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SpaceX set to launch NASA astronauts first after Boeing narrowly avoids catastrophe in space
SpaceX is set to become the first private company to launch NASA astronauts as few as three months from now, all but guaranteed after Boeing’s competing Starliner spacecraft narrowly avoided a catastrophe in space on its orbital launch debut.
The ultimate purpose of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) is to ensure that the US is once again able to launch its own astronauts into orbit and to the International Space Station (ISS) – a capability the country has not possessed since it prematurely canceled the Space Shuttle in 2011. In a logical step, NASA decided to fund two independent companies to ensure that astronaut launch capabilities would be insulated against any single failure, ultimately awarding contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014. Boeing did actually try to have Congress snub SpaceX back in 2014 and solely award the contract to Starliner, but the company thankfully failed.
As a result, SpaceX beating Boeing on the (not-a-) race to launch NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) would represent an immense and deeply embarrassing upset in the traditional aerospace industry – essentially a case of David and Goliath. For the better part of a decade, Congress, most industry officials, and Boeing itself have argued ad nauseum the Starliner spacecraft was clearly a far safer bet than anything built by SpaceX – Boeing, obviously, has far more experience (“heritage”) in the spaceflight industry. However, multiple “catastrophic” failures during Boeing’s recent Starliner ‘Orbital Flight Test’ (OFT) paint a far uglier picture.
As its PR team and executives will constantly remind anyone within earshot, Boeing helped build the first stage of the Saturn V rocket, while a company it bought years after the fact (Rockwell) did technically buy the company (North American) that built the spacecraft (Apollo CSM) that carried NASA astronauts from the Earth to the Moon (and back). Rockwell (acquired by Boeing) also built all five of NASA’s Space Shuttle orbiters.
In the 1990s, Boeing – set to lose a competition to build an expendable rocket for the US military – acquired McDonnell Douglas at the last second, slapping a Boeing sticker on the Delta IV rocket – designed and built by MD. Boeing then conspired to steal trade secrets from Lockheed Martin (bidding Atlas V) and used that stolen info to mislead the USAF about the real cost of Delta IV, thus securing the more lucrative of two possible contracts. This is all to point out the simple fact that Boeing has far less real experience designing spacecraft than it tends to act like it does.
As such, it’s substantially less surprising than it might otherwise be that Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has had such a rocky orbital launch debut. Preceded just a matter of weeks by a quality assurance failure that prevented one of Starliner’s four parachutes from deploying after an otherwise-successful pad abort test, a second Starliner spacecraft launched atop an Atlas V rocket on its orbital launch debut (OFT) on December 20th, 2019. Atlas V performed flawlessly but immediately after Starliner separated from the rocket, things went very wrong.
Bad software ultimately caused the spacecraft to perform thousands of uncommanded maneuvering thruster burns, depleting a majority of its propellant before Boeing was able to intervene. Starliner managed to place itself in low Earth orbit (LEO), but by then it had nowhere near enough propellant left to rendezvous and dock with the ISS – one of the most crucial purposes of the uncrewed flight test. Unable to complete that part of the mission, Boeing instead did a few small tests over the course of 48 hours in orbit before commanding the spacecraft’s reentry and landing on December 22nd.
But wait, there’s more!
As it turns out, although both NASA and Boeing inexplicably withheld the information from the public for more than two months, Boeing’s OFT Starliner spacecraft reportedly almost suffered a second major software failure just hours before reentry. According to NASA and Boeing comments in a press conference held only after news of that second failure broke after an advisory panel broached the issue in February 2020, a second Starliner software bug – caught only because the first failure forced Boeing to double-check its code – could have had far more catastrophic consequences.
NASA officials stated that had the second bug not been caught, some of Starliner’s thruster valves would have been frozen, either entirely preventing or severely hampering the spacecraft’s detached trunk from properly maneuvering in orbit. Apparently, that service module (carrying fuel, abort engines, a solar array, and more) could have crashed into the crew module shortly after detaching from it. Unsurprisingly, that ‘recontact’ could have severely damaged the Starliner crew capsule, potentially making reentry impossible (or even fatal) if its relatively fragile heat shield bore the brunt of that impact.
