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SpaceX’s Japanese Moon lander launch back on the calendar after indefinite delay
Update: After indefinitely delaying ispace’s first Moon lander launch on November 30th to fix unspecified issues with its Falcon 9 rocket, multiple sources indicate that SpaceX has put the mission back on its calendar.
Barring additional issues, the private HAKUTO-R Moon lander is now scheduled to lift off from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 pad no earlier than (NET) 3:04 am EST (08:04 UTC) on Wednesday, December 7th. The mission’s quick return after just a few days of rework is a good sign that the issue that forced SpaceX to stand down was relatively minor. Simultaneously, SpaceX is moving ahead with plans to launch its first mission for OneWeb – a low Earth orbit satellite Internet provider competing directly with Starlink – less than ten hours prior, at 5:37 pm EST (22:37 UTC) on December 6th.
SpaceX support ship Doug departed Florida’s Port Canaveral on the afternoon of December 4th, likely en route to recover Falcon 9’s payload fairing after its first OneWeb launch. If SpaceX is, in fact, working towards a December 7th launch of HAKUTO-R, twin support ship Bob will likely also head to sea within the next 24 hours.
SpaceX has delayed the launch of Japanese startup ispace’s first Moon lander, HAKUTO-R, from Wednesday to Thursday, December 1st “to allow for additional pre-flight checkouts.”
The mission will be the third Moon launch from US soil in less than four months after SpaceX’s successful launch of the South Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) in August and the debut of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket earlier this month. Perhaps more importantly, ispace has the opportunity to become the first company in history to successfully land a privately-developed spacecraft on the Moon, a milestone that would arguably mark the start of a new era of lunar exploration.
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
ispace’s first HAKUTO-R Moon lander is expected to weigh approximately 1050 kilograms (~2300 lb) at liftoff and is designed to land up to 30 kilograms (~66 lb) of cargo on the lunar surface. The lander is made by several commercial partners: ispace has provided most of its design and structures, but Europe’s ArianeGroup supplied all of HAKUTO-R’s engines, plumbing, and propulsion hardware and was responsible for most of the final assembly process.
Because of ArianeGroup’s involvement, it’s likely that HAKUTO-R shares direct heritage with the European Service Module currently powering NASA’s Orion spacecraft on its first mission to the Moon. It also arguably makes the mission more of a collaboration between Europe and Japan than an exclusively Japanese mission, though HAKUTO-R will still technically be Japan’s first private mission to the Moon.
If successful, it could also become the first privately-funded Moon landing in history. But HAKUTO-R can’t claim to be the first private Moon landing attempt, a title held by Israeli company SpaceIL’s ill-fated Beresheet Moon lander. Launched by SpaceX as a rideshare passenger sitting on top of an Indonesian communications satellite, Beresheet propelled itself all the way from geostationary transfer orbit to lunar orbit over the course of about six weeks. Just a minute or so before touchdown, a manual command inadvertently shut down the spacecraft’s propulsion, causing it to impact the surface of the Moon at ~500 kilometers per hour (310 mph) – less than 8% away from a soft landing.
In September 2019, just five months later, India’s first nationally developed Moon lander got even closer to a successful landing, losing control at a velocity of just 210 km/h (~130 mph) and an altitude of 330 meters (1080 ft). Since the Soviet Union’s 1976 Luna-26 mission, only China’s national space agency (CNSA) has successfully landed on the Moon, completing three landings between 2013 and 2020. The last successful Western Moon landing (Apollo 17; also the last crewed Moon landing) occurred in 1972.
ispace’s ultimate goal is to help facilitate the creation of infrastructure capable of supporting a permanent population of 1000 people on the Moon by 2040. The Japanese startup has privately raised $210 million since it was founded in 2010. In 2022, it won a $73M NASA contract to develop a much larger SERIES-2 vehicle capable of sending either “500 kilograms to the [lunar] surface or as much as 2000 kilograms to lunar orbit.” SERIES-2 will be developed out of ispace’s US branch instead of its Japanese headquarters.
HAKUTO-R will carry seven payloads:
- A solid-state battery for ispace corporate partner NGK SPARK PLUG CO
- A Moon rover (Rashid) for the United Arab Emirates space agency
- JAXA’s transformable lunar robot
- A Canadian Space Agency flight computer prototype
- A camera system built by Canda’s Canadensys
- A panel engraved with the names of HAKUTO’s crowdfunding supporters
- A music disc containing Japanese rock band Sakanaction’s song “SORATO”
In addition to HAKUTO-R, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will simultaneously launch the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Lunar Flashflight ice surveyor as a rideshare payload. After launch, Lunar Flashlight will attempt to enter an elliptical lunar orbit and use an infrared laser to (invisibly) illuminate the surface of craters that have been in shadow for millions of years. The way the surface reflects that laser light will allow the spacecraft to prospect for water ice deposits that could one day be mined and converted into rocket propellant.
Tune in below around 3:20 am EST (08:25 UTC) on Thursday, December 1st to watch SpaceX launch Japan’s first privately-developed Moon lander.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk and Tesla AI Director share insights after empty driver seat Robotaxi rides
The executives’ unoccupied tests hint at the rapid progress of Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi efforts.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and AI Director Ashok Elluswamy celebrated Christmas Eve by sharing personal experiences with Robotaxi vehicles that had no safety monitor or occupant in the driver’s seat. Musk described the system’s “perfect driving” around Austin, while Elluswamy posted video from the back seat, calling it “an amazing experience.”
