Connect with us

News

SpaceX, NASA win coveted Emmy award for spacecraft launch debut coverage

Crew Dragon is lifted onto recovery vessel GO Searcher after the spacecraft's flawless inaugural launch and reentry debut. (NASA/Cory Huston)

Published

on

Over the course of Crew Dragon’s ‘Demo-1’ orbital launch debut, SpaceX and NASA coordinated in a multitude of ways to ensure mission success, including cooperative webcasts that covered nearly all of the spacecraft’s major milestones.

On September 14th, SpaceX and NASA received the 2019 Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Program, honoring their combined video, social media, and interactive coverage of Crew Dragon’s inaugural launch, orbital rendezvous, docking, undocking, reentry, and splashdown – a true tour-de-force.

The Crew Dragon Demo-1 mission was a huge step forward for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP), a public-private partnership between NASA and companies SpaceX and Boeing to build and operate human-rated spacecraft. As the first orbital mission under the CCP umbrella, it successfully demonstrated the viability of NASA and SpaceX’s collaborative approach to fielding a human-rated spacecraft – in this case, an uncrewed Crew Dragon.

The SpaceX-built spacecraft successfully launched atop Falcon 9, rendezvoused and docked with the International Space Station (ISS), hosted a few visits from on-orbit NASA. ESA, and Roscosmos astronauts, and safely reentered Earth’s atmosphere for a soft-landing in the Atlantic Ocean.

NASA and SpaceX teamed up to broadcast the launch, docking, and landing procedures live on YouTube and NASA TV, on top of traditional media on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. NASA explained in a press release that “the nomination is a result of years of preparation for the historic launch and multiple live broadcasts from NASA and SpaceX facilities across the country during each phase of the Crew Dragon’s mission to the International Space Station and its stunning return to Earth. Throughout NASA’s coverage, the agency and SpaceX engaged social media users around the world and at local social media influencer gatherings at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.”

SpaceX engineer and broadcast representative – or as she referred to herself, a “talking head that gets to share our science with the world” – Kate Tice used Instagram to express her gratitude for central role in recommunications team and direct the spotlight to NASA astronauts Col. Bob Behnken and Col. Doug Hurley, both of which will fly aboard the first crewed Crew Dragon flight sometime next year.

Advertisement
https://www.instagram.com/p/B2fdrOmJjfD/

Several NASA team members – including spokesperson Dan Hout, Administrator Jim Bridenstine, and Communications Director Bettina Inclan – took to Twitter to celebrate the Agency’s win. Bridenstine congratulated all those involved with the “@SpaceX Demo-1 flight, which put us one step closer to our goal of launching @NASA_Astronauts from American soil.”

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1173056318854377472

NASA says that, “selected Creative Arts Emmys will be shown as part of the live 71st Primetime Emmys broadcast on Sept. 22, which will air on Fox at 8 p.m. EDT.”

Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes.

Advertisement

Space Reporter.

Advertisement
Comments

Elon Musk

SpaceX (SPCX) IPO is live today at $135: Here’s exactly what you need to know

SpaceX priced its historic IPO at $135 per share today, raising a record $75 billion.

Published

on

By

SpaceX officially priced its initial public offering at $135 per share, offering 555,555,555 shares of Class A common stock and raising $75 billion in what is the largest IPO in stock market history. Shares are set to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Friday, June 12, under the ticker symbol SPCX. The previous record holder was Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering at $29 billion, followed by Alibaba’s $22 billion offering in 2014.

At $135 per share and roughly 555.6 million shares, the implied valuation sits near $1.75 trillion, which would make SpaceX roughly the seventh largest company in the United States, just above Tesla’s current market cap. Regular investors can request shares at the IPO price through Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and E*TRADE, though the deal is heavily oversubscribed and most retail allocations will be partial or unfilled. Once trading opens June 12, anyone with a brokerage account can buy SPCX on the open market.

SpaceX’s amended S-1 is sparking a major Tesla merger conversation

 

The valuation is anchored primarily by Starlink. Starlink crossed 10 million subscribers as of February 2026 and is adding 750,000 to 1.5 million new users per month, with the connectivity segment already posting a $1.19 billion profit last quarter. The offering also bundles in xAI following SpaceX’s all-stock merger earlier this year, adding Grok and the Colossus supercomputer to the investment thesis. As Teslarati reported, Starlink ended 2025 with $10 billion in revenue, a figure analysts project could reach $24 billion by end of 2026.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has been vocal in his support. “I think the time is right,” Ives said, adding that the offering expands the Elon Musk ecosystem rather than competing with Tesla. An average 12-month price target of $165 per share represents roughly 22% upside from the IPO price. Not everyone agrees – Motley Fool noted xAI is spending $1 billion per month playing catch-up to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a single stated purpose. “Elon founded SpaceX with a goal to change humanity, to make us a multi-planet species,” CFO Bret Johnsen said in the company’s retail roadshow video this week. Musk himself has been more direct: “We are building the systems and technologies necessary to provide global connectivity on Earth and beyond, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

Continue Reading

Investor's Corner

Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”

Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.

Published

on

By

Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.

While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure

The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.

Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.

Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.

As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.

Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.

Continue Reading

News

Tesla stuns with another FSD approval in Europe, its second in two days

Published

on

Tesla has stunned by gaining yet another approval for its Full Self-Driving suite in Europe, its second in two days and its fifth overall.

Belgium will be the latest country to allow Tesla owners to utilize FSD on public roads in Europe, joining a quickly growing list that started with the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Estonia.

On Tuesday, Denmark announced its approval of the FSD suite, which has now been followed by Belgium just one day later.

The country’s Minister of Mobility, Annick De Ridder, announced the approval on her X account, stating that she had just signed the approval of Tesla FSD. It now goes to the country’s homologation department for the last step of the approval process.

The Belgian approval is one of mighty importance because it truly shows how quickly countries in Europe could greenlight the FSD suite consecutively. Approvals are already coming in relatively quickly, which is a great sign.

Perhaps the next big development that could come from FSD approvals in Europe is an approval from a country like England, Italy, France, Spain, or Germany. It would be something to see how FSD would perform in a major European metro, such as London, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Rome, or Berlin.

Full Self-Driving does an excellent job of roaming around major U.S. cities like New York and Los Angeles, but other high-profile international cities of significance would truly mark a line in the sand for Tesla, which can simply enable any vehicle in its customer-owned fleet to run FSD with the correct approvals.

Continue Reading