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SpaceX's next Crew Dragon launch is delayed but that's actually good news
NASA says that SpaceX’s next big Crew Dragon flight test has slipped a bit further into 2020, a counterintuitively positive sign that the human-rated spacecraft’s next launch is firmly scheduled for the first month of the next decade.
Known as Crew Dragon’s In-Flight Abort (IFA) test, SpaceX opted to include the mission in its Commercial Crew contract, a decision NASA chose to leave up to its providers. Boeing, for example, chose not to perform a real-world in-flight abort test of its Starliner spacecraft, instead relying on a pad abort test and digital modeling to determine the spacecraft’s capabilities. NASA allowed this flexibility because it believes – at least theoretically – that it should be possible to determine whether a spacecraft can perform the most challenging abort scenarios without actually doing full-fidelity flight tests.
Given that NASA chose to perform an extremely expensive full-fidelity in-flight abort test with its own Orion spacecraft just a few months ago, one can’t exactly say that the space agency has chosen to reap what it’s sown, but with any luck, the Starliner spacecraft will never have to perform such an abort and find out how close Boeing’s modeling is to reality.
It’s also worth noting that despite the fact SpaceX elected to perform an extra abort test that will likely destroy an entire Falcon 9 rocket, Crew Dragon development will cost NASA $2 billion (40%) less than Starliner, while each operational Crew Dragon launch will also cost some $250 million (39%) less than a comparable Starliner launch.
As of December 18th, NASA says that SpaceX’s In-Flight Abort (IFA) test has slipped a week from January 4th to January 11th, 2020. Counterintuitively, that delay is actually an extremely encouraging sign that Crew Dragon’s next launch is quite firmly set for the first month of 2020. For reference, as NASA and SpaceX approached Crew Dragon’s Demo-1 orbital launch debut earlier this year, the mission was initially set for January 17th. Around three weeks later, NASA announced that Demo-1 had slipped to no earlier than (NET) “February”. Four weeks after that delay, NASA once again announced another delay to March 2nd, which would turn out to be the day that Crew Dragon really did reach orbit for the first time.
On the other hand, IFA – Crew Dragon’s second launch – had its first firm launch date (January 4th) announced by NASA on December 6th, 2019. Less than two weeks later, NASA says that the launch date has slipped by exactly one week to January 11th, less than four weeks from today. It’s entirely possible that SpaceX’s IFA test will slip further into 2020 in the coming weeks, but compared to Crew Dragon’s Demo-1 mission, both NASA and SpaceX appear to be far more confident in the schedule for Crew Dragon’s second launch.
Regardless of when exactly it lifts off, Crew Dragon’s In-Flight Abort is going to be an extremely challenging test for the spacecraft. Designed to simulate a near-worst-case abort scenario during launch, SpaceX will essentially trick Dragon into believing that Falcon 9 has failed around a minute and a half after launch. At that point, the rocket and spacecraft will be traveling as fast as Mach 2.5 (860 m/s, 1900 mph) and experiencing what is known as Max Q, the point of peak aerodynamic stress (referring to heating, buffeting, pressure, and more).
At that exact point, Crew Dragon capsule C205 will ignite all eight of its SuperDraco abort engines, almost instantaneously producing 130,000 lbf (570 kN) of thrust to send the spacecraft almost a kilometer (0.5 mi) away from Falcon 9 in just a few seconds. If Crew Dragon survives the ordeal, it will quickly detach its trunk section, flip around to face its heat shield towards the ground, and ultimately deploy parachutes before gently landing in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX plans to recover and reuse the otherwise orbit-worthy capsule on a future mission, likely one of the company’s upcoming CRS2 space station resupply launches. Finally, if everything goes exactly as planned during the In-Flight Abort test and both NASA and SpaceX see no issues with the flown hardware or data the test produces, Crew Dragon Demo-2 – the spacecraft’s first astronaut launch – could potentially be ready for flight as early as February or March 2020.
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SpaceX readies Starship Flight 14 for a historic journey into uncharted territory
SpaceX finished Starship’s Flight 14 rehearsal, clearing the way for its first orbital flight Monday.
SpaceX has cleared one of the last hurdles before Starship’s first trip to orbit. The company posted on X Thursday afternoon that its launch rehearsal for Flight 14 was complete, keeping the mission on track for Monday, September 28. The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT at Starbase, Texas, and runs for 75 minutes.
A wet dress rehearsal is essentially launch day without the launch. Crews fill Booster 21 and Ship 41 with thousands of tons of extremely cold propellant, run the countdown nearly to ignition, then drain everything back out. It lets engineers catch leaks or equipment problems before anything leaves the pad. SpaceX still needs a launch license from the FAA before the stack, which stands 407 feet tall, can fly.
Flight 14 matters because of where it is going. All 13 previous Starship flights followed a suborbital path, which works like throwing a ball extremely high and far: the vehicle reaches space, but it is always on a course that brings it back down within about an hour. This time, Ship 41 will perform a short engine firing called an orbital insertion burn roughly 25 minutes after liftoff, giving it enough speed to keep falling around Earth instead of back into it. SpaceX plans about six laps at an altitude near 275 kilometers (171 miles) over nearly 10 hours, as Teslarati detailed when the mission was first announced.
Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14 pic.twitter.com/h5LBYyBqi4
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 24, 2026
Getting into orbit also means Starship has to prove it can get back out. The ship must relight a single Raptor engine in space to slow down for reentry. SpaceX says it will only attempt the orbital insertion burn after flight controllers confirm the hardware needed for that return burn has enough backup, and its flight plan includes health checks that could shorten the mission to two or five orbits.