The executives’ unoccupied tests hint at the rapid progress of Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi efforts.
Elon and Ashok’s firsthand Robotaxi insights
Prior to Musk and the Tesla AI Director’s posts, sightings of unmanned Teslas navigating public roads were widely shared on social media. One such vehicle was spotted in Austin, Texas, which Elon Musk acknowleged by stating that “Testing is underway with no occupants in the car.”
Based on his Christmas Eve post, Musk seemed to have tested an unmanned Tesla himself. “A Tesla with no safety monitor in the car and me sitting in the passenger seat took me all around Austin on Sunday with perfect driving,” Musk wrote in his post.
Elluswamy responded with a 2-minute video showing himself in the rear of an unmanned Tesla. The video featured the vehicle’s empty front seats, as well as its smooth handling through real-world traffic. He captioned his video with the words, “It’s an amazing experience!”
Towards Unsupervised operations
During an xAI Hackathon earlier this month, Elon Musk mentioned that Tesla owed be removing Safety Monitors from its Robotaxis in Austin in just three weeks. “Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point. So there will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them. Not even anyone in the passenger seat in about three weeks,” he said. Musk echoed similar estimates at the 2025 Annual Shareholder Meeting and the Q3 2025 earnings call.
Considering the insights that were posted Musk and Elluswamy, it does appear that Tesla is working hard towards operating its Robotaxis with no safety monitors. This is quite impressive considering that the service was launched just earlier this year.
Elon Musk
Starlink passes 9 million active customers just weeks after hitting 8 million
The milestone highlights the accelerating growth of Starlink, which has now been adding over 20,000 new users per day.
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service has continued its rapid global expansion, surpassing 9 million active customers just weeks after crossing the 8 million mark.
The milestone highlights the accelerating growth of Starlink, which has now been adding over 20,000 new users per day.
9 million customers
In a post on X, SpaceX stated that Starlink now serves over 9 million active users across 155 countries, territories, and markets. The company reached 8 million customers in early November, meaning it added roughly 1 million subscribers in under seven weeks, or about 21,275 new users on average per day.
“Starlink is connecting more than 9M active customers with high-speed internet across 155 countries, territories, and many other markets,” Starlink wrote in a post on its official X account. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell also celebrated the milestone on X. “A huge thank you to all of our customers and congrats to the Starlink team for such an incredible product,” she wrote.
That growth rate reflects both rising demand for broadband in underserved regions and Starlink’s expanding satellite constellation, which now includes more than 9,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites designed to deliver high-speed, low-latency internet worldwide.
Starlink’s momentum
Starlink’s momentum has been building up. SpaceX reported 4.6 million Starlink customers in December 2024, followed by 7 million by August 2025, and 8 million customers in November. Independent data also suggests Starlink usage is rising sharply, with Cloudflare reporting that global web traffic from Starlink users more than doubled in 2025, as noted in an Insider report.
Starlink’s momentum is increasingly tied to SpaceX’s broader financial outlook. Elon Musk has said the satellite network is “by far” the company’s largest revenue driver, and reports suggest SpaceX may be positioning itself for an initial public offering as soon as next year, with valuations estimated as high as $1.5 trillion. Musk has also suggested in the past that Starlink could have its own IPO in the future.
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NVIDIA Director of Robotics: Tesla FSD v14 is the first AI to pass the “Physical Turing Test”
After testing FSD v14, Fan stated that his experience with FSD felt magical at first, but it soon started to feel like a routine.
NVIDIA Director of Robotics Jim Fan has praised Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14 as the first AI to pass what he described as a “Physical Turing Test.”
After testing FSD v14, Fan stated that his experience with FSD felt magical at first, but it soon started to feel like a routine. And just like smartphones today, removing it now would “actively hurt.”
Jim Fan’s hands-on FSD v14 impressions
Fan, a leading researcher in embodied AI who is currently solving Physical AI at NVIDIA and spearheading the company’s Project GR00T initiative, noted that he actually was late to the Tesla game. He was, however, one of the first to try out FSD v14.
“I was very late to own a Tesla but among the earliest to try out FSD v14. It’s perhaps the first time I experience an AI that passes the Physical Turing Test: after a long day at work, you press a button, lay back, and couldn’t tell if a neural net or a human drove you home,” Fan wrote in a post on X.
Fan added: “Despite knowing exactly how robot learning works, I still find it magical watching the steering wheel turn by itself. First it feels surreal, next it becomes routine. Then, like the smartphone, taking it away actively hurts. This is how humanity gets rewired and glued to god-like technologies.”
The Physical Turing Test
The original Turing Test was conceived by Alan Turing in 1950, and it was aimed at determining if a machine could exhibit behavior that is equivalent to or indistinguishable from a human. By focusing on text-based conversations, the original Turing Test set a high bar for natural language processing and machine learning.
This test has been passed by today’s large language models. However, the capability to converse in a humanlike manner is a completely different challenge from performing real-world problem-solving or physical interactions. Thus, Fan introduced the Physical Turing Test, which challenges AI systems to demonstrate intelligence through physical actions.
Based on Fan’s comments, Tesla has demonstrated these intelligent physical actions with FSD v14. Elon Musk agreed with the NVIDIA executive, stating in a post on X that with FSD v14, “you can sense the sentience maturing.” Musk also praised Tesla AI, calling it the best “real-world AI” today.
Elon Musk and Tesla AI Director share insights after empty driver seat Robotaxi rides
Starlink passes 9 million active customers just weeks after hitting 8 million
