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SpaceX drone ship departs for upgraded Cargo Dragon launch debut
SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) has departed Port Canaveral ahead of an upgraded Cargo Dragon spacecraft’s Falcon 9 launch debut.
Scheduled to lift off no earlier than (NET) 11:39 am EST (16:39 UTC) on Saturday, December 5th, SpaceX’s 21st NASA Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) launch will mark several major firsts.
First and foremost, CRS-21 will debut an upgraded Cargo Dragon spacecraft. Derived from Crew Dragon (also known as Dragon 2), Cargo Dragon 2 will also dock with the ISS, utilizing a smaller docking (versus berthing) port that unfortunately limits the width of cargo Dragon will be able to deliver. Aside from improved reusability, SpaceX’s newest cargo spacecraft will otherwise be largely the same as Dragon 1 as far as cargo delivery goes.
Compared to SpaceX’s 20 CRS1 space station resupply missions, Cargo Dragon 2’s CRS2 launches will also be substantially more expensive, on average, though still NASA’s most affordable option. SpaceX executives have explained that cost increase as a result of the company’s growing confidence and greater awareness of its competition. NASA has only guaranteed six CRS2 contracts for three selected providers, leaving the space agency a great deal of leverage to analyze the playing field and issue at least as many new contracts to cover International Space Station (ISS) operations from at least 2023 to 2025.
Thanks to experience gained through joint NASA-SpaceX CRS1 contract modifications that allowed multiple Falcon 9 booster and Cargo Dragon capsule reuses, reusability – while again not built in to SpaceX’s CRS2 contract – will assuredly play a central role for most of the company’s future space station cargo missions. Unlike Dragon 1, which was only modified for reuse with an upgrade that debuted several launches into CRS1, the Dragon 2 capsule is designed from the start to fly at least five orbital missions.
NASA has already given SpaceX permission to reuse a more complex Crew Dragon spacecraft to launch astronauts as early as March 2021, so it’s all but guaranteed that the space agency will allow SpaceX to extensively reuse Cargo Dragon 2 capsules to complete its CRS2 contract. If so, it will likely save NASA a significant amount of money when it comes time to award additional CRS2 contracts.
Equally significant, NASA also appears to be upgrading its confidence in SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rockets with CRS-21, permitting the company to reuse Falcon 9 booster B1058 on Cargo Dragon 2’s launch debut. While B1058 did support SpaceX’s Crew Dragon astronaut launch debut back in May 2020, the booster has since flown two more commercial missions, carrying a South Korean communications satellite and a batch of SpaceX’s own Starlink spacecraft in July and October. CRS-21 will be the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to fly a space agency mission with a booster that’s supported non-NASA missions, implying a new level of trust in SpaceX.
It will also be the first time in history that a new spacecraft has debuted on a flight-proven rocket, as well as NASA’s first flight on both a twice-flown and thrice-flown Falcon 9 booster. If CRS-21 is a sign of things to come, life will be made much easier for SpaceX, reducing or eliminating the need to operate separate booster fleets for commercial and institutional customers.
Finally, CRS-21 will also mark the first time in history that two SpaceX Dragon spacecraft have been in orbit – or at the ISS – at the same time. A senior SpaceX Dragon manager recently noted that after Crew-1’s successful November 15th launch, all future Dragon launches would leave the company with two Dragons in orbit.
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Elon Musk is, in many respects, one of the biggest and most influential figures in modern-day artificial intelligence.
Given that Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are all looked at in their respective fields as leaders to an extent, each of them has a heavy influence on the future of AI, even though two of them are not thought of, at face value, as AI companies.
Musk has grand expectations for what is to come with AI, not only as a form of assistance to make human lives easier, but to make humans multiplanetary and solve some of the biggest issues that face us today. But even he is astounded by AI’s pace of progress.
He believes that in two years, AI will be so mind-blowing it might be unrecognizable.
Given that AI from 2 years ago feels so old that it should be in a museum, then obviously AI 2 years from now will be mind-blowing https://t.co/TcsKZ8o8OE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2026
This progress can be seen in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most popular way people have shown AI’s progress, especially on social media, is through an incredibly arbitrary way of watching Will Smith eat spaghetti:
The progression in AI of Will Smith eating spaghetti (2023 – 2026) pic.twitter.com/VDv82mB5gs
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) February 10, 2026
This is a great way to show people how AI is improving, especially from a perspective that examines how it can manufacture images and video from prompts. AI is an incredibly complex concept, however, and it goes much deeper than Will Smith eating Italian food.
Musk’s most widely adopted method of AI is likely Tesla Full Self-Driving, which impacts millions of people as they utilize it to increase safety with their travel. Musk has routinely pushed incredibly aggressive timelines for self-driving, especially unsupervised.
Perhaps this perspective is why he feels that things will be solved in a timeframe that is much more aggressive than most of us would think. Regardless, the progress of AI is moving fast, and it seems that Musk’s expectations for it could be high.
But if it can actually achieve full-length motion pictures and even more realistic production value, it will be hard to distinguish between reality and AI very soon.
Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.
In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.
10 million vehicles produced globally.
Congrats to all Tesla teams! pic.twitter.com/JkcraR63bs— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) July 30, 2026
Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.
The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.
Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.
This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.
Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.
Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk has a crazy prediction about AI in two years
Tesla just built it 10 millionth car
