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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk teases steel Starship on the Moon and Mars
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has published the first official renders of the company’s updated stainless steel Starship, offering glimpses of the spacecraft on both the Moon and Mars.
Although the designs of Starship and Super Heavy (formerly BFS and BFR) have shifted significantly over the past three years, the vehicle’s primary destinations have remained stable. Above all else, SpaceX remains focused on designing its next-gen rocket to be the best spacecraft ever built for transporting huge payloads and humans to the Moon, Mars, and ultimately throughout the solar system. The interplanetary future of Starship is currently an unknown quantity but SpaceX is already building the first full-scale orbital prototype and testing multiple finished versions of the Raptor engine that will power it.
As discussed earlier today, SpaceX has already completed a low-fidelity prototype of Starship known as Starhopper, designed to – per its namesake – perform low-altitude, low-velocity hop tests. Powered by Raptor, Starhopper also acts as a mobile test stand for the next-gen rocket engine meant to power both Starship and its Super Heavy booster. SpaceX’s current planning has delayed a vacuum variant of the engine for several years, instead choosing to standardize the same Raptor engine across both stages of BFR. Starship will feature seven Raptor engines producing ~14,000 kN (~3.2M lbf) of thrust, while Super Heavy’s latest iteration would require a 31 Raptors and produce a staggering 62,000 kN/14M lbf of thrust at liftoff.
That performance – theoretically making Starship/Super Heavy almost two times as powerful as Saturn V – is essential to support massive missions to Mars and the Moon while also enabling complete reusability of the rocket. SpaceX rightly judged that rapid, low-effort reusability is the only way to truly revolutionize the cost of access to orbit, at least for the indefinite future. This need itself piggybacks on CEO Elon Musk’s founding motivation: to make humanity a multi-planetary species and protect it against future mass-extinction events.
Musk has long viewed the Moon as a distraction to that goal, offering very little prospect of being more than a detour, but both NASA and the political apparatus currently controlling the US have decided that a rebranded Moon return is desirable. Repeating several nearly identical Moon return proposals from the last few decades, the political powers that be have yet to actually put any money where their mouths are. SpaceX and Musk have nonetheless jumped on the bandwagon, a pragmatic decision to hedge bets in case funding actually appears. Unsurprisingly, SpaceX is interested in any opportunity to acquire federal funding for its expensive Starship/Super Heavy/Raptor development programs.
In September 2018, SpaceX announced plans to send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and 8-10 artists of his choice on the first Starship mission around the Moon. According to Musk, that could happen as early as 2023 but will necessarily be preceded by at least one uncrewed demonstration of Starship’s performance in deep space. Given the nominal reusability of Starship, the same spacecraft might perform both missions.
In the meantime, SpaceX is in the process of building the first orbital Starship prototype, although it’s unclear just how advanced the vehicle will be. Depending on how polished and successful SpaceX’s Starship Alpha (for lack of a better term) is, it’s conceivable that the spacecraft could be retrofitted or upgraded for actual demonstration missions to deep space or the Moon. To enable the long-term reusability of Starships, SpaceX will need to rely on in-orbit refueling by way of dedicated tanker launches. However, a lower-fidelity prototype that might otherwise be scrapped could be a prime candidate for a one-way Moon-impact or lunar-landing mission, reducing risk for future crewed or uncrewed Starship missions to the Moon before SpaceX has the facilities and hardware to support simultaneous Starship and tanker launches.
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Tesla is being sued by the family of the woman who was killed in a Texas crash involving a Model 3. The driver, who is also being sued, claimed the vehicle was operating on Autopilot mode, but Tesla executives have come out challenging that claim, stating that the driver of the vehicle overrode the system.
The lawsuit was filed by 76-year-old Martha Avila’s daughter and her husband, who allege a “design defect” involving a Tesla and a failure to warn. The suit alleges negligence against Tesla and the driver, Michael Butler.
Butler “stated he was operating with an automated driving assistance system engaged at the time of the crash,” the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. He showed no signs of intoxication and was cooperative, the Sheriff’s Office said, according to NBC News.
Just after reports of the crash and numerous headlines that immediately blamed Tesla’s Autopilot suite, both Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Head of AI Ashok Elluswamy challenged that. Musk said the crash made “no sense” given that Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving do not travel at the speeds the door cameras captured the car traveling at, which Tesla says was 73 MPH.
Tesla finally clarifies fatal Texas crash, confirms driver manually overrode acceleration
Elluswamy also revealed that Tesla data showed Butler overrode the system by pressing the accelerator to 100%, and that the pedal was compressed fully even after the car had crashed. Tesla has not released this data to the public, likely because it is communicating with agencies like the NHTSA on an investigation.
The suit uses a Washington Post analysis of government data that “identified at least 17 fatal incidents linked to Tesla Autopilot.”
This is far from the first time an accident has been blamed on Autopilot. A fatal crash in Texas was blamed on Autopilot several years ago, but when Tesla released data to the NTSB, which was investigating the crash, Autopilot was not available where the crash occurred, and Autosteer was never enabled, meaning the car was manually controlled at the time of the accident.
“Application of the accelerator pedal was found to be as high as 98.8 percent,” the NTSB said in their findings. The highest recorded speed in the five seconds leading up to the impact was 67 miles per hour. The area where the crash occurred is residential, and Texas State laws… pic.twitter.com/XGD97NHVZ2
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) March 18, 2026
More information on the accident will be released as Tesla works with agencies to find the cause of the crash. From personal experience, it is hard to imagine Tesla Autopilot or FSD operating in this manner. It drives sometimes too cautiously in residential areas in parking lots, at least in my experience. Speeding happens, but at this rate in this type of area, it is hard to believe.
