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SpaceX fires up Starship and Super Heavy booster hours apart
SpaceX appears to have successfully fired up a Starship and Super Heavy booster hours apart, testing a total of three new Raptor 2 engines on the two rockets.
SpaceX says it completed a two-engine static fire with Starship 24 less than three hours after the company successfully ignited a Raptor 2 engine installed on a rocket prototype for the first time. That earlier test, performed by Super Heavy Booster 7, was also the first time SpaceX used its new Starbase orbital launch site to support a static fire test and the second-ever static fire of a Starship booster prototype. Had the company called it quits after Booster 7 survived its first intentional trial by fire, it would have still been an exceptionally successful day.
But SpaceX wasn’t done.
Instead, after Booster 7’s seemingly flawless single-Raptor static fire at 5:25 pm CDT, SpaceX loaded Starship 24 with a small amount of liquid oxygen and methane propellant and ignited two of the ship’s six engines around 8:18 pm. It was not initially clear how many engines were involved but a tweet from SpaceX later confirmed it was two. More likely than not, one of those engines was a sea level-optimized Raptor with a smaller bell nozzle and the other was a vacuum-optimized Raptor with a much larger nozzle.
Almost ten months ago, Starship 20 – SpaceX’s first potentially orbital-class Starship prototype – began static fire testing in a somewhat similar way. Its first day of static fires began with a single Raptor Vacuum engine and ended with a simultaneous RVac and sea-level Raptor test in October 2021. In some ways, SpaceX has been a bit less cautious with Starship 24, which is the second potentially orbital-class prototype to begin proof testing. Ship 24 already has all six Raptors installed, whereas Ship 20 only had four of six engines installed during its first static fire tests. SpaceX also took about three weeks to progress from Ship 20’s first static fire test to its first static fire of all six engines, whereas it appears that Ship 24 could potentially attempt its first six-engine test just a few days to a week later.
On the other hand, Ship 24’s path to its first static fire was substantially longer than Ship 20’s. Ship 20 completed its first static fire test(s) just 25 days after its first proof test, referring to the process of verifying that the prototype was in good working order before moving on to riskier testing with flammable propellant and intentional ignitions. Ship 20 also completed its first six-engine static fire 46 days after testing began. Ship 24, meanwhile, took 75 days to go from its first proof test to its first static fire – almost three times slower than Ship 20, a prototype that was essentially the first of its kind.
It’s possible that Ship 24’s upgraded Raptor 2 engines are partially or fully to blame. Instead of jumping straight into ‘hot’ Raptor testing like Ship 20, which began that particular campaign with a partial-ignition preburner test, SpaceX put Ship 24 through seven ‘spin-prime’ tests before its first static fire. For Raptor, spin-primes test the ignition step before preburner ignition, which is itself a step before main combustion chamber ignition (where the engine starts to produce meaningful thrust). Raptor startup procedures likely involve flowing high-pressure gaseous helium, nitrogen, or propellant (oxygen/methane) through the engine to spin up its turbopumps, ‘priming’ them for preburner and main combustion chamber ignition.
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On Raptor 1, the preburners would ignite once a high enough flow rate was achieved, producing hot gas that the main combustion chamber would mix and ignite one last time to start the engine. In a recent interview with Tim Dodd (“The Everyday Astronaut”), CEO Elon Musk revealed that SpaceX was able to “remove torch igniters” from Raptor 2’s main combustion chamber (MCC). It’s unclear if that means that Raptor 2 now has zero MCC igniters, but a major change in the overall ignition process could explain why the start of Ship 24 and Booster 7 engine testing was so sluggish. So could the unintended explosion Booster 7 caused when SpaceX attempted to spin-prime all 33 of its Raptor 2 engines at once.
Regardless, SpaceX has finally crossed that particular Rubicon and, with any luck, Raptor 2 testing will begin to speed up on both Starship 24 and Super Heavy Booster 7. SpaceX has test windows scheduled on August 11th, 15th, and 16th. A warning distributed to Boca Chica, Texas residents on August 10th confirmed that the company intends to perform at least one more static fire test on the 11th.
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
