation, a project that has taken more than a decade to finish since Boeing and SES first signed SpaceX on for the work.
Unlike the thousands of Starlink satellites SpaceX has stacked into orbit over the years, O3b mPower flies in a different neighborhood entirely. The three new satellites, tagged F11, F12 and F13, are headed for medium Earth orbit at roughly 5,000 miles up, more than ten times higher than Starlink’s shell around 340 miles but still a small fraction of the 22,000 miles where old school geostationary satellites sit. That middle position is the whole point, because a satellite that far out needs far fewer siblings to blanket the globe than a low orbit constellation does. Essentially, SES only needed 13 satellites total to build a network offering quick, steady service that used to require thousands of spacecraft.
With most people having heard plenty about Starlink and almost nothing about O3b mPower, SES and SpaceX already blend the two networks for some customers. Both SpaceX and SES sell satellite broadband, but they’re aimed at different buyers. Starlink is built for volume, direct to consumers, RVs, homes, small businesses, plus a growing aviation and maritime business. O3b mPower skips consumers entirely and sells enterprise grade connectivity to airlines, cruise lines, offshore energy operators, telecoms needing backhaul, and governments, priced and provisioned more like a dedicated circuit.
A 2023 partnership lets cruise ships combine Starlink’s speed with O3b mPower’s steady capacity depending on what a ship needs at a given moment. Sunday’s completed 13 satellite constellation effectively finishes the medium orbit half of that pairing, years after.
Sunday’s mission was already a something on SpaceX’s manifest well before O3b mPower entered the picture. This flight marked its 29th trip to orbit, a history that includes two crewed Axiom missions, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope and 22 separate Starlink batches. SpaceX has landed boosters on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas so often that Sunday’s touchdown attempt, if it went as planned, was set to be the 661st successful Falcon booster landing to date.
For a company that pushed the Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites back in August, almost entirely through bulk launches from California, Sunday’s flight was a reminder that SpaceX’s schedule still has room for someone else’s satellites too. SES gets a finished network built for a narrower set of customers, and Falcon 9 gets one more line on an already long resume.
Elon Musk
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
Tesla teased an October 1 Roadster reveal, reviving years of delayed SpaceX thruster hover promises.
Tesla teased an October 1 event date for its next generation Roadster, posting an image on X Saturday that shows the car lit up like it is sitting on a launch pad, with the date “10.01” stamped across the bottom and the caption “Go for launch.” A countdown clock on Tesla’s Roadster order page now points to the same date, which falls on a Thursday. The company has not said where the event will happen or whether it will be streamed at the moment. Stay with us @Teslarati for live updates.
Go for launch pic.twitter.com/Khu03eiZ04
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 12, 2026
Tesla has since sent formal invitations to reservation holders confirming the event will take place in Waco, Texas, about 90 minutes north of its Austin headquarters, based on a digital ticket shared on X by Sawyer Merritt. Tesla did not name the exact venue, though Waco sits close to SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, rocket test site, previously reported as the planned location for a Roadster thruster demonstration. The invite sets the reveal for 8:30 p.m. Eastern on October 1, requires RSVPs by midnight on September 16, and limits entry to guests 21 and older. Invitations are non-transferable.
The tease follows nine years of a project defined by unimaginable specs along with slipped dates. Musk first showed the second generation Roadster in November 2017 as a surprise reveal at the end of the Tesla Semi event, promising a 0 to 60 mph time under two seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery, and production starting in 2020. At last November’s shareholder meeting, Musk set an April 1 demo date and joked the choice gave him “deniability” if it slipped again, which it did, moving first to late April, then to “a month or so,” then to August.
Tesla Roadster SpaceX Package’s 1.1-second 0-60 mph launch visualized in concept video
Whatever Tesla shows on October 1 is expected to center on the SpaceX developed thruster package Musk has described since 2018. Internally code named A71, a nod to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the system reportedly uses cold gas thrusters fed by a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, the same tank design SpaceX uses on Falcon 9. Musk has said a thruster equipped Roadster could hit 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds under roughly 2.75 g of launch force, well past the 1.9 second figure quoted for the standard car. That version reportedly will not be street legal and has reportedly been discussed as a limited run sold through a track only program.
The standard Roadster is still expected to carry the original $200,000 base price and $250,000 Founders Series tier, both set when Tesla opened $50,000 and $250,000 reservations in 2017. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy has confirmed production will happen at Gigafactory Texas, with Musk targeting 2027 or 2028, 12 to 18 months after whatever the company demonstrates next month.
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
