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SpaceX, NASA finalize contract for second crewed Starship Moon landing
Around eight months after announcing its intention to do so, NASA has awarded SpaceX a contract for a second crewed Starship Moon landing as early as 2027.
Known as Option B, NASA has exercised a baked-in right to modify its Human Landing System (HLS) Option A contract with SpaceX – signed in April 2021 – to extract even more value from investments into the program. In addition to an uncrewed Starship Moon landing planned no earlier than (NET) 2024 and a crewed demonstration that could land two NASA astronauts on the Moon as early as 2025, NASA’s contract modification gives SpaceX the approval and resources it needs to prepare for a second crewed Starship Moon landing.
On top of securing NASA’s Artemis IV mission astronauts a ride to the lunar surface, the Option B contract will also allow SpaceX and NASA to pursue and demonstrate upgrades that will make Starship an even more capable and cost-effective Moon lander.
Update: NASA says that the Option B modification will cost $1.15 billion, raising the maximum value of SpaceX’s HLS contract to approximately $4.2 billion.
When NASA first announced its intention to add a second crewed Moon landing to SpaceX’s existing HLS contract, the agency couldn’t offer specific information about when that landing might occur or which Artemis mission it would be attached to. Part of the reason for that uncertainty was another announcement two months prior that NASA no longer expected a Moon landing to be paired with its Artemis IV (4) mission. And five days after a March 2022 announcement of plans for a second crewed Starship Moon landing, NASA seemingly reaffirmed that there would be a multi-year gap between Starship’s first crewed Moon landing (NET 2025; tied to Artemis III) and NASA’s second crewed Moon landing, which would use an unspecified lander.
But as of November 2022, NASA has thankfully abandoned plans to intentionally allow a gap between Moon landings. SpaceX’s Starship is now on contract to support back-to-back crewed Moon landings NET 2025 and 2027 as part of NASA’s Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. It’s unclear how or why NASA was able to make that change, but it’s a definite improvement over the alternative.
Additionally, NASA will work with SpaceX to debut new capabilities and improvements on Starship’s second crewed Moon landing. While the Artemis III landing will be about as barebones as possible, the Artemis IV Starship will be upgraded with the ability to transport more NASA astronauts (four instead of just two) and more cargo to the lunar surface. It’s not entirely clear, but NASA reportedly wants to land just ~180 kilograms (~400 lb) of cargo with the first crewed Starship, a vehicle likely capable of landing dozens of tons of cargo in addition to several astronauts. NASA hopes that future “sustainable” lander missions, a category that Starship’s Option B landing may or may not fall under, will transport up to one ton (~2200 lb) of cargo to and from the lunar surface.
Finally, the Artemis IV Starship will also be able to dock with NASA’s Lunar Gateway. Gateway is a small deep space station that will be located in a strange, high lunar orbit. It exists almost exclusively to give NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew capsule a destination they can both reach. The Orion capsule is almost twice as heavy as its Apollo counterpart and its European Service Module (ESM) offers less than half the performance of NASA’s retired Apollo Service Module. Combined, Orion is physically incapable of transporting itself (or astronauts) to the simpler low lunar orbits used by the Apollo Program.
Instead, NASA’s new Moon lander(s) have to pick up Orion’s slack. Starship will be responsible for picking up astronauts in a lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), transporting them to low lunar orbit, and returning them to NRHO in addition to landing on the Moon, spending a week on the surface, and launching back into lunar orbit.
Until it’s modestly upgraded in the late 2020s or 2030s, Gateway will be equally underwhelming. In fact, that’s part of the reason that Starship docking with the Gateway is in any way significant. SpaceX and NASA have decades of expertise docking and berthing spacecraft with space stations. But those spacecraft are typically smaller and lighter than the stations they were joining. Even after the Gateway is fully outfitted with a range of international modules, Starship will likely weigh several times more than the tiny station, making docking even more challenging than it already is.
Starship’s Moon lander variant could also have a cabin with hundreds of cubic meters of habitable space, while the Gateway is unlikely to ever have more than a few dozen. Having a Starship docked would thus immediately make the ultra-cramped station far more livable.
NASA says Artemis IV and the second crew Starship Moon landing will occur as early as 2027. But a ‘space prophet’ who predicted in 2017 that NASA’s SLS launch debut would slip from 2019 to “around 2023” and forecasted that SpaceX alone would win NASA’s Moon lander contract recently told Ars Technica’s Eric Berger that Artemis III, the mission before Artemis IV, is unlikely to launch before 2028. At the time, that source’s predictions verged on blasphemy, but they’ve ultimately proven to be eerily accurate. Only time will tell if their third ‘prophecy’ follows the same path.
Tesla has expanded the operational geofence for its driverless Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, marking the first such increase in some time. The updated Service Area for Robotaxi in Austin now spans about 288 square miles and is roughly 9 percent larger than the previous boundary.
This incremental growth adds approximately 24 square miles of coverage, bringing the prior zone of roughly 264 square miles into a broader footprint that better serves northern suburbs.
The expansion extends the geofence northward toward Pflugerville along the US 183 corridor, incorporating additional neighborhoods north of the Domain and areas such as Mesa Park. These additions include higher-end residential and commercial districts that previously sat just outside the allowed operating zone.
