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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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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.
Elon Musk
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
Tesla teased an October 1 Roadster reveal, reviving years of delayed SpaceX thruster hover promises.
Tesla teased an October 1 event date for its next generation Roadster, posting an image on X Saturday that shows the car lit up like it is sitting on a launch pad, with the date “10.01” stamped across the bottom and the caption “Go for launch.” A countdown clock on Tesla’s Roadster order page now points to the same date, which falls on a Thursday. The company has not said where the event will happen or whether it will be streamed at the moment. Stay with us @Teslarati for live updates.
Go for launch pic.twitter.com/Khu03eiZ04
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 12, 2026
Tesla has since sent formal invitations to reservation holders confirming the event will take place in Waco, Texas, about 90 minutes north of its Austin headquarters, based on a digital ticket shared on X by Sawyer Merritt. Tesla did not name the exact venue, though Waco sits close to SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, rocket test site, previously reported as the planned location for a Roadster thruster demonstration. The invite sets the reveal for 8:30 p.m. Eastern on October 1, requires RSVPs by midnight on September 16, and limits entry to guests 21 and older. Invitations are non-transferable.
The tease follows nine years of a project defined by unimaginable specs along with slipped dates. Musk first showed the second generation Roadster in November 2017 as a surprise reveal at the end of the Tesla Semi event, promising a 0 to 60 mph time under two seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery, and production starting in 2020. At last November’s shareholder meeting, Musk set an April 1 demo date and joked the choice gave him “deniability” if it slipped again, which it did, moving first to late April, then to “a month or so,” then to August.
Tesla Roadster SpaceX Package’s 1.1-second 0-60 mph launch visualized in concept video
Whatever Tesla shows on October 1 is expected to center on the SpaceX developed thruster package Musk has described since 2018. Internally code named A71, a nod to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the system reportedly uses cold gas thrusters fed by a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, the same tank design SpaceX uses on Falcon 9. Musk has said a thruster equipped Roadster could hit 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds under roughly 2.75 g of launch force, well past the 1.9 second figure quoted for the standard car. That version reportedly will not be street legal and has reportedly been discussed as a limited run sold through a track only program.
The standard Roadster is still expected to carry the original $200,000 base price and $250,000 Founders Series tier, both set when Tesla opened $50,000 and $250,000 reservations in 2017. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy has confirmed production will happen at Gigafactory Texas, with Musk targeting 2027 or 2028, 12 to 18 months after whatever the company demonstrates next month.
Tesla is planning to roll out some pretty significant safety and accident avoidance features with Full Self-Driving version 15, which will be the next major FSD deployment from the company.
Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy used a near-miss this week to preview what the company says is the next leap in Full Self-Driving.
In response to a driver whose car had swerved away from another vehicle pulling out of a parking lot, Elluswamy wrote that he was glad the owner was safe and that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” would arrive with FSD v15.
Glad you are safe. Even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance coming as part of the next big upgrade (v15).
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) September 11, 2026
The comment landed as Tesla continues to treat software as the primary safety upgrade path. v15 is described internally as a larger architectural step, with a much bigger neural network and tighter coupling between prediction and control.
The company has already begun using early v15 software in some robotaxi operations while rolling out safety features such as Automatic Collision Evasion into current customer cars, allowing the driving stack to intervene even when the driver is in manual control.
Tesla is rolling out a new FSD version with a massive safety addition
Tesla’s published telemetry is the backbone of its safety argument. In recent North American Vehicle Safety Report data, vehicles with FSD (Supervised) engaged traveled roughly 5.1 million to 5.7 million miles between major collisions, defined as airbag-deployment events.
Tesla’s estimate of the U.S. average over the same period is about 699,000 miles per comparable crash. That is the comparison Tesla often frames as roughly seven times fewer major collisions.
A tighter comparison uses the same Tesla fleet. Cars driven manually with active safety features such as automatic emergency braking still recorded a major collision about every 2.1 million miles. Against that baseline, FSD’s advantage shrinks to roughly 2.4 to 2.7 times fewer severe crashes, which independent researchers argue is the more apples-to-apples figure.
European data released in 2026 pointed in the same direction: Tesla reported FSD as 3.5 times safer than manual driving in the Netherlands and 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas with active safety across more than 100 million kilometers in five approved countries.
Those numbers do not settle every debate. NHTSA’s Standing General Order still shows Tesla accounting for the large majority of U.S. Level 2 driver-assist crash reports, in part because the fleet logs far more assisted miles than rivals. Critics also note that Tesla’s “U.S. average” mixes crash definitions and driving mix.
Even so, Tesla’s own same-car comparisons, plus lower rates of automatic emergency braking and harsh maneuvers when FSD is engaged, are the evidence Elluswamy is pointing to when he says v15 will push prediction and collision avoidance further. The claim is not that software already eliminates risk. It is that each major version is meant to widen the gap between the system and an unaided human driver.
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
