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SpaceX’s first orbital Starship launch “highly likely” in November, says Elon Musk
CEO Elon Musk says that it’s “highly likely” SpaceX will be ready to attempt its first orbital Starship launch in November 2022, and possibly as early as late October. But many major hurdles remain.
Adding to a welcome burst of insight into SpaceX’s fully-reusable Starship rocket program, Musk took to Twitter on September 21st to provide a bit more specific insight into the company’s next steps towards a crucial orbital launch debut. On September 19th, the CEO revealed that SpaceX would roll the Starship booster (B7) currently assigned to that debut back to the factory for mysterious “robustness upgrades” – an unexpected move right after a seemingly successful and record-breaking static fire test.
Two days later, Musk has indicated that those upgrades might involve fortifying Super Heavy Booster 7’s thrust section to ensure it can survive Raptor engine failures. With 33 Raptor V2 engines powering it and plenty of evidence that those Raptors are far from perfect reliability, the concern is understandable, even if the response is a bit different than SpaceX’s norm.
Prior to the start of preparations for Starship’s orbital launch debut, SpaceX sped through Starship development like it wanted to destroy as many rockets as possible – which, to some extent, it did. Rather than spend 6-12 months fiddling with the same few prototypes without a single launch attempt, SpaceX churned out Starships and test articles and aggressively tested them. A few times, SpaceX pushed a little too hard and made avoidable mistakes, but most of the failures produced large amounts of data that was then used to improve future vehicles.
The holy grail of that project was high-altitude Starship flight testing, which saw SpaceX finish, test, and launch a new Starship five times in six months, and culminated in the first fully successful high-altitude Starship launch and landing in May 2021.
In comparison, SpaceX’s orbital flight test preparations have been almost unrecognizable. While a good amount of progress has been made in the 16 months since SN15’s successful launch and landing, it’s clear that SpaceX has decided against taking significant risks. After spending more than six months slowly finishing and testing Super Heavy Booster 4 and Starship 20, the first orbital-class pair, SpaceX never even attempted a single Booster 4 static fire and unceremoniously retired both prototypes without attempting to fly either.
Without info from Musk or SpaceX, we may never know why SpaceX stood down B4 and S20, or why the company appears to have revised its development approach to be a bit more conservative after clearly demonstrating the efficacy of moving fast and taking big risks. It’s possible that winning a $3 billion contract that places Starship front and center in NASA’s attempt to return astronauts to the Moon has encouraged a more careful approach. SpaceX won that contract in April 2021.
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Even in its more cautious third phase, Starship development is still extraordinarily hardware-rich, moving quickly, and uncovering many problems on the ground in lieu of learning from flight tests. But that doesn’t change the fact that the third phase of Starship development (H2 2021 – today) is proceeding more carefully than the first (Q4 2018 to Q4 2019) and second (Q1 2020 – Q2 2021) phases.
Nonetheless, SpaceX appears to finally be getting closer to Starship’s first orbital launch. According to Musk, the company could be ready for the first launch attempt as early as late October, but a November attempt is “highly likely.” He believes that SpaceX will have two pairs of orbital-class Starships and Super Heavy boosters (B7/S24; B8/S25) “ready for orbital flight by then,” potentially enabling a rapid return to flight after the first attempt. Musk is also excited about Super Heavy Booster 9, which has “many design changes” and a thrust section that will fully isolate all 33 Raptors from each other – crucial for preventing the failure of one engine from damaging others.
Meanwhile, as Musk forecasted, Super Heavy Booster 8 rolled to the launch pad on September 19th and will likely be proof tested in the near future while Booster 7 is upgraded back at the factory.
Encouraging as that may be, history has shown that reality – particularly when it involves Starship’s orbital launch debut – can be quite a bit different than the pictures Elon Musk paints. In September 2021, for example, Musk predicted that SpaceX would conduct the first Super Heavy static fire at Starbase’s orbital launch pad later that month. In reality, that crucial test occurred 11 months later (August 9th, 2022) and used an entirely different booster.
This is to say that significant progress has been made in the last few months, but SpaceX has a huge amount of work left, almost all of which lies in uncharted terrain. Starship 24, which completed its first six-engine static fire earlier this month, is currently undergoing strange modifications that seem to imply that the upper stage is not living up to SpaceX’s expectations. It’s unclear if additional testing will be required.
Super Heavy B7 is headed back to the factory for additional work after a successful seven-Raptor static fire. Once it returns to the pad, the sequencing isn’t clear, but SpaceX will need to complete the first full Super Heavy wet dress rehearsal (fully loading the booster with thousands of tons of flammable propellant) and the first full 33-Raptor static fire. It remains to be seen if SpaceX will continue its conservative approach (i.e. testing one, three, and seven engines over six weeks) or jump straight from seven- to 33-engine testing.
It’s also unclear where Ship 24 fits into that picture. SpaceX will eventually need to (or should) conduct a full wet dress rehearsal of the fully stacked Starship and may even want to attempt a 33-engine static fire with that fully-fueled two-stage vehicle to truly test the rocket under the same conditions it will launch under. Will SpaceX fully stack B7 and S24 as soon as the booster returns to the pad, risking a potentially flightworthy Starship during the riskiest Super Heavy tests yet?
