News
SpaceX set for historic Crew Dragon astronaut mission with splashdown from space
SpaceX is close to becoming the first-ever private astronaut transportation service with the conclusion of the Crew Dragon Demonstration 2 mission (Demo 2) just hours away. Following a completely flawless autonomous undocking from the International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule performed a series of autonomous burns setting it up for a picture-perfect return Sunday afternoon, August 2.

The process of ending Crew Dragon’s first astronaut mission – and final certification test flight – stretches about two days. On Saturday, August 1, the crew of the Demo 2 mission, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, participated in a farewell ceremony while aboard the International Space Station. The pair were joined by ISS Commander NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner to officially say goodbye ahead of their journey home.
The Demo-2 crew then spent the next few hours performing final check out tasks and packing the Crew Dragon capsule, which they designated as the “Dragonship Endeavour,” with the necessary cargo including a few special artifacts. Doug Hurley was sure to bring home a commemorative American flag that was delivered to the ISS by the crew of the final space shuttle mission STS-135 in 2011.
This flag symbolized the end of NASA’s space shuttle program and the beginning of the Commercial Crew era of astronaut transportation. The flag will be returned by Doug Hurley, a member of the final STS-135 crew, to later be flown on a future mission to the Moon through NASA’s Artemis program. Bob Behnken was sure to bring home the zero-G indicator that traveled with the astronauts during their ascent trip to the ISS, a stuffed toy apatosaurs dinosaur named Tremor. The dinosaur was chosen by Behnken and Hurley’s young sons and will be returned to them.
Following the farewell ceremony, the Demo-2 crew boarded the Dragonship Endeavour and began undocking procedures. The astronauts, although able to intervene if necessary, notably had an observatory role during undocking as the Crew Dragon is designed to perform all docking and undocking procedures completely autonomously. The capsule unhooked from the ISS, backed up, and performed a series of burns to bring it up, over, and in front of the ISS completely autonomously, without incident.

Following the series of successful orientation burns, Behnken and Hurley were permitted to go to sleep aboard the capsule as Crew Dragon would spend the next nineteen hours orbiting the Earth ahead of its reentry, descent, and splashdown landing. As the crew slept, Crew Dragon autonomously performed a series of phasing burns to line the capsule up with the correct trajectory to attempt reentry just a few hours later.
Should everything proceed as planned, the Crew Dragon carrying the Demo-2 crew is expected to attempt deorbit, reentry, parachute deployment, and landing on the afternoon of Sunday, August 2nd. Behnken and Hurley are expected to return for a splashdown landing in the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida’s west coast near Pensacola, FL at 2:48 pm ET/11:48 am PT. A backup splashdown location has also been designated off the coast of Panama City, FL.
A successful landing will solidify the Demo-2 mission in the history books and make SpaceX the first private company to transport NASA astronauts to and from the ISS successfully. Following the conclusion of the Demo-2 mission, the first operational mission of Crew Dragon, Crew-1, is tasked to take place later this fall no earlier than September 2020.
You can join NASA and SpaceX for the reentry events live on their social media accounts. The event is also available via live webcast found below or on SpaceX’s website.
Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
News
Tesla stuns with another FSD approval in Europe, its second in two days
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.
De @Tesla community houdt hier al geruime tijd de vinger aan de pols over de toelating voor de FSD-technologie op onze Vlaamse en Belgische wegen.
Uit waardering voor jullie niet-aflatende interesse (en aanmoediging 😉), krijgen jullie hierbij de primeur: ik heb net de toelating… pic.twitter.com/Yrps4OHTj8— Annick De Ridder (@AnnickDeRidder) June 10, 2026
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.
Getting Full Self-Driving in Spain and England will be such huge milestones for Tesla. I am so excited to see how FSD performs in Madrid, Barcelona, and London, specifically.
The ultimate test will always be Mumbai or New Delhi. Excited for India’s eventual approval! https://t.co/paw9Ch1qmL pic.twitter.com/9RdDERVSSJ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 9, 2026
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.