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SpaceX adds mystery Falcon 9 launch to packed October manifest
SpaceX FCC paperwork has revealed the addition of an unidentified Falcon 9 launch to the company’s packed October manifest, ranging from several Starlink missions to Crew Dragon’s first operational astronaut launch.
Under the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), companies must submit an application for permission to communicate with their rocket for every single launch. While a major annoyance for those companies and an undeniably clunky process, those applications for “special temporary authority” (STAs) to communicate are one of the only ways members of the public can independently monitor and forecast US launch activities. For SpaceX, the company typically applies for multiple STAs for every single launch, including specific applications for booster launches, landings, and preflight ground tests.
The separate STAs can be connected with a “Mission Number” SpaceX associates each one with, while coordinates included to designate the area of landing communications (i.e. the drone ship recovery zone) often reveals a mission’s trajectory. Combined, STAs can often be used to identify the exact mission (i.e. a Starlink launch, Crew Dragon, etc.). STAs for SpaceX’s upcoming Crew Dragon Crew-1 and Cargo Dragon CRS-21 missions, as well as several Starlink launches, have already been identified.
Thanks to bad weather and a flurry of ULA delays, SpaceX’s October manifest is currently packed with three Starlink missions, a GPS III satellite launch for the US military, and Crew Dragon’s first operational astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Barring a miracle, ULA’s latest Delta IV Heavy launch delay has pushed SpaceX’s GPS III SV04 mission to October 1st.
Starlink-12 – SpaceX’s 11th Starlink mission this year and 13th overall – is tentatively set to follow GPS III SV04 at 9:17 am EDT (13:17 UTC) on October 1st. Starlink-13 and Starlink-14 are then scheduled to launch no earlier than mid-to-late-October. Finally, SpaceX and NASA are in the final stages of preparing for Crew Dragon’s Crew-1 mission – the spacecraft’s first operational delivery of astronauts to the ISS – as soon as October 31st (Halloween).
A new Sirius XM radio satellite (SXM-7) could launch on a Falcon 9 rocket on November 6th. On the West Coast, SpaceX’s first California mission since June 2019 could launch on November 10th. SpaceX and NASA are also targeting the launch debut of an upgraded Cargo Dragon 2 resupply spacecraft on a mission known as CRS-21, scheduled to lift off NET November 15th. Last but assuredly not least, Turkey’s Turksat 5A communications satellite could launch as early as November 31st. No Starlink missions are currently scheduled in November but it’s safe to assume that there will be at least one or two. Altogether, SpaceX already has five launches scheduled in October and four set for November. While undeniably prolific, SpaceX has never launched more than three times in one month.
Now, on top of that swath of firm launches, mysterious “SpaceX Mission 1512” has joined the fray. Based on the FCC STA request, the mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than (NET) October 3rd (with a six-month window) and will include a return-to-launch-site (RTLS) Falcon 9 booster landing. The RTLS landing in particular substantially constrains the mission and means – right off the bat – that it can’t be for Starlink, while also ruling out Cargo Dragon CRS-21 (an RTLS landing STA already exists) and Crew Dragon Crew-1 (drone ship landing). Simply put, an RTLS rules out every other launch on SpaceX’s 2020 manifest beyond a rideshare mission tentatively scheduled in December, and SpaceX almost never files for STAs months in advance.
That leaves some kind of unannounced, mystery mission. Only once in SpaceX’s history has the company conducted an unannounced launch – unsurprisingly for some unknown branch of the US military or espionage apparatus. Known as Zuma and still shrouded in secrecy, it followed an almost identical pattern, revealed only through FCC launch and landing communications requests and rumors in 2017 before a January 2018 launch. Although Northrop Grumman was thrown under the bus for a failed payload adapter that may or may not have doomed the satellite, no federal agency has taken credit for the mission – unspeakably odd as far as spaceflight goes.
At the time, unofficial rumors published on Reddit implied that Zuma would only be the first of many similar missions. The claimed failure of a spring-like deployment mechanism and loss of spacecraft – believed to be worth one or several billion dollars – just hours after launch would have unsurprisingly thrown a wrench into those gears. Now, almost three years later and in the midst of an exceptionally busy period of several important launches, could SpaceX be preparing for Zuma-2?