SpaceX has undeniably suffered its own significant failures, most notably when flight-proven Crew Dragon capsule C201 exploded moments before a static fire test, but the company has already proven that it fixed the source of the failure with the spacecraft’s second successful launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. Ultimately, it’s becoming nearly impossible to rationally argue that Boeing’s Starliner will be safer than SpaceX’s Crew Dragon – let alone worth the 40% premium Boeing is charging NASA and the US taxpayer.
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According to Ars Technica’s Eric Berger, Crew Dragon’s inaugural astronaut launch is now tentatively scheduled as early as late-April to late-May 2020. Paperwork – not technical hurdles – is currently the source of that uncertainty, and all Demo-2 mission hardware (Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon) is either already in Florida or days away from arriving.
Due to the combination of similar software failures Starliner suffered during its first and only launch, Boeing now has to review the entirety of the spacecraft’s software – more than a million lines of code – before NASA will allow the company to launch again. There’s also a very good chance that Boeing will now have to repeat the Orbital Flight Test, potentially incurring major delays. In short, it would take nothing less than a miracle – or NASA making a public mockery of itself for Boeing’s benefit – for Starliner to launch astronauts before SpaceX.
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Elon Musk
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Tesla owner David Moss just pushed his intervention free FSD streak past 20,000 miles total.
Tesla Model 3 owner David Moss has spent the better part of eight months turning his vehicle into a rolling stress test for Full Self-Driving, and this week he pushed his single, continuous FSD streak past 20,000 miles without a human intervening.
Moss, a Tacoma, Washington resident who sells LiDAR scanning equipment for a living, first drew wide attention in December 2025 when he logged 10,000 consecutive miles on FSD v14.2. Days later he drove from the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, covering 2,732 miles in two days and 20 hours with zero disengagements, the first verified coast to coast autonomous drive in Tesla’s history. Tesla even featured the trip as an official customer story in March. That original streak eventually reached 12,961 miles across 30 states before ending in rural Wisconsin in January, when snow and single digit temperatures forced Moss to take over.
Tesla FSD successfully completes full coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions
He started over, and this run has gone further. In late May, Moss drove 3,760 miles across Canada with two companions, from Horseshoe Bay in Vancouver to a Tesla showroom in Halifax, again without a single intervention, a trip Tesla AI software VP Ashok Elluswamy publicly congratulated him for on X. In June, he pushed the same unbroken streak south, aiming to link the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and crossed 10,000 miles on Tesla’s newly added in car streak counter along the way, the first driver to do so since Tesla began showing confetti animations for the feature.
20,000 Mile Tesla FSD Screen Streak!
Special thank you to @DevinOlsenn, @scotsrule08, & @OwenSparks for helping co drive during all these fun adventures these last couple of months
Also thank you to @wholemars for always tracking me along the journey verifying it all with his… pic.twitter.com/CZ2yO6Ev0X
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) July 27, 2026
It’s worth noting that every mile is logged through the FSD Database, a community run tracker built by Tesla influencer Omar Qazi, well known as @WholeMars on X, that pulls telemetry straight from the car and records disengagements down to a tenth of a mile. That verification is what separates Moss’s numbers from casual claims on social media.
The streak itself is a fairly recent addition to Tesla’s software. FSD v14.2 introduced a Self Driving Stats panel tracking the ratio of autonomous to manual miles, and v14.3.4 added the live streak counter in June, which resets the moment a driver brakes, wrenches the wheel or cancels navigation. Reaching 20,000 miles on that counter means a single Tesla drove itself through countless highways, city grids, construction zones and Supercharger stalls without a single reset.
Moss has said the goal was never to set a record for its own sake, but to show, mile by verified mile, what the software can already do.
Elon Musk told The Economist that artificial intelligence will likely surpass the combined intelligence of every human on Earth within about five years, and that humans may not remain in charge once that happens. In a wide-ranging interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, recorded at Giga Texas for the outlet’s Insider series, Musk compared the widening gap between AI and human intelligence to the gap between humans and chimpanzees.