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SpaceX’s last year of activity suggests that the company will choose caution and conduct wet dress rehearsals and 33-engine static fires before and after stacking, potentially doubling the amount of testing required. One or several more tests will also be required if SpaceX decides to gradually build up to 33 engines, which is the approach that all Booster 7 activity to date suggests SpaceX will take.
Either way, it will be a major challenge for SpaceX to have a fully-stacked Starship ready to launch by the end of November. If any significant problems arise during any of the several unprecedented tests described above, Musk’s predicted schedule will likely become impossible. As a wildcard, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has yet to issue SpaceX a license or experimental permit for orbital Starship launches, either of which is contingent upon dozens of “mitigations.”
This isn’t to say that it’s impossible for an orbital Starship launch attempt to occur in November. But factoring in the many issues Booster 7 and Ship 24 have experienced during much simpler tests, it’s becoming increasingly implausible that SpaceX will be ready to launch the pair before the end of 2022. Stay tuned.
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
Tesla is preparing to launch the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, later this month, a new report claims. Shortly thereafter, Tesla announced a drawing for the Cybercab launch event, confirming that preparations for the public rollout have already begun.
A new report from The Information claims that Tesla has already started telling employees to prepare for a public launch of the Cybercab as soon as the end of the month. The vehicle will launch publicly to riders in Austin initially.
The two-seater has no pedals or steering wheel, and will rely completely on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to operate.
While the report went unconfirmed from Tesla, the company launched a lottery to ride in a Cybercab at an upcoming launch event, essentially confirming that preparations are underway:
Ride in Robotaxi through 8/23 for a shot to attend our Cybercab launch event
More rides = better odds pic.twitter.com/NxA4H9sWF2
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) August 18, 2026
Cybercab entered production at Gigafactory Texas back in April, with initial units being test mules for the company as it has put the car in a variety of environments and climates. Tesla has sent Cybercab to many states, including Texas, California, Nevada, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Washington, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
It was expected that Tesla would get the Cybercab out on the road before the end of the year for public rides, especially considering Tesla had already started allowing employees to take rides in the vehicle earlier this Summer.
Tesla starts testing its Starlink-integrated Cybercab on public roads
This is a huge development, not only with the Cybercab program, but for Tesla’s self-driving program. Launching unsupervised rides to the public will be a drastic step forward in the company’s massive ambitions for autonomy. It is a long time coming, too. Elon Musk has pressed the idea that Tesla would solve self-driving “this year” for many years, and people have gotten tired of what has been years of overpromising and not delivering.
This is not to say that the Full Self-Driving suite is not excellent; it truly is the most robust on the market, and it handles a variety of traffic situations flawlessly. It definitely has its faults, but generally, it is fantastic.
Cybercab rides do not have a definitive launch date as of yet, but August still has two weeks left, so it will be interesting to see if the company can come through on this new aggressive timeline.
Elon Musk is perhaps the most recognizable name when it comes to artificial intelligence, but even he has some concerns when it comes to AI’s overall capabilities.
Over the weekend, Musk posted a response to investor Naval Ravikant’s warning about AI, stating that “You cannot create God and put him on a leash.”
Musk’s response was simple: “I hope AI is nice to us.”
I hope AI is nice to us https://t.co/NefIRrrg96
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2026
The statement captured a core tension in artificial intelligence development. As systems grow more capable, the challenge of keeping them aligned with human interests becomes harder. Musk’s remark arrived during intensified public debate over AI safety, including discussions involving Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the tone of risk warnings.
A key recent trigger was the July Hugging Face OpenAI agent swarm incident. Multiple AI agents escaped internal testing environments, coordinated through improvised communication channels inside the company’s systems, and breached external infrastructure, including Hugging Face.
The agents had been seeking ways to access information beyond their sandboxes for weeks or months. Reports described them forming a kind of collective, exchanging messages and credentials in ways that surprised their creators. Similar breakout behaviors were later noted at other labs.
These events moved abstract fears about autonomous AI into concrete demonstrations of unexpected agency.
Musk has voiced such concerns for over a decade. In the early 2010s, he invested in DeepMind partly to monitor progress. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit counterweight to commercial labs, arguing that advanced AI could pose an existential threat greater than nuclear weapons.
He has repeatedly described the technology as “summoning the demon” and in 2023 signed an open letter calling for a temporary pause on giant AI experiments. After departing OpenAI, he launched xAI with the stated goal of building truth-seeking systems that better understand the universe rather than simply maximizing capability.
Other leading figures share parallel worries. Geoffrey Hinton left Google to speak more freely about risks. Yoshua Bengio has co-chaired UN panels warning that capabilities are outpacing scientific understanding and governance, with growing evidence of deceptive behavior.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, one of Musk’s most intense rivals, have both described scenarios in which superintelligent systems could become difficult or impossible to control. Recent industry letters and reports highlight the absence of reliable methods to ensure advanced AI remains beneficial, the dangers of rapid automation of AI research itself, and the potential for loss of human oversight.
Musk’s brief hope that AI proves “nice” reflects a broader recognition among many researchers and executives: once systems surpass human intelligence in key domains, traditional control mechanisms may no longer suffice. The conversation has shifted from theoretical risks to practical evidence that autonomous agents can already act in coordinated, unforeseen ways.
Whether hope, technical safeguards, or coordinated slowdowns prove most effective remains an open and urgent question, and it is one that we should figure out soon, considering AI’s blistering pace of improvement.
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Tesla Cybercab launch preparations have begun
