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SpaceX looks to launch space tourists to record heights
SpaceX has signed an agreement with a space tourism company that could see its Crew Dragon spacecraft take space tourists to heights unmatched by astronauts in half a century.
On Tuesday, February 18th, Space Adventures announced the agreement, revealing that it is now officially looking for wealthy private customers interested in launching to orbit on a SpaceX rocket and spacecraft. Known as Crew Dragon, that spacecraft is perhaps just two or three months away from SpaceX’s inaugural astronaut launch, in which two NASA astronauts will be sent into orbit to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station (ISS) before returning to Earth after several weeks or months in space.
Founded in 1998, while Space Adventures has a slightly checkered past and has been more or less inactive for more than a decade, the company did manage to arrange eight separate spaceflights for seven private customers between 2001 and 2009. All flights previously arranged were done so through Russian space agency Roscosmos with Soyuz rockets and spacecraft and involved approximately week-long visits to the International Space Station (ISS), where the private astronauts – all multimillionaires and billionaires – mainly observed routine ISS operations and assisted with science experiments. With SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon, Space Adventures hopes to soon offer orbital tourists an option that keeps all operations in the United States.
As noted, it must be stated that the February 18th agreement doesn’t actually mean that private customers will definitively launch into orbit in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. Instead, it serves as a semi-contractual confirmation that the spaceflight company is officially willing and ready to support such a mission in the event that Space Adventures is able to secure enough customers to purchase the necessary launch services. While not out of the question, that will be no easy feat.
Thankfully, several aspects of this new agreement should work in SpaceX and Space Adventures’ favor. As a unique ‘free-flying’ mission, Crew Dragon and its space tourists would not actually rendezvous with the ISS – instead serving as its own miniature outpost in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for several days. Relative to SA’s past tourist flights to the ISS, this will save a large portion of the time and cost associated with both training civilians for spaceflight and ISS operations and working with NASA and Roscosmos to arrange the complex mission.
Aside from simplifying the training and bureaucracy involved in orbital tourism, the fact that Space Adventures’ newest proposal will have no affiliation or involvement with NASA or Roscosmos also means that there’s nothing preventing SpaceX from using a flight-proven Falcon 9 booster and Crew Dragon capsule on its space tourist launch. By combining flight-proven hardware with a space station-free mission profile, SpaceX could theoretically cut the overall flight’s cost by tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
According to public analyses performed over the last few years by auditors and researchers, SpaceX Crew Dragon launches will likely cost NASA around $400 million each, while a comparable Boeing Starliner mission will cost the space agency at least $650 million. The SpaceX figure is, however, predicated upon the production of a brand new Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft for each launch and includes costs associated with any processing or operations involving NASA teams and facilities.
As noted above, the use of a thoroughly flight-proven Falcon 9 booster and Crew Dragon capsule could dramatically cut the cost of private astronaut launches relative to the NASA baseline. It’s conceivable that – having effectively amortized the cost of the spacecraft and booster with a NASA astronaut launch – such a private mission’s price could be little more than the cost of building a new Falcon upper stage and Crew Dragon trunk, as well as booster/capsule refurbishment and general operations. Conservatively, the ultimate price SpaceX offers or offered Space Adventures could thus be as low as $100-200 million per launch.
Space Adventures says it could support as many as four space tourists on one flight, translating to a cost of $25-50 million per person if all seats are filled. This would compare reasonably well with the $20-50 million it typically charged its seven orbital tourism customers. That is still a vast sum of money and cuts the pool of potential customers to perhaps a few tens of thousands of people worldwide. Nevertheless, Google co-founder Sergey Brin (and possibly others) is on a sort of waiting list (requiring a $5 million deposit) for future orbital Space Adventures flights, giving the company at least one strong prospective customer.
Thanks to skipping a space station rendezvous, perhaps the single biggest selling point of the mission is that Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon could potentially send space tourists higher than ever before – to an altitude only certain NASA Apollo and Gemini astronauts can claim to have surpassed. Space Adventures specifically notes this on its website, stating that prospective space tourists could reach an altitude that only Gemini 11 astronauts have surpassed while remaining in Earth orbit.
Gemini 11 astronauts reached an of apogee around 850 miles (1350 km) while still in Earth orbit – a record that stands today. Neither Space Adventures or SpaceX have specifically stated how high an unmodified Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon to launch private astronauts, but the implication is that the view would be comparable to – or even better than – what the Gemini 11 crew saw back in 1966. Regardless, it’s safe to say that if SpaceX and Space Adventures’ new space tourism effort is greeted with healthy demand, we’ll be shortly entering a new era of private spaceflight. Crew Dragon’s first private astronaut mission is tentatively scheduled to launch as early as late-2021 or early-2022.
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SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
SpaceX launched the classified USSF-385 mission from Vandenberg, landing its booster on a tenth flight.
SpaceX launched another classified mission for the U.S. Space Force from California early Saturday morning, and the Falcon 9 booster that carried it landed on a drone ship in the Pacific for the tenth time. The USSF-385 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:00 a.m. PT.
Booster B1100 touched down on Of Course I Still Love You roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. It was the booster’s tenth flight and tenth successful landing, following the NROL-95 national security mission and eight Starlink launches. Its previous flight, a Starlink Group 15 mission on August 22, came just 35 days earlier. SpaceX ended its livestream shortly after the landing, which is standard for classified payloads, and neither the company nor the Space Force has said what the rocket carried.
Watch Falcon 9 launch the USSF-385 mission from pad 4E in California https://t.co/CAdbx85Ydy
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 26, 2026
USSF-385 is the fourth Space Force launch from the same Vandenberg pad in roughly six weeks, following USSF-366 on August 15, USSF-153 on September 10, and USSF-259 on September 17. When SpaceX flew USSF-366 in August, independent trackers noted that the rocket’s stage drop zones matched SpaceX’s Starlink Group 15 missions, pointing to Starshield, the government version of the Starlink satellite bus. The Space Force later cataloged 23 satellites after both USSF-366 and USSF-153, while USSF-259 placed 17 satellites into a different orbital plane, per KeepTrack. Launch databases describe USSF-385 the same way, though the payload remains officially unidentified.
The cadence lines up with the contracts, because in July, the Space Force awarded SpaceX $1.6 billion in task orders for 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg through the end of 2027. SpaceX also holds contracts to build pieces of that same network, which pushed its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion.
Saturday’s flight was also the sixth and final Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg in September, according to Spaceflight Now, while only one Falcon 9 flew from the East Coast this month as SpaceX shifts its Florida infrastructure toward Starship. Launch trackers list it as SpaceX’s 112th mission of 2026 and the 108th Falcon 9 flight of the year, with SLC-4E turned around about six and a half days after its previous launch.
The West Coast pad will not stay quiet for long, considering SpaceX has another Starlink mission scheduled from SLC-4E on September 30. Meanwhile, in Texas, the company is two days away from Starship Flight 14, which is targeting Monday at 7:15 a.m. CT for the vehicle’s first attempt to reach orbit.
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Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.
Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.
“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.
The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.
See you next week pic.twitter.com/BT52bGVxFu
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 25, 2026
The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.
That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.
Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.
The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
