Italy's Railway Says It Might Test Musk's Starlink for Projects
'Possible experiments' that may involve 'Starlink satellites for projects by the Group's companies are being evaluated and analyzed,' a representative for Rome-based Ferrovie said in a statement on Saturday.
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Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
SpaceX's Expensive Starship Explosions Are Starting to Add Up
(Bloomberg) -- When one of SpaceX's Starship vehicles burst into flames during a routine fueling test in June, the Elon Musk-led company decided it was time to bring in reinforcements. Why New York City Has a Fleet of New EVs From a Dead Carmaker Chicago Schools Seeks $1 Billion of Short-Term Debt as Cash Gone Trump Takes Second Swing at Cutting Housing Assistance for Immigrants A Photographer's Pipe Dream: Capturing New York's Vast Water System A London Apartment Tower With Echoes of Victorian Rail and Ancient Rome Shortly after the incident, roughly 20% of the engineering group working on the company's flagship Falcon 9 program were reassigned for six months to Starship, a reusable rocket Musk hopes will someday carry humans back to the moon and to Mars, according to people familiar with the company's planning. SpaceX and Musk have a history of tackling engineering problems by throwing additional staff at them: Last year, Boring Co. staff were flown to Las Vegas to get its Prufock machine back online following water damage, according to people familiar with the matter. In 2018, employees of Tesla Inc., Musk's car company, were flown in from across the country to California to help ramp up production of the Model 3. The added muscle for Starship is intended to help improve the craft's reliability and individual component testing, as well as the rate at which the company can produce more of the rockets, one of the people said. SpaceX revealed in August that a pressurized bottle holding gaseous nitrogen had been damaged, causing it to fail and lead to an explosion during fueling. The test-stand incident was the latest in a series of recent setbacks for Starship. In three test launches this year from the company's south Texas facility, two exploded prematurely, and a third failed to deploy its test satellites and spun out of control as it returned to Earth. Those failures have led to increasing questions about whether Starship will be able to fulfill Musk's aims. A New York Magazine story asked: 'Is Elon Musk's Starship Doomed?' SpaceX's impressive track record, including the construction of the Starlink satellite-internet network and its innovation on reusable rocket technology, has had a deep impact on the space industry and US space policy. It has also made SpaceX among the most highly valued private companies in the world. Since its inception, SpaceX has made highly visible test flights that sometimes fail in spectacular ways something of a calling card, with cinematic broadcasts on X, Musk's social-media platform. Its process is designed to learn from failures fast. Yet Starship's recent struggles are revealing how rapidly updating rockets that cost hundreds of millions to make can lead to a cascade of expensive issues. 'When you're changing lots of things in the design at once, all of those ripple effects start adding up,' said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on space policy. 'And it becomes more and more likely that you're not going to catch things and you will have a catastrophic failure during a test flight.' Musk has made bold predictions about Starship. In his telling, it will not only be the first fully reusable orbital rocket, but orders of magnitude cheaper than any rival. Starship would also help meet his loftiest goal: bringing humans to Mars. So far, however, Musk's early projections that it would be safe to carry humans to space by 2023 and land people on the moon as early as this year haven't panned out. 'It's really one of the hardest engineering challenges that exists,' Musk said at an event for Tesla owners in July. 'When we first started talking about Starship, people thought this was impossible. In fact, even within the company, we sort of thought it was impossible.' The misfires haven't deterred investors. The 23-year-old company has continued to raise new capital at rates more befitting a keenly watched startup than a mature, capital-hungry business. Most recently, SpaceX has been planning a sale of stock that would value the company at about $400 billion. Yet there are also signs that for SpaceX to achieve a substantially greater valuation, investors may need to see more progress on Starship. During its latest fundraising effort, in which new investors don't participate, the company had discussed a $500 billion valuation, before lowering it after consultation with backers, people familiar with the matter said. Much will hinge on what happens next. The company is aiming to launch its tenth test flight of Starship as early as Aug. 24. It's possible that SpaceX will be able to continue to absorb more testing failures, but the perception that the company is moving forward in Starship development will be key to their long-term investment success and fulfilling contractual agreements with NASA. Starship Scramble Starship is one large piece of a growing web of programs that make up the SpaceX business plan. The company began with its Falcon rocket program and added the Dragon capsule to deliver cargo and people to space. Now, the majority of its revenue comes from Starlink, which relies on a massive system of satellites in low-Earth orbit that beam broadband internet to Earth. To make Starship work, SpaceX is betting that it can draw resources away from its core rocket program at a time when the company faces weak competition. Some planned launches of SpaceX's Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rockets would potentially be pushed from the end of this year to early 2026 because of the surge of Falcon engineers working on Starship, the people familiar with the company's planning said. SpaceX currently has about 8,000 Starlink satellites aloft, and removing a few launches from the manifest this year wasn't seen as a show-stopping problem, the people said. Maintaining Starlink's robust financial health is important for SpaceX to absorb Starship's costs. Building one of the rockets — comprised of the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster — costs hundreds of millions of dollars, the people said. When one flight fails, the full cost of the lost vehicle falls on SpaceX, they added. The company is on the hook for other costs, too, including any