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Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
The in-car Tesla Theater is among the most unique features available within the cars. When charging, parked, camping, or just hanging out, vehicle occupants can access a variety of streaming platforms on the large center screen, helping keep them entertained during downtime.
However, the Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms, something that owners have requested for some time.
Tesla owners recently discovered that visiting Apple TV in the vehicle browser can launch a fullscreen interface that looks and behaves like a dedicated application rather than an ordinary webpage:
Today I learned that if you go to Apple TV in the Tesla browser, it will open up an actual Apple TV app, fully functional. Not just the site.
Apparently there are more apps than just the few that show on the apps page. pic.twitter.com/os1Ypfm4JR
— Jason W (@jmwilt21) August 20, 2026
The experience drops the usual address bar and browser chrome, presenting catalogs, continue watching rows, and playback controls in the same window Tesla Theater already uses for its listed services. Independent testers soon found similar treatment for HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, and Prime Video when those sites are opened from the car browser.
This shift is a plausible early signal that Tesla is widening Theater support without a formal software note. Theater has long been a set of web views rather than native applications, so recognizing extra domains and stripping the browser frame is a small server-side change that can expand the catalog quickly.
Owners still lack permanent Theater icons for the newly recognized services, and video remains limited to Park, yet the smoother launch is a meaningful step toward a broader lounge while charging.
Tesla Theater arrived with software version 10 in September 2019. The first video services were Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, available only while parked and originally tied to WiFi. Spotify arrived in the same era as music rather than Theater video. Disney+ joined officially in July 2021 with the 2021.24 update, giving owners another major catalog on the center screen. Twitch and TikTok later appeared among the default Theater tiles, and Tesla Tutorials remained a persistent educational tile.
Not every addition stayed put. In December 2023, a Holiday software build removed the Disney+ tile for many United States owners after a public dispute involving advertising on X. Hulu stayed visible even though Disney owned it. Visiting disneyplus.com in the browser often restored the tile, which suggested the removal was a recognition list change rather than a complete block. Owners have also reported occasional blank Theater grids after updates, usually fixed by language toggles, resets, or later firmware.
Tesla axes Disney+ from vehicles with Musk-Iger rivalry, but there’s a workaround
Code archives from 2024 listed many unused source names, including Apple TV and Prime Video, that never became official icons, which now looks like groundwork for the current fullscreen browser behavior.
Now that this hint toward an expanded Theater experience has been recognized, Tesla could follow through with these additional shortcuts as a sign that more streaming platforms are available in Teslas than ever before.
Tesla recently received its largest order for the all-electric Semi from Einride, a Swedish transport service, for 500 units, a groundbreaking invoice to receive before the first deliveries begin.
Even more remarkable, Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said in a recent interview that he expects his company to take delivery of all 500 — the entire order — before the end of 2027. He even expects to have 75 Tesla Semi units in the Einride fleet before the end of this year.
🚨 Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli on the Tesla Semi partnership:
“If we start with the Amazon announcement that we did earlier this year, that was on the back of having gone through a proving period together with them and proving out our technology. Then we took that next step in… pic.twitter.com/oazkXjwoig
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 28, 2026
Charli said the Tesla partnership was part of a broader push, along with its earlier partnership with Amazon. Einride is assisting Amazon with the use of its Saga AI platform, which helps eliminate questions about budgeting and forecasting for logistics companies.
The Semi, as well as Tesla’s production and subsequent delivery of the units to Einride, will help the company “to have a good supply of vehicles that we can deploy on the [Saga AI] platform,” Charli said. “Tesla is also a relationship we’ve had for a while, and as the Tesla Semi deliveries are firming up, we decided to do a larger commitment to that and deploy that on our platform.”
In its initial announcement, Einride said it anticipated taking delivery of the trucks over the next two years, but now it appears the company is expecting all 500 units within the next 16 months.
Built at a dedicated factory in Sparks, Nevada, the Tesla Semi has been perhaps the biggest and most intensive testing process the company has ever had for a single vehicle model. For the past several years, Tesla has been working with many companies, most notably Frito-Lay and PepsiCo, to gain knowledge on the performance on regional routes.
Tesla plans to launch the Semi officially on September 24, five months after production started ramping.
Additionally, drivers have said they are happy about the Semi’s performance and that its numerous safety and productivity features have made their jobs and routes much easier.
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
