On August 20th, a member of a local California Facebook group happened to spot a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster in transit, an exceedingly rare sight as of late. Moving east, the booster is almost certainly heading to Florida to support a major cluster of 6-8 launches in Q4 2019. This marks the first time in […]
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According to an August 20th update from the US Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), SpaceX’s next dedicated USAF launch – the third completed GPS III spacecraft – has slipped one month and is now scheduled no earlier than (NET) January 2020. Known as GPS III Space Vehicle 03 (SV03), SpaceX’s next US […]
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While the FAA’s slow pace continues to delay Starhopper’s second major flight test, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that his planned Starship 2019 presentation will also be delayed and will instead follow a major integration milestone for the first orbital-class Starship prototype. That milestone – likely representing the preliminary completion of Starship Mk1’s primary structure […]
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Four and half days after a recent call with FAA officials, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that the company is still waiting for a permit to perform Starhopper’s next major flight test, a 200m (650 ft) hop. Previously expected to occur as early as August 12th, Starhopper – an ungainly testbed for SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft […]
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Speaking at the 2019 AIAA Propulsion & Energy Forum, SpaceX Vice President of Build and Flight Reliability Hans Koenigsmann was significantly more confident that the company is just days or weeks away from wrapping up a serious Crew Dragon failure investigation. On April 20th, flight-proven Crew Dragon capsule C201 experienced a catastrophic failure mode – […]
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After traveling more than 3500 miles (5600 km), SpaceX autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) began its eastbound transit of the Panama Canal on August 18th, placing the vessel roughly two-thirds of the way to its unknown destination. As previously discussed on Teslarati, JRTI’s move came as a bit of a […]
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SpaceX and NASA teams continue to prepare for Crew Dragon’s inaugural crewed launch (Demo-2) to the International Space Station (ISS) slated to possibly – but not likely – occur by year’s end. On Tuesday, an official NASA Twitter account published images of teams from SpaceX and the space agency performing a full rehearsal of crew […]
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Based on some basic analysis of recent photos of SpaceX’s East Coast Starship facility, situated in Cocoa, Florida, SpaceX has almost certainly begun fabricating and staging hardware that will eventually become part of the company’s first Super Heavy booster prototype. This is by no means surprising but it does confirm the reasonable assumption that SpaceX […]
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According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the company’s next major Starhopper flight test is still awaiting FAA approval due to a need for more hazard analysis, presumably required because Starhopper will be traveling much higher than before. On August 9th, SpaceX completed a routine wet dress rehearsal (WDR) with Starhopper, loading the vehicle with propellant […]
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A new generation of space race is currently underway, but this time it’s not a race to determine which country will reach orbit first, but rather which spaceflight company will successfully reach orbit first with the world’s second generation of super-heavy launch vehicles (SHLVs). SpaceX, United Launch Alliance (ULA), Blue Origin, and NASA all have […]
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