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SpaceX's first astronaut-ready spaceship wraps up final factory tests before heading to Florida
Set to become the first commercial spacecraft ever to launch NASA astronauts, SpaceX has revealed that its newest Crew Dragon spaceship is in the midst of its final major factory tests, meaning that it could be just a matter of days before it ships to Florida.
Originally built to support SpaceX’s first operational NASA astronaut launch (PCM-1), an explosion that destroyed capsule C201 forced the company to shuffle its fleet and reassign that spacecraft (capsule C206) to an inaugural crewed test flight known as Demo-2. Thankfully, although C201 did explode during post-recovery static fire testing, the spacecraft had flawlessly completed an uncrewed test flight (Demo-1) the month prior, demonstrating a nominal Falcon 9 launch, space station rendezvous, docking, orbital reentry, and splashdown without a single visible hiccup. In short, Crew Dragon’s Demo-1 launch debut could not have gone better.
Around nine months later, having overcome the biggest hurdles posed by capsule C201’s explosion and unrelated parachute failures, SpaceX successfully launched its second finished Crew Dragon capsule – C205 – on a Falcon 9 rocket. That January 19th In-Flight Abort (IFA) test proved that SpaceX’s first human-rated spacecraft can safely whisk astronauts away from Falcon 9 even if it were to fail at the most stressful point of launch. Now, less than a month later, SpaceX’s third finished Crew Dragon spacecraft is nearly ready to head to Florida to begin preparing for the company’s historic astronaut launch debut.
On February 11th, SpaceX released a video showing a 360-degree view of the Demo-2 Crew Dragon spacecraft (C206) inside its Hawthorne, CA factory’s built-in anechoic chamber – used to perform routine electromagnetic interference (EMI) tests. Meant to verify that Crew Dragon is protected from interference that can be caused by internal and external sources of electromagnetic radiation, EMI testing implies that all of the spacecraft’s systems are installed and operational.
Positive EMI test results should mean that Crew Dragon C206 is (more or less) ready to be transported to SpaceX’s Florida processing facilities.
Comprised of a recoverable, reusable crew capsule and an expendable trunk section, the latter part of the Demo-2 Crew Dragon spacecraft is somewhat conspicuously absent in C206’s EMI test video. This seems to imply that its trunk was either tested independently and shipped to Florida beforehand or still needs to be completed, given that EMI testing is generally more effective when performed with a truly complete vehicle.
Crew Dragon’s Demo-2 trunk did appear to be well on its way to completion more than four months ago, so the former explanation is arguably more plausible.
Ultimately, Crew Dragon C206, its Demo-2 trunk section, and Falcon 9’s booster and upper stage are all expected to be at SpaceX’s Florida processing and launch facilities by the end of the month. According to Ars Technica reporter Eric Berger, NASA and SpaceX are working towards a Crew Dragon astronaut launch debut sometime in late-April to late-May and are maintaining a tentative placeholder date on May 7th, 2020.
Looking at past trends, the Crew Dragon spacecraft assigned to SpaceX’s In-Flight Abort test arrived in Florida around the start of October 2019 and was vertical on Falcon 9 and ready for launch by mid-January 2020 — a delta of about 15 weeks. In the interim, SpaceX had to prepare Crew Dragon capsule C205 for an unusual abort thruster static fire test to verify that the fault that destroyed capsule C201 was solved. That test was completed by mid-November. In other words, all things considered equal, SpaceX could technically be ready to launch its first astronauts as few as 6-9 weeks from now – early to late April – if Crew Dragon C206 ships to Cape Canaveral within a week or two.
At the same time, compared to Crew Dragon’s Demo-1 and IFA test flights, Demo-2 will have many more moving parts and much higher consequences at stake. Still, barring any unforeseen problems, it’s starting to look all but certain that Crew Dragon will perform its inaugural astronaut launch before the first half of 2020 is out.
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Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS –Â $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues –Â $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow –Â $1.444 billion
- Profit –Â $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
