Earth is dynamic, not just the landscape but also its internal workings. The magnetic poles flip, it bleeds lava, and the crust trembles; it’s a misconception that we are on solid ground. Earthquakes happen frequently. Most of the time we cannot feel them, but occasionally there’s one that really rocks the surface.
Soon after I took on the Grand Canyon in my solo hike, the Earth’s crust had stressed itself out and released enough energy to roll the ground for hundreds of miles. It was a glorious 7.1 magnitude quake, equivalent to the energy of 45 atomic bombs. For whatever reason, earthquakes don’t frighten me. Maybe it was the rocket launches I’ve experienced? Perhaps all the hurricanes? If you’re close enough to a rocket launch in Florida, you can feel the ground shake. It’s definitely a thrill!
One-hundred forty five miles (233 kilometers) away and 5 miles (8 kilometers) in depth, a fault had dislocated in an area called Searles Valley. Luckily, this was within driving distance and the area accessible to me. On a quest for knowledge and to feel the planet’s rhythm once again, I set off to the epicenter using an app of the location. I brought camping gear with me like last time, ready to explore the area and stay the night as close to the epicenter as possible while hoping for a night full of rumbling.
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- Crews in Ridgecrest repair the roads after an earthquake. | Image: Tom Cross
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- Crews in Ridgecrest repair the roads after an earthquake. | Image: Tom Cross
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- Crews in Ridgecrest repair the roads after an earthquake. | Image: Tom Cross
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- Crews in Ridgecrest repair the roads after an earthquake. | Image: Tom Cross
Destruction from the quake was visible on the drive to the epicenter. A small town called Ridgecrest took the brunt of the force because it’s established along the fault. Driving through the town, crews were cutting large sections of road where it had cracked and were completely repaving the area properly rather than just smoothing out the fracture; I was impressed to see them put that much work into a repair. On either side of the road, the ground was noticeably lifted from the rolling shockwave. Homes in the location had freshly collapsed walls, and a gas station had sunken into the ground a few inches, yet it was still pumping gas and collecting payment even though it had no power or water. The store clerk sat outside in a chair turning customers away. Grocery stores were still open but were missing ceiling tiles, and certain aisles were closed for cleaning.
While eating lunch in a store, I felt a bump at the table and the visible water pipes in the ceiling were swaying. Something had slipped off a shelf and shattered glass on the floor. This was one of the many aftershocks that I was pursuing!
A dry lake was as close as I could get to the epicenter. Unusual rock formations made of calcium carbonate called tufa that formed 10,000 years prior when water filled the basin were scattered along the landscape. Now I was walking through them, investigating changes caused by the earthquake and hoping to feel aftershocks in this area. I discovered a crack in the dense tufa and put my fingers inside. Abandoned railroad tracks offered an opportunity to feel the vibration along a great distance, so I lay down on the steel quietly for awhile.
As night approached, I set up a camera to shoot time-lapse of the Milky Way, parked my vehicle nearby, and put together a sleeping arrangement on the roof. Throughout the night I watched meteors burn up in the atmosphere with the awesome backdrop of our galaxy that’s thousands of light years in visible depth. I thought of the reality that I’m one of many creatures created by the cosmos, floating in a sea of energy swirling around on a rock enveloped in gas we breathe. Life is extraordinary. Where else is it located?
An app on my phone pinged, signaling an earthquake had just occurred, and my spaced out thoughts had come back to the ground. I paid attention to the motion of my vehicle; certainly the rocking could be better felt due to the suspension. For the remainder of the night I allowed my body to sense the silent rumblings of the earth while I’d guess the magnitude. Two minutes after each quake, my phone would ping and display the stats; I’d study them to increase my understanding of the energy I experienced.
I enjoyed the bumping and rocking while watching the sky rotate above. For the first time, I immersed myself into a dynamic experience of our planet’s movements on the ground and in space. Some of the most incredible locations have been formed by the destructive forces of earthquakes.
In next week’s blog, I take a trip into the nearby snow-capped mountains and witness the beauty created by natural disaster. Stay tuned!
Don’t miss Tom Cross | Behind the Lens
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.
Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”
This is the future we shall bring into being pic.twitter.com/8aD0w8MDVc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2026
The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.
This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.
What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.
That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.
Elon Musk
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Tesla is now shipping Cybercabs from Giga Texas with Starlink hardware built in as standard.
Tesla’s Cybercabs are now leaving Gigafactory Texas with Starlink hardware on the rear hatch in significant numbers, according to drone footage captured Tuesday by longtime Austin drone observer Joe Tegtmeyer. Production at the factory ramped back up after the Labor Day weekend, and his flyover of the outbound lot showed rows of gold Cybercabs alongside Model Y Long Wheelbase units, many carrying the satellite module for the first time as standard equipment rather than a one off retrofit.
Giga Texas today is busy with production coming back up following the long weekend. Of interest today in the outbound lot is the appearance of hundreds of Mode; YL’s and many more Cybercabs and for the 1st time equipped with the Starlink module one the hatch in big numbers.
At… pic.twitter.com/G9yl6s51m4
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 8, 2026
Tesla first showed Starlink built into an actual Cybercab on August 10, when the Robotaxi account posted images of a single gold unit with the antenna integrated into the roofline above the taillights and called it the first Cybercab with Starlink integration. That followed a July reveal where Tesla and Starlink jointly posted a cutaway diagram of the antenna placement without a working vehicle to back it up. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI software, said at the time that the connection isn’t required for the car to drive itself. It exists mainly for navigation, customer service and keeping tabs on the fleet.
Musk has made a different case in public. During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, he said the company can’t afford robotaxis stranded in what he called “Bermuda Triangles of lack of cellular connectivity,” and he separately claimed on X that Starlink will eventually reach every Tesla built, calling it the only way to deliver high bandwidth to billions of vehicles. He has also pitched the antenna as an entertainment upgrade, telling riders they would be able to stream 4K video or play games during a trip.
The rollout has moved fast since. Robotaxi service opened to the public in Austin on September 3, and Cybercabs had already been spotted with Starlink hardware in Houston and near Miami International Airport in the weeks before Tuesday’s factory footage showed the module shipping at volume rather than on scattered test units. Whether the satellite link earns its keep is still an open question. Tesla’s unsupervised service currently runs in dense metro geofences in Texas and Florida, markets where cellular coverage is already strong, which is not where the rural dead zones Musk describes tend to show up.
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
