News
SpaceX’s backup Dragon launch pad on track for 2023 debut
SpaceX has begun building a backup launch pad for its Cargo and Crew Dragon spacecraft and says the facility could be ready for use as early as fall 2023.
Reuters first revealed those plans in June 2022. They arose because NASA reportedly told SpaceX it was worried that the company’s first Florida Starship launch site – colocated at the only pad currently able to launch SpaceX Dragon spacecraft – could add too much risk. In September 2022, NASA and SpaceX acknowledged plans to modify LC-40 for Dragon launches and indicated that both parties had decided to proceed.
Four months later, SpaceX and NASA have provided another press conference update. Officials confirmed that construction is already partially underway and reported that LC-40 could be ready to support its first Dragon launch less than a year from now.
The update that's rolling out to the fleet makes full use of the front and rear steering travel to minimize turning circle. In this case a reduction of 1.6 feet just over the air— Wes (@wmorrill3) April 16, 2024
Because Boeing’s comparable Starliner capsule is years behind schedule and still unqualified to launch humans, NASA has relied almost exclusively on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to launch its astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) since 2020. Starliner should be ready to supplement Crew Dragon’s operational astronaut launches by the end of 2023 or early 2024, alleviating some of that pressure.
NASA, however, chose to develop two spacecraft to guarantee that one spacecraft would likely be available if the other was grounded for any reason. Adding the possibility that a giant, new, experimental rocket (Starship) could potentially halt all SpaceX Dragon launches in one fell swoop was apparently one bridge too many for the agency.

SpaceX’s answer to the problem was about as simple, elegant, and cheap as possible. The company has two operational Falcon launch pads in Florida, and it proposed to modify the second pad. SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 pad is located on a secure military base and has an even longer history of successful Falcon 9 launches than Pad 39A. It also appears that its layout will allow SpaceX to add a Dragon access tower without requiring major redesigns or months of downtime.
LC-40 is SpaceX’s most productive launch pad by far, and the company intends to launch up to 100 times in 2023. It’s thus crucial that the pad remains as active as possible as it’s modified – a major challenge. A combination of luck and the fact that the launch pad is already operational is the only reason that’s possible.
Modifying SpaceX’s busiest pad
In theory, SpaceX needs to do relatively little to enable Dragon launches out of LC-40. Dragon spacecraft are processed for flight at a separate facility and only head to the pad once they’re ready to be attached to a Falcon 9 rocket. The biggest modification LC-40 needs is a launch tower, but SpaceX ironically has experience building giant towers in sections – and offsite – through Starship.
LC-40’s Dragon access tower requires far less complex plumbing and should be smaller and easier to prefabricate and assemble. Regulatory documents indicate that the new tower will stand 81 meters (265 feet) tall – almost a third shorter than the 110-meter-tall tower SpaceX modified at Pad 39A for the same purpose. LC-40 will also need a swinging access arm to connect the tower to Dragon’s hatch. That arm can also be constructed offsite, further reducing the amount of downtime required.

The most disruptive modifications may involve LC-40’s transporter/erector (T/E) device, which rolls Falcon 9 out to the pad, raises it vertical, holds it down with giant clamps; and hosts a maze of plumbing that fuels, pressurizes, and powers the rocket. The top of LC-40’s T/E is fitted with a brace designed to support Falcon payload fairings. In comparison, 39A’s T/E was designed with swappable ‘heads’ that allow SpaceX to switch between Dragon and fairing configurations in a matter of days. The top of LC-40’s T/E also appears to be somewhat removable, but SpaceX may still have to halt launches for a few weeks to get the T/E up to spec and modified for Dragon.
SpaceX says that LC-40 will be ready to support its first Dragon launch as early as fall (Q4) 2023. Its first Dragon mission will carry cargo to the ISS, meaning that the tower, arm, and pad will not need to be immediately human-rated. In theory, SpaceX could even launch Cargo Dragon 2 from LC-40 without a tower or arm, as the only purpose of the tower during uncrewed missions is to load volatile cargo at the last possible second. SpaceX could even revert to a practice that dates back to its original Dragon 1 spacecraft and devise a method to late-load cargo while Falcon 9 and Dragon are still horizontal.

The tower and access arm are only essential for Crew Dragon launches, during which astronauts must board the spacecraft a few hours before liftoff. More importantly, the same arm and tower would be used to escape Dragon and Falcon 9 in case of a minor emergency. NASA requires an escape (egress) system to human-rate a launch pad and rocket. SpaceX met that requirement at Pad 39A with a “slidewire basket” system that carries astronauts to a concrete bunker several hundred feet away from the rocket. Before LC-40 can be human-rated, SpaceX will likely need to build the same basket-and-bunker system or come up with a viable alternative.
Once complete, SpaceX will have two pads capable of supporting all Crew and Cargo Dragon launches. With that redundancy in place, NASA should be far more open to regular launches of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket out of Pad 39A. Access to multiple pads will likely be essential for Starship to complete NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, which will culminate in the giant rocket sending humans back to the Moon for the first (and second) time in half a century in the mid-to-late-2020s.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
News
Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.