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SpaceX still eyeing back-to-back East and West Coast launches this weekend
Update #2: SpaceX’s Starlink-15 launch has slipped to Sunday, November 22nd, roughly 36 hours after Sentinel 6A’s scheduled November 21st launch.
Update: Three days later, there’s still a chance that SpaceX will be ready to attempt back-to-back East and West Coast Falcon 9 launches on Saturday, November 21st, potentially launching twice in exactly ten hours if schedules hold.
On the West Coast, a new Falcon 9 rocket has successfully completed a routine static fire test and is likely just hours away from rolling out to SpaceX Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E). The rocket is scheduled to place the international Sentinel 6A oceanographic satellite into a polar orbit, followed by booster B1063’s first landing attempt at Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4).
On the East Coast, Falcon 9 and 60 more Starlink v1.0 satellites went vertical at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) Launch Complex 40 (LC-40) pad. It’s unclear if SpaceX will perform a prelaunch static fire test despite the fact that the Starlink-15 mission will be booster B1049’s seventh flight – a first for SpaceX and orbital-class reusable rocketry.
Oddly, SpaceX has yet to update its website with details or confirmation of the two back-to-back launch attempts, raising the possibility of one or both being delayed, but hardware at the pad remains an unequivocal confirmation that at least one of the missions is close to liftoff. As usual, whenever Sentinel 6A and Starlink-15 do launch, SpaceX will host an official webcast on its YouTube channel.
SpaceX appears to be on track to attempt two separate Falcon 9 launches and landings within the same ten-hour, also marking the company’s 14th Starlink mission this year and first West Coast launch in a year and a half.
After overcoming a range of minor issues, replacing two Falcon 9 booster engines, effectively reactivating a dormant orbital launch complex, and doing all of the above to a standard capable of satisfying NASA’s strict expectations, SpaceX is officially set to launch the Sentinel 6A oceanography satellite no earlier than (NET) 9:17 am PST (16:17 UTC) Saturday, November 21st. The twist: Falcon 9 will be launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), California for the first time since June 2019.
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Meanwhile, back on the East Coast, SpaceX has successfully completed Crew Dragon’s operational astronaut launch debut, clearing the company to focus on its third November mission – Starlink V1 L15. Set to be SpaceX’s 14th dedicated Starlink launch in 2020 alone, Starlink-15 is currently scheduled to lift off NET 10:17 pm EDT (03:17 UTC) on November 21st – coincidentally exactly ten hours of Falcon 9’s Sentinel 6A launch.
SpaceX’s Sentinel 6A launch will debut new Falcon 9 booster B1063, first spotted on its way from the company’s McGregor, Texas test facilities to VAFB in late August. Unfortunately, when Falcon 9 booster B1062 suffered a last-second abort on October 2nd, the Merlin 1D booster engine issue ultimately deemed responsible for the anomaly was also traced back to B1061 and B1063.
As a result, SpaceX chose to replace an average of two Merlin 1D engines on each of the three boosters in a process that took several weeks. Additional difficulty was added due to the fact that all three new boosters were assigned to high-profile missions for exceptionally strict NASA and US military customers, necessitating extra caution and verification. Regardless of the hurdles, SpaceX managed to complete an entire complex rocket engine anomaly investigation in less than six weeks, determining the root cause, replicating the failure mode with individual engine static fires, replacing multiple engines on multiple boosters, and recertifying all three boosters for their respective flights.
Falcon 9 B1062 successfully launched the US military’s GPS III SV04 satellite on November 5th, followed by Falcon 9 B1061’s flawless four-astronaut launch on November 15th. Of the three impacted boosters, only B1063 remains and is scheduled to launch just four days from now. Barring surprises, all three will likely support one or several dozen more launches in the coming years.
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s November 21st Starlink-15 launch is expected to feature Falcon 9 B1049 in what will become the first time the same rocket booster flies for the seventh time. In essence, if successful, Starlink-15 will effectively mean that SpaceX is 70% of the way towards achieving its longstanding goal of ten launches per booster.
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