Flight 14 is also the first to put working satellites into service. Flight 13 carried 20 Starlink V3 satellites in July, but they came back down with the ship because that mission never reached orbit. This time, 26 V3 satellites are meant to stay up and join the constellation within a few weeks. Together they add about 26 terabits per second of network capacity, which SpaceX says is roughly 10 times what a single Falcon 9 launch of older V2 Mini satellites adds. Three of them carry cameras that will photograph Starship’s heat shield in orbit to check for tile damage before reentry.
The hardware has changed too. Ship 41 flies with extra fasteners on tiles in the most vulnerable areas, fixes for gaps where superheated plasma slipped behind tiles, and curved tiles designed to reduce heating between them. Two tiles recovered from Ship 40 will fly again, the first reuse of any part of a Starship heat shield. Booster 21 carries better engine filtering and new relight software after ice clogged three center engines on the previous booster, leaving only eight of 13 engines to restart for its landing burn.
Ship 41 is targeting a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a new recovery zone after several Indian Ocean landings, while Booster 21 aims for the Gulf. Neither will be caught by the tower on this flight. Elon Musk said in August that a ship catch was likely “in a few months.”
Elon Musk
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
Google will launch its first Project Suncatcher AI satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare next week.
Google is about to put its own AI chips into orbit for the first time, and it is paying SpaceX to get them there.
The company said Thursday that the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, its research effort to find out whether space can host large-scale AI computing, will fly next week on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission.
The satellite, called MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator and carries four of Google’s Tensor Processing Units, the same chips Google runs in its ground data centers. Google originally planned to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but chose to move faster by integrating its chips into a satellite.
MVP’s solar panels supply about one kilowatt of power, and Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs only in bursts of roughly 15 minutes before the chips shut down so the radiators can shed heat. In a blog post, Google said its Trillium TPUs survived vibration testing that mimicked sustained launch loads of up to 10g, with individual components seeing 50 to 100g, and handled a radiation dose greater than a five year mission would deliver.
SpaceX and Google mull massive partnership on Musk’s orbital data dream: report
Next week’s flight, slated for October 1, follows a relationship that became public in May, when Teslarati reported that Google was in talks with SpaceX for a launch deal tied to orbital data centers. Google also holds a stake of roughly 6% in SpaceX.
The two companies are chasing the same idea from very different starting points. SpaceX’s own orbital compute program is built around the AI1 satellite, a roughly 70 meter structure derived from Starlink V3 hardware that is designed for 150 kW of peak compute, about 150 times the power MVP will draw. Elon Musk has brushed off concerns about crowding orbit with those satellites, and SpaceX is building its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, to produce them, targeting an annualized rate of about 1 GW of space compute by the end of 2027.
Musk also posted on X on Thursday that “the amount of compute in space will obviously round up to 100% of all compute.”
Google has been more cautious in public. Its research estimates that launch prices need to fall below about $200 per kilogram before an orbital data center can compete with a ground facility on energy cost, a threshold the company believes could be reached around the mid 2030s. The Suncatcher team has said it expects the effort to remain a project rather than a product for years, which leaves the first real test of its hardware riding on a rocket from the company with the most aggressive timeline in the field.
Tesla has taken another concrete step toward owning its battery supply chain, and it’s doing so with what is perhaps the most important vehicle in its short-but-storied history.
On September 23, Tesla announced that it has officially built the first Cybercab with cathode material produced in-house at the company’s first cathode plant in the U.S., and the first in the U.S. overall.
First Cybercab made using our in-house cathode material – from the first cathode plant in the Americas pic.twitter.com/X95aVXsT9H
— Robotaxi (@robotaxi) September 23, 2026
Active cathode material is the most expensive piece of a lithium-ion battery cell, and it often accounts for more than a third of cell cost. For years, the industry sourced a majority of it from Asia, but Tesla’s decision to make it in the United States bodes well for the Cybercab project. This is the latest chapter in Tesla’s vertical integration strategy, which began in public at Battery Day in 2020.
At the Battery Day Event, Elon Musk said the company would build a North American cathode plant and overhaul the process to cut costs and waste, while also making some of the most powerful and long-lasting cells in the industry.
The Austin facility took years to appear. Tesla filed permits for “Project Cathode” in 2022 on land near Giga Texas. By mid-2022, the building frame was up and Tesla later invested hundreds of millions of dollars as part of a larger expansion of the Giga Texas plant. The company stated it was operating the first large-scale cathode production facility in North America to supplement 4680 cell production.
One month later, that material reached a finished Cybercab.
Made with nickel cathode manufactured locally at Gigafactory Texas! https://t.co/DqMm5fZV3n
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 24, 2026
The timing of this breakthrough is monumental for the Cybercab program. As Tesla officially launched the first Cybercab rides to the public earlier this month, production of the ride-hailing-geared vehicle is moving forward on the planned S-curve that CEO Elon Musk told everyone to expect.
Nevertheless, packs of Cybercab units have been spotted throughout the United States, in an effort to potentially activate the fleet as soon as the company gains regulatory approval in various geographic areas.
On top of that, Tesla owning the cathode step and pairing it with its own in-house lithium from the Gulf Coast refinery shortens the supply chain that once stretched thousands of miles and subjects every pack to fewer external price shocks and geopolitical risks.
Tesla is not yet independent of all of its foreign suppliers, as some precursor metals come from mines and chemical plants. But the first in-house cathode Cybercab shows the company is closing the most expensive and most concentrated gap in its battery production efforts. For a vehicle like Cybercab to operate at a high utilization within the Robotaxi network, that control over cost is so crucial.
It is arguably as important as the software that drives it.
SpaceX readies Starship Flight 14 for a historic journey into uncharted territory
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