We look forward to more details being released with time.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has awarded the 2025-2026 Tesla Cybertruck crew cab pickup its highest honor: Top Safety Pick+. This marks the Cybertruck as the only full-size pickup to achieve this distinction in recent evaluations.
The award applies specifically to vehicles built after April 2025, following structural upgrades including front underbody reinforcements and footwell modifications.
These changes enabled strong performance in updated crash tests. The Cybertruck earned “Good” ratings in the small overlap front (driver and passenger sides), updated moderate overlap front, and updated side tests—core requirements for the Top Safety Pick+ designation.
It also secured acceptable or good headlights across trims and a “Good” rating for its standard front crash prevention system in pedestrian scenarios, along with acceptable or good performance in vehicle-to-vehicle testing.
The Cybertruck avoided every single pedestrian collision, including:
- Daytime child crossing
- Nightitime adult crossing
- Night parallel adult
In IIHS pedestrian front crash prevention tests, @Cybertruck avoided every single collision – daytime, nighttime & different angles
It was also the only pickup to earn Top Safety Pick+ (highest award) in 2026https://t.co/BNPqT9TbsW pic.twitter.com/M6nwDisBFK
— Tesla (@Tesla) June 24, 2026
In the large pickup category, competitors such as the Toyota Tundra received only a standard Top Safety Pick, while the Ford F-150 and Ram 1500 did not qualify for either award. This positions the Cybertruck as a standout in occupant protection and crash avoidance among its peers.
Credit: IIHS
Ironically, the same vehicle celebrated for superior U.S. safety performance remains banned from public roads in the United Kingdom and much of Europe. Regulators there cite the Cybertruck’s sharp external edges and highly rigid stainless-steel construction as failing pedestrian-protection standards. European and UK rules require rounded surfaces on protruding parts to minimize injury risk in collisions with vulnerable road users.
Critics also point to the truck’s substantial weight and unyielding body structure, which some argue could transfer more force to other vehicles or pedestrians rather than absorbing it.
Tesla’s engineering philosophy underpins the Cybertruck’s strong IIHS results. The vehicle features a distinctive stainless-steel exoskeleton made from ultra-hard 30X cold-rolled stainless steel. This provides exceptional structural rigidity and a robust safety cage that resists deformation in side impacts and rollovers.
Engineers designed integrated load paths to channel crash forces away from the occupant compartment while allowing controlled energy absorption in key zones. Post-April 2025 refinements to the front underbody further optimized performance in overlap crashes.
Complementing the passive structure is Tesla’s advanced active safety suite, including the standard Collision Avoidance Assist system with automatic emergency braking. This contributed directly to the vehicle’s strong front crash prevention scores. The skateboard platform and low center of gravity also enhance stability and handling, reducing the likelihood of certain crashes.
The IIHS recognition highlights how Tesla’s combination of high-strength materials, structural innovation, and software-driven safety systems can deliver top-tier protection in rigorous testing. While global regulatory differences on design and pedestrian interaction continue to limit the Cybertruck’s availability outside North America, its U.S. safety credentials set a new benchmark for full-size pickups.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Elon Musk confirmed Starmind as SpaceX’s AI satellite constellation name, targeting one million orbital compute nodes.
Elon Musk confirmed that Starmind will be the official name of SpaceX’s planned AI satellite constellation, following a trademark filing by xAI that surfaced earlier this week. Starmind is what’s being described to the FCC as a constellation of up to one million AI satellites
It’s worth noting that SpaceX’s Starlink communication satellite and Starmind are built on the same orbital infrastructure concept but serve entirely different purposes. Starlink is a connectivity network, with satellites receiving and relaying data between points on Earth, and functioning as a high-speed internet backbone in space. The satellites themselves do not process or think, and move information from one place to another, the same function a fiber cable performs underground.
SpaceX just forced Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to team up for the first time in history
Starmind, on the other hand, is something completely different, and tather than moving data, its satellites would compute data through artificial intelligence and directly in orbit using onboard processors powered by large solar arrays. Where a Starlink satellite is essentially a very fast pipe, a Starmind satellite is a server. The practical implication is that Starmind would allow AI models to run inference, process queries, and generate outputs from space, then beam results down to users anywhere on Earth within milliseconds, and without the data ever needing to travel to a terrestrial data center.
Starship will be able to carry 30 to 50 AI1 satellites per launch, delivering the equivalent of dozens of server racks per flight, with no land acquisition, no power grid approval, and no cooling infrastructure required on the ground.
SpaceX is pursuing this new technology as terrestrial data centers are running into hard limits such as lack of physical space, community opposition, and power and water consumption at a scale that is increasingly difficult to permit. Space has unlimited solar power, natural vacuum cooling, and no zoning boards. Musk said in a June 8 video presentation that he expects space to become the lowest-cost location to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Two AI1 prototypes are scheduled to launch in early 2027, with volume production targeted for the end of that year at a new facility called Gigasat.
The real world applications Starmind enables extend well beyond powering Grok. A constellation of orbiting AI processors could run inference workloads for any paying customer, anywhere on Earth, with latency measured in milliseconds rather than the seconds associated with ground-based cloud routing across continents. Starmind, if it scales as described, would make SpaceX the landlord of AI compute the same way Starlink made it the landlord of satellite internet.
Tesla and driver sued by family of woman killed in Texas crash: what we know
Tesla Cybertruck is officially the safest pickup, IIHS says
