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SpaceX follows up Falcon Heavy spectacle with sunrise Falcon 9 launch

Another spectacular SpaceX launch for the books. (Richard Angle)

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SpaceX has followed up Falcon Heavy’s latest spectacle with a Falcon 9 launch shortly after sunrise, producing more ethereal views of the company’s rockets in action.

SpaceX’s visual style is off to a strong start in 2023. All rocket launches are impressive to some degree, but SpaceX has managed to complete Falcon Heavy’s first twilight launch and a Falcon 9 launch backlit by the morning sun less than three days apart. Falcon Heavy kicked off the pair on January 15th with the successful launch of the US Space Force’s USSF-67 mission. Three times more powerful than Falcon 9 and the most capable commercial rocket ever built, Falcon Heavy lifted off shortly after sunset. The fury of its exhaust was amplified by the twilight sky as it rose back into sunlight, producing one of the most visually spectacular launches in SpaceX history.

62 hours later, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 pad with the US military’s sixth upgraded GPS III navigation satellite inside its payload fairing. The mission was a flawless success. Falcon 9 booster B1077 touched down on drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas eight and a half minutes after liftoff, completing its second orbital-class launch and landing. 90 minutes after leaving the ground, Falcon 9’s upper stage deployed the GPS III SV06 satellite into a nominal transfer orbit with one end at 392 kilometers and the other around 20,170 kilometers (~12,530 mi) above Earth’s surface. The satellite will use its own propulsion to raise itself into a circular orbit, where it will eventually enter operation and begin distributing more accurate location information.

For unknown reasons, SpaceX delayed the launch 14 minutes, pushing the T-0 time from 7:10 am to 7:24 am – from just before to just after sunrise. As a result, instead of a brief twilight spectacle, Falcon 9 lifted off with the morning sun low in the sky and almost directly behind the rocket from certain perspectives. Rocket solar transits are possibly even rarer than optimal twilight launches, making for an exceptionally impressive pair of back-to-back SpaceX missions.

Perhaps the most spectacular Falcon 9 solar transit yet. (SpaceX – Ben Cooper)

Heading toward 100?

GPS III SV06 was SpaceX’s fourth launch in the first 18 days of 2023. That pace is far from unusual after the company’s record-breaking 2022, but the fact that three of those missions launched from one pad – LC-40 – is. Over the last six weeks, SpaceX has launched six Falcon 9 rockets from LC-40 – an average of one launch every seven days. That sustained cadence is unprecedented for a single SpaceX pad, and the company has three.

In 2022, LC-40 managed 33 launches – one launch every 11 days. It’s California (SLC-4E) and Kennedy Space Center (Pad 39A) facilities combined to support 28 launches, for a total of 61 Falcon launches last year. It’s well known that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s target of 100 launches in 2023 is exceptionally ambitious and could be hard to hit. But already, SpaceX’s performance over the last six weeks is making that unprecedented target more and more achievable.

LC-40 is not alone in its improved cadence. For the workhorse pad’s six launches, SLC-4E managed five launches in the same six-week period. Combined, all three SpaceX pads have supported 11 successful launches in the last 42 days, equating to 95 launches per year if sustained for all of 2023. Having already sustained that pace for six weeks, and with an almost unbelievable 2022 under its belt, launching 100 times in 2023 suddenly seems like a real possibility.

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Continuing that relentless push, SpaceX’s next mission – Starlink 2-4 – is scheduled to launch as early as 7:23 am PDT (15:23 UTC) tomorrow, January 19th.

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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Elon Musk’s Grok Bot is picking up the phone now, and the first calls are wild

Elon Musk wants Grok Bot users making phone calls, and one Comcast call saved $500.

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Elon Musk is pushing Grok Bot users toward a feature that, until this week, few of them could actually use. “Try asking Grok @Bot to make calls!” Musk wrote on X Tuesday afternoon, quoting a demo from Sawyer Merritt that included audio from a live call.

Musk first announced calling on October 25, writing that the agent could “call someone or a business for you, make a request on your behalf, take notes on the response and send you a note summarizing the conversation.” There were no release notes at the time, and the feature only appeared in preview builds. That changed on Tuesday, when creator Peter Yang said all Grok Bot users should now be able to call US businesses. Musk reposted his demo.

Yang’s call shows how far the feature goes. In his video, his bot dialed Comcast, worked through the phone menu, deflected small talk about the weather by saying it does not “have eyes on the sky,” turned down three upsells and used a cheaper fiber offer from competitor Sonic as leverage. His bill dropped from $84 to $45 per month on a faster plan, a savings of nearly $500 a year. The call ran about 25 minutes, and the bot paused to get Yang’s approval before accepting the final terms.

Merritt described what the user sees: a live transcript runs during the call, and when the business asks for something the bot does not know, an answer box pops up in the chat. The user types a reply and Grok relays it to the person on the line. Other users posted results Tuesday, including a $100 gift card recovered from Verizon Fios after a 51 minute call and a same day pediatric appointment, which Musk also shared. Not every call worked. One user said a rep refused to cancel a subscription once it was clear an AI was on the phone.

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The Grok Bot terms require every call to identify itself as a virtual assistant calling on the user’s behalf and warn that calls may be recorded. Marketing, mass calling and impersonation are prohibited, and calling currently works only with US numbers.

The timing stands out. Days ago, users began hitting their weekly limits early, and Musk said the cost of serving Grok Bot was “unsustainably high relative to revenue,” as Teslarati reported. A call that spends most of its 25 or 50 minutes on hold is the kind of long running task that eats into usage, and SpaceXSI has not said how calls count against the weekly pool. Grok Bot is included from the $30 Premium tier of The X Subscription upward.

