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SpaceX's next launch ready to go just weeks after in-flight engine failure
Just weeks after SpaceX suffered its first in-flight rocket engine failure since 2012, the company has scheduled its next launch on April 16th.
Set to lift off no earlier than (NET) 5:31 pm EDT (21:31 UTC) from NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A (Pad 39A), the mission will be SpaceX’s seventh dedicated launch of 60 Starlink satellites. Known as Starlink-6 in reference to the sixth launch of finalized Starlink v1.0 spacecraft, a successful mission could leave SpaceX with some ~410 operational satellites in orbit – significantly more than twice as big as the next largest constellation.
More importantly, Starlink-6 will mark a sort of return-to-flight for Falcon 9 after booster B1048 suffered an in-flight engine failure and missed its landing attempt on March 18th. While the booster was able to sacrifice itself to ensure that the overall Starlink-5 mission was a success, any in-flight failure is still a significant event in aerospace. To that end, very little is known about the Starlink-5 anomaly, aside from announcements that both NASA and the US Air Force will be paying close attention to the results of SpaceX’s internal investigation. Starlink-6’s imminent launch is now the latest piece of that puzzle, shedding some welcome light on the situation.
Unsurprisingly, an in-flight Falcon 9 engine failure more than piqued the curiosities of high-profile SpaceX customers like NASA and the US Air Force (and Space Force), both of which have some of the company’s most important launches ever scheduled within the next few months. Most notably, NASA noted on March 25th that the space agency and SpaceX “are holding the current mid-to-late May [target for Crew Dragon’s inaugural astronaut launch] and [will] adjust the date based on review of the [engine failure] data, if appropriate.”
At time of comment, a few aspects of the unfortunate Starlink-5 engine failure were already positioned in SpaceX’s favor. Critically, it was the first time that a flight-proven Falcon 9 booster launched on its fifth orbital-class mission, meaning that the very same booster – B1048 – had already launched four times prior. In aerospace parlance, the mission thus served as a pathfinder for SpaceX’s reusable rocketry technology, venturing into new territory. Since it began internal Starlink launches, SpaceX has used those opportunities to take its most recent reusability leaps without risking customer payloads in the process.
At least for now, neither NASA or the USAF have plans to fly their most valuable payloads on flight-proven Falcon boosters. While that may change over the next several years, it means that SpaceX’s Starlink-5 anomaly and missions like Crew Dragon Demo-2 and GPS III SV03 – both set to fly on new boosters – share much less commonality. Of course, this assumes that B1048’s March 18th engine failure is directly related to the booster’s exceptionally flight-proven nature. Were SpaceX’s investigation to conclude that the fault had nothing to do with multi-launch wear and tear, it would likely ground Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy indefinitely.
Instead, SpaceX – knowing full-well the potential consequences of two consecutive in-flight failures – has decided to attempt another orbital-class Starlink launch and booster landing less than a month after Starlink-5. To be clear, while SpaceX could choose to throw caution to the wind on an internal launch, it’s doubtful that it would haphazardly take such a substantial risk. Instead, Starlink-6’s April 16th launch date strongly suggests that SpaceX is already reasonably confident that it’s both determined the likely culprit of last month’s engine failure and identified ways to prevent its reoccurrence.
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.
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.
Elon Musk
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.
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.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
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.
News
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
SpaceX launched three final O3b mPower satellites Sunday, finishing a lesser known SES satellite network.
SpaceX had an 87 minute window opening at 2:49 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to fly a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying the final three satellites for SES’s O3b mPower constellation, a project that has taken more than a decade to finish since Boeing and SES first signed SpaceX on for the work.
Unlike the thousands of Starlink satellites SpaceX has stacked into orbit over the years, O3b mPower flies in a different neighborhood entirely. The three new satellites, tagged F11, F12 and F13, are headed for medium Earth orbit at roughly 5,000 miles up, more than ten times higher than Starlink’s shell around 340 miles but still a small fraction of the 22,000 miles where old school geostationary satellites sit. That middle position is the whole point, because a satellite that far out needs far fewer siblings to blanket the globe than a low orbit constellation does. Essentially, SES only needed 13 satellites total to build a network offering quick, steady service that used to require thousands of spacecraft.
With most people having heard plenty about Starlink and almost nothing about O3b mPower, SES and SpaceX already blend the two networks for some customers. Both SpaceX and SES sell satellite broadband, but they’re aimed at different buyers. Starlink is built for volume, direct to consumers, RVs, homes, small businesses, plus a growing aviation and maritime business. O3b mPower skips consumers entirely and sells enterprise grade connectivity to airlines, cruise lines, offshore energy operators, telecoms needing backhaul, and governments, priced and provisioned more like a dedicated circuit.
A 2023 partnership lets cruise ships combine Starlink’s speed with O3b mPower’s steady capacity depending on what a ship needs at a given moment. Sunday’s completed 13 satellite constellation effectively finishes the medium orbit half of that pairing, years after.
Sunday’s mission was already a something on SpaceX’s manifest well before O3b mPower entered the picture. This flight marked its 29th trip to orbit, a history that includes two crewed Axiom missions, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope and 22 separate Starlink batches. SpaceX has landed boosters on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas so often that Sunday’s touchdown attempt, if it went as planned, was set to be the 661st successful Falcon booster landing to date.
For a company that pushed the Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites back in August, almost entirely through bulk launches from California, Sunday’s flight was a reminder that SpaceX’s schedule still has room for someone else’s satellites too. SES gets a finished network built for a narrower set of customers, and Falcon 9 gets one more line on an already long resume.
Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
