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SpaceX’s first NASA astronauts to receive Space Medal of Honor for Dragon test flight
NASA says that the astronauts responsible for SpaceX’s first crewed Dragon test flight will be awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor for their bravery.
Kamala Harris, the sitting US Vice President and Chair of the National Space Council, will bestow the exceptionally rare awards to former NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken in a ceremony on Tuesday, January 31st. NASA will stream the event live on all social media platforms and its own NASA TV service, beginning around 4:15 pm EST (21:15 UTC).
The update that's rolling out to the fleet makes full use of the front and rear steering travel to minimize turning circle. In this case a reduction of 1.6 feet just over the air— Wes (@wmorrill3) April 16, 2024
Since Congress authorized the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1969, it has been awarded just 28 times. Just 11 went to living astronauts, while the other 17 were awarded posthumously: to the three NASA astronauts killed in the 1967 Apollo 1 accident and the 14 astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle’s 1986 Challenger disaster and 2003 Columbia disaster. Former President George W. Bush awarded the most recent medal to Robert L. Crippen, the first Space Shuttle pilot, in 2006.
NASA notes that “despite the medal’s name, the President awards this medal based upon recommendations from the NASA Administrator,” indicating that Administrator Bill Nelson selected Behnken and Hurley for the honor. It’s difficult to imagine a pair of astronauts more worthy of ending the 16-year gap since the last Space Medal of Honor was awarded.
Prior to the Dragon test flight they will be honored for, Behnken and Hurley had storied careers in the US military and at NASA. Bob Behnken earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Caltech in 1997 and eventually became a lead flight test engineer in the US Air Force’s F-22 Raptor program. He was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in 2000 and flew two Space Shuttle missions in 2008 and 2010. In 2012, Behnken was chosen to lead NASA’s prestigious Astronaut Office, and did so for three years before he began training for the Commercial Crew Program.
Doug Hurley earned a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1988 and received a commission in the US Marine Corps upon graduating. He made three deployments as an F/A-18 pilot and later became a Navy Test Pilot in 1997. Hurley was “the first Marine pilot to fly the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet” and has experience flying more than 25 types of aircraft. He was also selected to become an astronaut in 2000 and flew on two Space Shuttle flights, including the Shuttle’s 135th and final mission in 2011.
In 2018, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were assigned to SpaceX’s first crewed Crew Dragon test flight. Leaning on their histories as pilots and engineers, they worked with SpaceX for multiple years before the company’s historic astronaut launch debut. Their input lives on today throughout SpaceX’s Dragon program, from the spacecraft’s design and interior to how the company trains private and public astronauts.
On May 30th, 2020, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first NASA astronauts to lift off from US soil since the Space Shuttle’s 2011 retirement and the first astronauts in history to ride a privately-developed rocket and spacecraft into orbit. Defying expectations, Crew Dragon beat Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to the punch and performed (more or less) flawlessly throughout its Demo-2 test flight.
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NASA was so confident in SpaceX – and encouraged by Crew Dragon’s initial performance – that Demo-2 was extended from a minimum duration of about a week to 62 days. After two months in orbit, Crew Dragon successfully undocked from the International Space Station (ISS), deorbited, reentered Earth’s atmosphere, deployed parachutes, and gently splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico – safely returning Behnken and Hurley to Earth.
The highly successful test flight allowed NASA to rapidly certify Dragon. Less than four months later, another Crew Dragon spacecraft lifted on a Falcon 9 rocket on SpaceX’s first operational astronaut ferry mission for NASA. More than two years later, Boeing’s Starliner remains uncertified, and Crew Dragon is still the only spacecraft capable of sustaining the presence of NASA astronauts at the ISS. SpaceX is on track to launch its sixth consecutive astronaut ferry mission – Crew-6 – no earlier than February 26th.
The pressure on SpaceX and the importance of Crew Dragon to NASA cannot be overstated. In a nontrivial sense, NASA and SpaceX would not have Crew Dragon’s essential – and currently irreplaceable – capabilities without the work done and risks taken by Behnken and Hurley. Had either astronaut made a significant mistake or faltered during Dragon’s Demo-2 test flight, the state of US human spaceflight could be significantly worse off than it is today. Instead, the astronauts played their parts to perfection and helped catapult SpaceX, NASA, and the world into a new era of commercial human spaceflight.
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley retired from NASA in 2021 and 2022, respectively. They will receive the 29th and 30th Congressional Space Medals of Honor.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
