Connect with us

News

SpaceX readies for a busy month, first up, a Falcon 9 and Starlink satellites

Starlink fairing art (Richard Angle)

Published

on

SpaceX is set to begin its potentially busy May launch cadence with the launch of 56 V1.5 Starlink satellites from LC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch is currently scheduled for May 4th at 3:31 AM ET (07:31 UTC).

This specific Falcon 9, B1069, has led a pretty interesting career for a Falcon 9. After successfully launching the CRS-24 resupply mission to the International Space Station, the booster had a rough landing on the droneship ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ which damaged multiple engine bells and landing legs. After a lengthy refurbishment of 250 days, the rocket returned to service to launch a batch of Starlink satellites in August 2022.

B1069 damage after a rough landing (Richard Angle)

Following that successful return to flight, B1069 would go on to launch 4 more times between October 2022 and March 2023, most recently launching the SES 18 and 19 satellites. The early morning launch today will bring 56 version 1.5 Starlink satellites to orbit and increase the number of operational satellites to more than 3,400 and a total of more than 4,300 launched. SpaceX could potentially launch at least 5 batches of Starlink satellites this month, and as of right now, 3 of those launches are on range schedules between their Florida and California launch sites.

If SpaceX launches on time early tomorrow morning at 3:31 AM ET (07:31 UTC), the first stage of the booster will attempt to land on the drone ship ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’ approximately eight-and-a-half minutes later. The 2nd stage carrying the 56 Starlink satellites will perform a 6-minute orbital insertion burn before coasting for approximately 46 minutes. The satellites are then set to separate from the 2nd stage one hour and 4 minutes into the flight to begin their journey to their operational orbit.

B1069 launching SES 18 & 19 (Richard Angle)

The early morning launch will mark 222 overall launches and 27 launches of the Falcon 9 in 2023, respectively. The current weather outlook has a 95% chance of acceptable weather, which is much appreciated after the last 2 launches faced many weather obstacles. Following this launch, pending any changes in the schedule, SpaceX will then shift focus to the West Coast with a Falcon 9 set to launch more Starlink satellites into orbit.

Questions or comments? Shoot me an email @ rangle1555@gmail.com, or Tweet me @RDAnglePhoto.

Launch journalist, specializing in launch photography. Based on the Space Coast, a short drive from Cape Canaveral and the SpaceX launch pads.

Advertisement
Comments

News

Tesla snags Semi supply deal with major logistics firm

Published

on

Credit: Tesla

Tesla has snagged a deal with IMC Logistics to supply the company with 50 Semi units for its logistics operations.

IMC handles drayage and landside logistics and has over 2,700 asset trucks in its fleet. In its over forty years of service, it has established more than 50 locations across the United States and spans operations from coast to coast.

Jim Gillis of IMC said that the addition of the Tesla Semi will help IMC move toward a “zero-emission service for long-haul lanes.”

The move is one that has become more common over the past few years, as more and more companies doing large-scale logistics have moved to sustainable powertrains, using either Tesla or others.

Advertisement
-

Tesla’s Semi program just entered its first truly public phase, as the company handed over its first production units to companies in September, although a pilot program with companies like PepsiCo. and Frito-Lay has been ongoing for years.

IMC announced its intention to purchase 50 Semi units from Tesla in September, and according to VP of Marketing and Public Relations on September 29 to Trucking Drive, the company will take delivery either this week or took delivery late last week.

Tesla has a ‘no human contact’ approach for Semi production

With surging prices of diesel and high logistics costs, Tesla and the Semi could truly revolutionize how companies manage their fleets. With the advent of Full Self-Driving, the Semi will potentially cut down on driver fatigue and increase productivity, while decreasing the cost of operation per mile by being cheaper to refuel.

Tesla had a dedicated Semi handover event at the Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, a few weeks back, as it officially introduced its truck to many company fleets that have been waiting to add these sustainable powertrains.

Advertisement
-
Continue Reading

Lifestyle

Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley

Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.

Published

on

By

Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.

Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.

Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:

“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”

Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.

The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.

Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.

Published

on

By

Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.

In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”

The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”

Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner

SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.

Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.

Advertisement
-

The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.

It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”

The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.

Continue Reading