“It’s hard to imagine that the chimpanzee would be in charge,” he said, addressing what happens to human authority once AI moves far beyond us.
Elon Musk reiterates his most optimistic prediction yet with “UHI” forecast
Musk’s timeline stretches out from there. Five years for AI to out-think humanity combined, ten years before humans lose meaningful control, and by 2036, he says, money itself may stop mattering.
Musk notes that if robots and AI produce more goods and services than people could ever consume, currency loses its purpose. He told Beddoes that governments could respond with direct payments, what he called “universal high income,” a term he first used in an X post last August describing a future where “everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.”
There will be universal high income (not merely basic income).
Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.
Sustainable abundance.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2025
He also floated a more surprising prediction that deflation, and not inflation, would become the bigger economic problem, since expanding the supply of goods and services faster than the money supply grows would push prices down rather than up.
None of this is new territory for Musk, who has spent years describing an “age of abundance” built on Optimus and autonomous vehicles. What’s notable is the timing. The interview landed the same week Tesla shares dropped roughly 19 percent following a second quarter earnings report that beat on revenue but missed badly on profit, and as SpaceX stock continues to slide from its post-IPO peak.
Musk’s own net worth has fallen close to $700 billion since mid-June, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, even as he describes a future where personal wealth stops being the point.
Musk did not dodge the risk side of the equation either. He put the odds of AI contributing to human extinction somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range, then arrived at what he called his “philosophical conclusion” since the technology cannot realistically be stopped and the arguably better response is to keep building it and hope the outcome leans toward abundance rather than catastrophe. “I’ve gone from exhilaration to terror regarding AI,” he told Beddoes, “even intraday.”
Tesla is adding a new “Traction Control Modes” feature to its cars for better handling in any conditions. These features will roll out to the Model 3 and Model Y, the two vehicles in Tesla’s lineup that typically do not have drive modes for various conditions.
Tesla did include this in the Model S and Model X, as well as the Cybertruck.
The new feature will roll out with the 2026 Summer Update, which Tesla announced last week and subsequently started rolling out to some owners today. The Summer Update is the latest iteration of the usual four seasonal releases the company rolls out throughout the year. These releases typically feature some owner-requested features, as well as improvements to things like the Full Self-Driving suite.
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
This release is no different. Among the changes are improvements to Navigation, new customization options with wraps and how they can be shared and stored, more functionality with the Tesla smartphone app, and new gamification with self-driving.
However, Tesla announced today that it was adding another feature to the Summer Update. Traction Control Modes will now be available with the release
Tesla describes them:
“Choose from three updated Traction Control Modes: Auto for normal driving conditions, Slippery Surface for icy or wet roads, Stuck Assist when stuck in snow, mud, or sand. The mode resets to Auto at the start of each drive. To select, go to Controls > Dynamics > Traction Control Mode.”
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update also includes new Traction Control Modes
📸: @PatchesHQ https://t.co/N9cD2lGP14 pic.twitter.com/ogLC5ROIgc
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 26, 2026
The use of these modes will help improve a Tesla’s overall performance in less-than-ideal conditions. Typically, these traction control modes monitor wheel speed through sensors and track engine power to adjust responsiveness in various conditions.
These drive modes are not an ultimate solution to all driving conditions; just because there is a “Stuck Assist,” doesn’t mean your Tesla will dig itself out of a foot-and-a-half trench during a blizzard. It is important to remember that some of these scenarios also require some assistance from the driver. For example, driving in sand requires tires to be aired down significantly to increase traction and control.
However, this will be a welcome addition for those who use the Full Self-Driving suite and might not be convinced of its performance in adverse conditions. Some of us prefer to be in control in rain, snow, or ice, which is totally understandable. However, adjusting the Traction Control Mode while utilizing FSD in snow, rain, or ice could increase confidence and overall experience.
Tesla’s Summer Update is already rolling out to some owners, so it should be making its way to most of the fleet over the next several weeks. The Spring Update rolled out at a very conservative pace, so if you don’t have it by the end of August, don’t be too upset. It might just be Tesla’s method.
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Elon Musk explains what happens when AI outsmarts all of us
