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Trump adds pro-SpaceX commercial space advocate to NASA transition team
After pulling over billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to his overall White House transition team, President-elect Donald Trump has made another Elon-Musk-connected team addition, this time to his NASA transition team. The addition of Dr. Greg Autry comes as good news for SpaceX and commercial space fans overall.
Dr. Autry, an Assistant Professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California, focuses his research on innovation policy and government impact on entrepreneurism, with “new space” as a particular area of interest since 2003. He currently sits on the editorial board of the New Space Journal and, along with having published in several major news outlets, was the lead author on a report for the FAA Offices of Commercial Space Transportation analyzing the competitive advantage of the United States in the human spaceflight market.
In early September, Dr. Autry published an op-ed on SpaceNews.com advocating for the future of private space exploration despite the recent SpaceX launch pad anomaly. In the piece, he defended SpaceX’s 93% launch success rate compared to NASA’s 91% overall, and encouraged continuing support of the developments being made in commercial space programs using history as a guide for the potential advancements.
Further in favor of SpaceX, Dr. Autry outlined his policy recommendations for the incoming presidential administration in his mid-October Forbes article. In the piece, he advocated for the complete defunding of NASA’s Space Launch System, citing the high budget allotment for the program which has failed to keep up with the commercial space company technologies of SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Other team members added for Trump’s NASA transition are Steve Cook of Dynetics, a corporate vice president heavily involved in the AR-1 engine to replace the current Russian-made RD-180 being used by United Launch Alliance, and Jack Burns, a major advocate for lunar-based missions.
As is the case with other government departments, NASA will be making top level administration changes during the presidential administration transition, something that will have major impacts on the direction the agency will take in the coming years.
For historical context, NASA underwent a major change in direction under President Obama when the moon-focused Constellation program was canceled and the space shuttle was retired, temporarily handing human trips to the International Space Station over to the Russians via purchased rocket seats. The idea was for money to be invested into NASA’s commercial space program, thus majorly benefiting companies like SpaceX, but the plan was rerouted in Congress, and the birth of the Space Launch System came from political maneuvering over economic concerns. The SLS mission has now been directed towards deep space exploration and included as part of NASA’s “Journey to Mars”.
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It’s almost anyone’s guess where things will head policy-wise under President Trump, but the direction seems to be circling three goals: the restoration of U.S. leadership in human spaceflight, a focus on deep space exploration over Earth-focused missions, and breaking down barriers hindering commercial space programs. While there are varying voices included on Trump’s transition team, having a strong advocate for the benefits of commercial space flight is welcome news.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