Riders can now request unsupervised trips that begin or end in these newly included locations, provided the entire route remains inside the digital boundary:
Tesla has just expanded its Robotaxi service area in Austin, Texas for the first time in 10 months.
The new service area is roughly 9% larger than the old one, and is about 288 square miles in total. pic.twitter.com/i4oBM1KfWS
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 31, 2026
Tesla first launched public Robotaxi operations in Austin in mid-2025 with a modest initial zone of about 20 square miles. Subsequent enlargements in 2025 and early 2026 steadily grew the map until it covered much of the metropolitan area.
After the last major update roughly ten months earlier, the company held the boundary steady while it collected additional miles and refined the FSD suite.
The modest nine percent increase still matters for daily utility. Longer trips become possible, more residents gain access, and the fleet can accumulate more diverse real-world data across new road types and traffic patterns. Observers note that the added territory aligns with existing Tesla service infrastructure, which could support more efficient vehicle staging in the North end of Austin.
Although the geofence has grown, Tesla continues to operate a relatively small unsupervised fleet in the city. The company has emphasized safety and software readiness over rapid geographic scaling. This latest map update signals that Tesla remains committed to expanding Robotaxi availability in its home market as it prepares for further software improvements and potential Cybercab deployments.
The 288-square-mile zone now gives Austin riders one of the larger driverless service areas currently available in the United States.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update turns Grok from a talking companion into a true in-car controller, with considerably expanded capabilities. Where the assistant once answered questions and handled navigation, it can now operate hardware and software through ordinary speech, including several requests at the same time.
Grok has become incredibly robust over the past few quarters, and this new ability that Tesla has included with its Summer Update is perhaps the clearest sign of just how capable it has become.
You can issue many commands to Grok at once, and each will be taken care of: anything from headlight control to climate adjustments to mirror folding can now all be taken care of with a simple sentence spoken toward Grok:
This is cool, you can now give Grok a ton of commands at once in your Tesla and it’ll do them all together.
The commands I gave:
• Fold mirrors
• Turn on wipers to fastest setting
• Change temp to 65°
• Open self-driving app
• Open gloveboxComes with Tesla’s 2026 Summer… pic.twitter.com/drZxoHrknv
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 26, 2026
Here’s another example I used in my Model Y:
🚨 Using Grok to control the cabin temperature and turn on headlights in 2026 Model Y on FSD v14.3.8 and 2026.26.6.5 pic.twitter.com/7clgQkGABk
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 27, 2026
Tesla’s official Release Notes list the core powers of Grok’s new capabilities: Grok can place phone calls from a paired phone, search a streaming service and queue music, adjust climate, and search the Controls panel. Drivers can also ask it questions about the vehicle or the latest features included in a recent software update.
It can also take care of driving settings, dynamics, and other relevant preferences that deal with how the car operates and handles.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
It’s also more of a use case than a novelty feature. Grok was great for learning about something that was being pondered while Full Self-Driving was taking care of the major automotive responsibilities, but it did have some useful functionality when it came to navigation.
Another less-noted improvement is the swift transition that Grok has from thinking of its answer to giving you one. In the past, it would take a few seconds for Grok to truly come up with a valuable response. It now seems that it is improving, at least slightly.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is set to get a major fix with pothole avoidance, a feature that CEO Elon Musk said recently was “coming soon.” The feature has been included within the FSD v14 release notes for some time as an upcoming improvement.
Potholes come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is universal about them, and that is the fact that every driver wants to avoid them. Driving into or over a pothole can cause tire and wheel damage, alignment issues, and even, in some more severe instances, injury to occupants or major damage to a vehicle in despair.
Tesla Cybercab uses a unique strategy for picking up the right rider
Musk said late last night in a post that pothole avoidance while utilizing the Full Self-Driving suite is “coming soon.”
Coming soon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 31, 2026
Full Self-Driving, even in its most recent and robust forms, still has its shortcomings. While the suite has performed exceptionally well with avoiding on-road obstacles like cardboard boxes, horse droppings, car parts, and other debris, it still seems to struggle with recognizing certain things.
Potholes and other abrupt changes in a road’s layout are things that FSD still tends to struggle with. Perhaps the suite’s 3D modeling is still in need of some additional data or some sort of script that will help it to avoid a potentially destructive pothole or bump in the road that would be easily recognizable by the human eye.
Musk has mentioned pothole avoidance for some time, with the initial idea coming in April 2019 when an owner first requested the feature. Musk said that Tesla would “definitely” develop pothole avoidance.
In August 2020, Musk said Tesla was in the process of labeling bumps and potholes so cars can either slow down or steer around them altogether.
Tesla to utilize micro maps for pothole-detection in future update
Avoiding major disturbances in the road is a necessary feature for Full Self-Driving to have, especially as Tesla is working toward a fully autonomous program that will eventually allow every occupant in the vehicle to sleep, work, or enjoy leisure time while traveling.
That truly begins this week with the launch of Cybercab on Thursday.
Tesla expands driverless Robotaxi geofence in Austin
Elon Musk’s Grok can basically control anything in your Tesla now