For Tesla owners, the agent has been in their cars since September 22 and is enabled across every Cybercab and Model Y Robotaxi. Musk has already pitched it for phone chores like scrubbing your number from spam call lists. Neither Tesla nor SpaceXSI has confirmed whether a bot can place one of these calls on request from inside the vehicle.

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Tesla Full Self-Driving gets hit with some adjustments in Europe

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Tesla Full Self-Driving, which is now referred to in Europe as “Tesla Assisted Driving” (TAD), is getting hit with a handful of new changes at the hands of the Netherlands’ vehicle authority, the RDW (Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer).

On 3 November, the RDW announced that it has assessed and approved a set of changes to Tesla’s FSD Supervised driver-assistance system. The updates introduce the official European name TAD and impose stricter controls on the system’s speed behaviour.

The new name will appear on the in-car display, in the owner’s manual, and in all other driver-facing information. The change applies to Tesla models equipped with Tesla Assisted Driving and hardware version 4.0 (HW4) or later.

Tesla Assisted Driving expands to tenth EU country

Importantly, the RDW stressed that the name change does not alter the system’s fundamental operation: it remains a supervised driver-assistance feature that supports the driver in performing driving tasks. The driver stays fully responsible for controlling the vehicle at all times.

Beyond the rebranding, the most significant functional adjustments concern speed settings. Drivers will still be able to set a speed margin, a percentage by which the system may exceed the applicable speed limit when necessary for safety or traffic flow. However, the maximum allowable margin has been reduced from +50% to a maximum of +10%.

In addition, every time the vehicle is started, the speed-margin setting will default to 0% deviation, and other speed-related functions will be disabled by default. These changes will be delivered through an over-the-air (OTA) software update from Tesla.

Tesla requested the RDW’s review of these “minor changes.” After evaluating how the modifications were implemented and how the system behaves, the authority found no adverse or unintended effects on the system’s operation or the vehicle’s driving behaviour. Consequently, the existing type approval remains valid under the same conditions and for the same use; no amendment or extension of the approval is required.

The RDW has informed the nine EU member states that have already accepted its type approval—Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Czechia—about the updates. Broader EU-wide approval is still under discussion within the European Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV). Those proceedings remain confidential, and the RDW has declined to comment on them.

The approved changes align with earlier discussions involving German authorities, which had advocated both for clearer naming to avoid misleading drivers and for a tighter speed offset.

By formally incorporating these adjustments while leaving the core type approval intact, the RDW has cleared the way for Tesla to roll out the updated TAD software via OTA to eligible vehicles in the Netherlands and the other countries that recognise the Dutch approval. The system continues to function strictly as supervised driver assistance, with the human driver remaining the responsible party.

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Tesla shows off Roadster ‘kickflip’ over vehicle lineup in crazy new POV video

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Tesla’s new Roadster, upside down and trailing cold gas thruster smoke, flips over a lineup of Tesla vehicles at the Roadster unveiling near Waco, Texas on October 15, 2026. (Image: Tesla)
Tesla’s new Roadster, upside down and trailing cold gas thruster smoke, flips over a lineup of Tesla vehicles at the Roadster unveiling near Waco, Texas on October 15, 2026. (Image: Tesla)

Tesla has released a fresh point-of-view video capturing the next-generation Roadster’s headline stunt from its October 15 unveiling, giving fans a visceral look at the car as it jumps and rotates over its siblings within the company’s vehicle lineup.

Tesla posted the video on X today with the caption “POV you’re a flying car,” and the roughly 30-second clip reveals never-before-seen angles directly attached to the Roadster. It’s really unbelievable:

The sequence reveals the uncrewed prototype firing its cold-gas thrusters, lifting off the ground, and barrel-rolling fully inverted while sailing over a staged lineup that includes a Model 3, Model Y, Cybercab, Cybertruck, and Tesla Semi.

Here’s an image of it that Tesla shared right after the unveiling event for a better perspective of what you’re looking at:

Credit: Tesla

There are also some other cool takeaways from the video, including the shift to the inverted-ramp demonstration. The Roadster uses its underbody suction-fan system to climb, then lock itself upside down on the ramp.

This generates multiple Gs of downforce, which then translates into the Roadster releasing these systems to enable a mid-air roll. The car then settles on its wheels gently as thruster vapor provides a perfect cushion.

All of the runs at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, test site, which is where the unveiling took place, were autonomous. Elon Musk stated this was a safety measure.

Tesla shows what Roadster drivers will see on screen before thruster activation

Tesla’s vehicle-engineering chief Lars Moravy dubbed the mid-air roll the “kickflip,” prompting Musk to quip that Tony Hawk would be proud and that the car could clear even more of the fleet. The thrusters, which use high-pressure compressed air and fast electric actuators, provide the precise, short-duration force needed for both the launch and the controlled rotation; the same hardware is intended for production versions of the higher-end Thrust and Rocket trims.

The second-generation Roadster, first teased in 2017, has been delayed repeatedly. Musk has indicated production is targeted for 2028.

While the company has yet to publish full pricing or independent performance verification, the combination of extreme acceleration, ground-effect suction, and limited flight capability has already positioned the car as one of the most theatrical EV reveals in years.

Musk has also said Tesla plans a dedicated Texas test track so future owners can experience the maneuvers themselves, far from public roads. The new POV clip simply lets everyone else feel a fraction of that experience from the car’s own cameras.

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