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Who’s Coming, Who’s Going at Tesla Motors
Tesla has had two senior employees depart recently, but has acquired the services of Felix Godard, designer to the upcoming Porsche Mission E sports car.
Working at Tesla could be a dream job. It is one of the most high profile and innovative companies in both the tech and automotive worlds, but with that also comes high stresses.
Elon Musk is known to demand a lot of his people. Some get burned out after a while. Others just want a fresh set of challenges. One of those is Riccardo Biasini. He joined Tesla in 2011 and worked his way up in the company to the senior system engineer leading the company’s vehicle propulsion team.
SpaceX and Tesla rated most meaningful work in high tech. Also, most stressful, but that goes with the territory. https://t.co/y8s4UdMF5z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2016
Biasani has just announced he is leaving the company to head up the AI unit at George Hotz’s start-up, Comma.ai. Hotz says his company will soon offer aftermarket systems that bring lane keeping and automatic braking to new cars. He promises his system will outperform any others on the market — including Tesla’s Autopilot.
According to Forbes, Hotz is using an Acura ILX as his test vehicle. It is equipped with 6 cameras, Lidar, and radar. A computer with a Nividia graphics card resides in the trunk and coordinates the inputs from all devices using machine learning algorithms that Hotz developed.
Also leaving Tesla is James Chen, vice president of regulatory affairs and deputy general counsel. Most recently, Chen spearheaded the operation that defeated the General Motors sponsored legislation in Indiana that would have eliminated the company’s ability to sell cars directly to customers in that state. Chen has not revealed what company he is going to next.
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On the plus side, Tesla has hired Félix Godard, the designer for the interior of the futuristic Porsche Mission E electric sports car. Godard will play an important role in designing the interior of the Model 3. At is reveal, the Model 3 featured on a minimalistic dashboard unlike any seen on a production prototype before.
Tesla has confirmed that dashboard is what will be in the Model 3 when it rolls off the assembly line. When Porsche revealed a prototype of the Mission E, it had this to say in a press release. “Instruments are intuitively operated by eye tracking and gesture control, some even via holograms — highly oriented toward the driver by automatically adjusting the displays to the driver’s position.”
Elon Musk has hinted that Phase 2 of the Model 3 reveal — scheduled to take place closer to the date when production begins — will be more astounding than Phase 1. The Porsche Mission E concept may offer an important clue as to what Tesla has in mind for the final production version of its car. A full head’s up display spread across the entire windshield? Holograms? Imagine a $35,000 sedan that has the same technology as the most advanced Porsche in history.
Anytime someone leaves Tesla, there are stories about poaching and outrageous signing bonuses. The process works both ways, with the company attracting talent from other companies and some of its employees finding the grass is greener elsewhere. Tesla probably won’t miss a beat from the departure of Ricardo Biasini or James Chen. But the arrival of Félix Godard suggests exciting times ahead for Tesla.
Source: BGR, Forbes
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 shed two new bits of detail on Starship following its 13th test launch, which was an overwhelming success.
SpaceX launched Starship for the 13th time last Friday after two delays: one on Monday when several Raptor engines did not ignite, and another on Thursday due to unfavorable weather conditions in Starbase, Texas.
The launch was overwhelmingly successful. SpaceX was able to complete a necessary test of the heat shield tiles by increasing the acceleration of Starship from launch throughout the flight; 20 Starlink v3 satellites were released with no issue; the Super Heavy Booster landed safely in the Gulf of America, Ship successfully reignited engines while in space; and it also splashed down without incident in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Nevertheless, more details are coming out about Starship, and Musk is doing the talking.
Starship Will Be Retrieved in the Ocean
Musk revealed on Tuesday night that Starship would be recovered by a ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX routinely tries to recover Starship after splashdown in an effort to find out more about the flight by examining the spacecraft afterward.
We’re sending a ship out to recover Starship https://t.co/fUqUZTITO9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2026
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This helps engineers find out more about why things might have happened, allows them to examine any potential damage or anomalies that might have occurred, and increases the chances of an even more successful flight next time thanks to the additional information recovered.
Ship Could Have Been Caught by Tower Arms, Musk claims
Musk has already indicated that SpaceX will plan to attempt a catch of Starship with the 14th test flight. While this would be a major accomplishment, it would be an expected next step, considering the fact that the Super Heavy Booster has already been caught by the chopsticks on numerous occasions.
The ship landing was precise, meaning that it would have been caught by the tower arms https://t.co/6nbNrRfX9P
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2026
A ship catch would be a great indication of where SpaceX stands in terms of reusability and launch cadence. A successful catch with relatively no incidents would be a good sign that SpaceX is nearing a more frequent launch of Starship, but also that the reusability of the massive rocket would be something many would expect in the near future.
It is a necessity to make life multiplanetary.
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Elon Musk has updated his timeline for when humans will walk on Mars and for when ships will simply get there.
The objective of getting to Mars has been one of Musk’s biggest goals since becoming a serial entrepreneur and realizing that time on Earth is limited. Musk has said several times he hopes to die on Mars, and not by impact.
Musk now believes that people will be on Mars in “roughly 5 to 7 years.” He said that a Mars lander will get there “a few years sooner.”
People on Mars in roughly 5 to 7 years.
Mars lander a few years sooner.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2026
The response from Musk comes after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that SpaceX’s biggest priority is the Moon and not Mars. Because of this, Isaacman conceded that he believes nuclear power and propulsion investments will provide “potentially the pathway with the fewest miracles required to put four people on Mars in the next 10 to 15 years.”
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Of course, this is what NASA can do through taxpayer funding and nuclear investments, he added.
Musk’s grand ambitions are much more optimistic than most, and it is certainly a double-edged sword. This is not the first time timelines for Mars have been somewhat lofty, especially to those normal thinkers like you and me, not super geniuses like Musk.
In fact, the SpaceX and Tesla frontman has said on at least a dozen occasions that we could be on Mars in the coming years. Musk said 2020 would be the big year as early as 2009. In 2020, he was “highly confident” of a landing in 2026, and had even said 2024 in a best-case scenario.
The point is, the range has varied, and it’s anyone’s guess when we’ll get there. This latest adjustment to the timeline is typical of Musk, and while the Moon has seemingly taken priority over Mars, it is still worth mentioning that the ultimate goal is to make life multiplanetary, and it starts potentially with the Red Planet.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Elon Musk sheds two new bits of detail on Starship after 13th test launch
