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SpaceX to test last old-gen Falcon 9’s orbital upper stage lifespan tonight

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SpaceX Falcon 9 B1045 is just hours away from completing its second and final mission, a launch that will also signify a swan-song for the reusable rocket company’s Block 4 and older boosters. Not one to let an opportunity go to waste, Elon Musk’s space company intends to do a long coast demonstration of the orbital upper stage once the reused Cargo Dragon spacecraft separates.

Jessica Jensen, SpaceX’s Director of Dragon Mission Management, spoke among a panel of CRS-15 stakeholders on the morning of June 28 and spoke evident pride and confidence in the company’s progress up to this point, with respect to both the mission at hand and SpaceX’s achievements more generally. CRS-15, the third flight-proven Dragon and Falcon 9 launch, is a fitting mission for SpaceX to bring to a close their H1 launch manifest (the 12th of 2018), mainly due to the impressive fact that more than two-thirds of the boosters launched this year have been flight-proven.

Falcon 9 B1045 before its first launch, carrying NASA’s TESS exoplanet observatory, in April 2018. (Tom Cross)

As Jensen rightfully noted, SpaceX completed its first-ever reuse of a recovered Falcon 9 booster scarcely 15 months ago in March 2017, a period in which SpaceX has since completed 26 missions, recovered 16 Falcon 9 and Heavy boosters, and successfully launched 12 flight-proven rocket boosters. At the current rate of launch, SpaceX is likely to smash its previous annual cadence record – 18 in 2017 – with anywhere from 24 to 28 launches this year, with CRS-15 marking a dozen missions in the first half of the year, if successful. As such, simply the launch frequency in the first six months would bring SpaceX to 24 completed missions this year. A slight uptick, perhaps as a result of the rapid reusability of new Block 5 boosters, might allow SpaceX to squeeze in several additional missions.

Falcon 9 B1045 and it’s Cargo Dragon C111 prepare for their second flights on June 29. (Tom Cross)

Critically, Jensen also noted that B1045’s final launch will be significant for a reason other than the fact that it nearly halved the previous record for Falcon 9 booster refurbishment, an accomplishment she ceded to the skill and growing experience of SpaceX’s rocket refurbishment teams of engineers and technicians. Aside from that growing expertise, she stated that

“[CRS-15] will also be the final Block 4 configuration of a Falcon 9 booster that SpaceX flies, so all the boosters from here on out will be the Block 5 version.”

Barring unforeseen design flaws, Falcon 9 Block 5 has the potential to be a game-changer, perhaps allowing SpaceX to finally realize a long-term goal of dramatically lowering the cost of access to orbit with new reliable, reusable rockets. Reported by NASASpaceflight.com to be flying aboard a Block 4 booster, something also confirmed to Teslarati through a separate source, it’s not 100% clear if Jensen’s blanket statement included the upcoming in-flight Crew Dragon abort test, scheduled sometime after the upgraded Dragon’s first launch in late 2018. Regardless, she is fully correct in the sense that all future commercial SpaceX launches after CRS-15 will quite definitively fly aboard Falcon 9 and Heavy Block 5 rockets.

Flight-proven Cargo Dragons a new norm for SpaceX

Meanwhile, the specifics of CRS-15 mirror SpaceX’s two most recent International Space Station resupply missions, both of which simultaneously flew flight-proven orbital Cargo Dragon spacecraft and flight-proven Falcon 9 boosters, leaving just the second stage and Cargo Dragon trunk to be expended. As a taste of the future SpaceX fully intends to realize, the spectacle of these CRS missions is not only undeniable but demonstrates a newfound confidence in commercial reusable rockets growing within NASA, an agency that SpaceX would quite simply not be here today without.

https://twitter.com/_TomCross_/status/1012490324646748163

After CRS-15, SpaceX has another five flight-proven Cargo Dragon missions left on their CRS-1 contract, after which the updated CRS-2 contract will take over, replacing the old Cargo Dragon with an upgraded cargo version of SpaceX Crew Dragon, also known as Dragon 2. CRS-2 launches are currently scheduled to begin sometime in 2020.

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Finally, reminiscent of Falcon Heavy’s spectacular debut launch, Falcon 9’s upper stage “will be doing a long coast demonstration [after Cargo Dragon separates from the rocket]”. Jensen was unable to go into more detail here, but it can be safely presumed that the S2 coast test is either related testing for upper stage reusability or is being used as an opportunity to further demonstrate on-orbit coast capabilities to the US Air Force and/or NASA, a feature that is necessary for certain national security and interplanetary missions.

Follow us for live updates, peeks behind the scenes, and photos from Teslarati’s East and West Coast photographers.

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Eric Ralph Twitter

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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 Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end

Elon Musk’s Boring Company says Vegas Loop stations will double by year end once again.

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the boring company's vegas loop entrance

The Boring Company says the Vegas Loop’s station count will double by the end of the year, tying the target to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers in Las Vegas. “Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!” the company wrote in a post on X, attaching listings for a Loop driver and a senior Loop operations manager.

The number checks out against what’s already public, with the Vegas Loop currently running 14 operational stations, while the Boring Company’s own project page lists 28 as the target for the end of 2026.

Much of that growth is tied to tunnels that are already built and waiting on an opening date. A roughly two-mile dual tunnel system under Paradise Road, connecting Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, is expected to open in stages over the coming weeks, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief executive Steve Hill told the Review-Journal last week. New stations at 4744 Paradise, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, and the former Gordon Biersch site would come online with it, several of them built to speed up rides to Harry Reid International Airport ahead of Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.

Clark County entitled Vegas Loop for 123 stations after approving 19 more in August, as Teslarati reported at the time. Entitlement and construction move at different speeds on this project, so county approval alone does not guarantee a station opens on any particular schedule.

Clark County approved 18 additional stations back in 2023, part of a plan that pushed the system’s target to 69 stations across 65 miles, doubling the network on paper for the first time. The target kept climbing after that, to roughly 93 stations by the end of that year and 104 by last year, before August’s vote pushed it to 123. This week’s announcement is the first time that doubling language has been attached to stations actually running rather than stations merely approved on a county map.

Ridership gives some sense of what a denser network could carry. Boring Company executive Mike Baier said in July that the Vegas Loop already moves around 40,000 passengers on busy convention days, a total that tops most light rail systems in the country despite the system running on a fraction of its planned tunnel mileage. Company leadership has projected ridership could triple or quadruple once the airport connector tunnels fully open.

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Boring Company did not say which stations beyond those already under construction would open by year end, or whether the hiring push points to a fleet expansion alongside the new stops.

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Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence

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Credit: Tesla Asia | X

Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.

Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”

The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.

Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.

Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.

Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.

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Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.

Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done

Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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