environmental damage caused when failed rockets tumble back to Earth. Getting Starship right is critical to SpaceX's future. Eventually, Starship would be used to launch larger, more powerful Starlink satellites into space. Over time, the company plans to phase out the Falcon 9, making Starship its workhorse rocket, company executives have said. And above all, Starship is meant to be the primary vehicle to start a base on Mars — the reason that Musk has said he created SpaceX in the first place. A SpaceX representative didn't respond to a request for comment. Moon Landing SpaceX maintains that Starship will be landing people on the moon within the next few years. NASA has awarded SpaceX contracts worth roughly $4 billion to use Starship to shuttle astronauts to the lunar surface. To live up to that bargain, SpaceX will need to demonstrate the ability to refuel Starship more than a dozen times in orbit with back-to-back flights. That maneuver has never been performed anywhere near the scale SpaceX needs — and Starship has not yet completed a full orbit of the Earth. The pressure to move quickly has affected decisions about the design of the rocket, according to a person familiar with the process who wasn't authorized to speak publicly about SpaceX's decision-making. For recent tests, SpaceX has used a Starship prototype known as Version 2, or V2. A few of the design decisions for this version have been made in an attempt to save time and money, the person said. It's a type of risk that SpaceX and Musk like to take, but the consequences of these choices can have cascading explosive effects, which in turn have an impact on public perception. 'I don't think anything that's happened with Starship invalidates SpaceX's approach,' Carissa Christensen, founder and CEO of BryceTech, a space analytics and consulting firm, said. 'That said, the persistent failures over multiple tests are happening in a context of One: high visibility. Two: a company that typically moves very fast and very successfully on innovation and Three: in a world where programmatic objectives depend on this vehicle,' notably NASA's moon mission. The frenetic pace of Starship's development may also be a contributing factor to its missteps, with quickly implemented changes sometimes having unforeseen effects on other parts of the vehicle. For instance, a seal on the vehicle's Raptor engines began to fail after SpaceX started adding more propellant on later flights, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to discuss the program's inner workings publicly. Many engineers at SpaceX continue to operate under the philosophy that every launch is a learning opportunity and that it's better to fail prematurely and often than wait years to execute a perfect flight. That thinking has been nurtured by the company's large resources and continuing access to vast sums of capital. SpaceX is known to be 'hardware rich,' meaning that it is consistently producing multiple rocket prototypes that are available to test and tweak. It is committed to testing its remaining inventory of V2 Starships despite a consensus at the company that the design is subpar, according to people familiar with the matter. Engineers think there are lessons to learn from launching the rest of the V2s, the people said. Above all, engineers need to get better data from Starship's heat shield tiles to help perfect the vehicle's tiles haven't returned intact during any flights this year. This year, the White House proposed phasing out the Space Launch System, a massive rocket built by Boeing Co., after is third flight. The White House argued that SLS was overbudget and inefficient, and that it should be eventually replaced with commercial alternatives, with SpaceX's Starship an implied option. Ultimately, Senator Ted Cruz included more money for Space Launch System's fourth and fifth flights after Starship's setbacks sowed doubt that it would be ready to replace the Boeing-made vehicle in the near future. SpaceX has repeatedly proven to its naysayers that it can master what was once considered near-impossible engineering. Now, it needs to regain the confidence of doubters who fear that the company might be stuck in the mud. 'The number one thing is visible, demonstrable progress,' Christensen said. 'I think that's going to go a long way toward not creating negative perceptions. And the optimal outcome from that standpoint would be that they successfully reach space with a Starship return.' Foreigners Are Buying US Homes Again While Americans Get Sidelined What Declining Cardboard Box Sales Tell Us About the US Economy Women's Earnings Never Really Recover After They Have Children Americans Are Getting Priced Out of Homeownership at Record Rates Survived Bankruptcy. Next Up: Cultural Relevance? ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Gizmodo
12 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
11 Years Later, Elon Musk Is Floating the Flying Car Scam Again
'Maybe we'll make a flying car, just for fun,' Elon Musk told the Independent back in 2014. The news outlet insisted at the time that Musk wasn't joking and that he should be taken seriously, given his success with other companies like PayPal. At the time, the Tesla CEO was worth a measly $8.4 billion according to Forbes, a fraction of the $413 billion he currently holds on paper. But when a billionaire CEO says he's going to do something, you're supposed to hear him out. 'We could definitely make a flying car—but that's not the hard part,' Musk was quoted as saying in 2014. 'The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy.' Well, Musk never built a flying car. Probably because there are many more hurdles beyond making them quiet. Piloting them, for instance, poses a huge problem since most people aren't trained to fly. But Musk clearly hasn't given up the dream. Or he hasn't given up the hype, to be more precise. Because Musk loves to toss out wild ideas to get attention and suggested in a new tweet Tuesday that Tesla might be taking up the challenge of flying cars, writing, 'Maybe Tesla should make this.' Musk was quote-tweeting an AI-generated video of a Cybertruck outfitted with wings. The vehicle is seen flying among a post-apocalyptic wasteland 'run by robots,' which seem to be hulking around with no real purpose. Maybe Tesla should make this — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 19, 2025Can Musk pull it off? We're not going to hold our breath. Flying cars have been imagined for well over a century, with inventors and popular tech magazines insisting they were always just around the corner. There was the flying car of 1923, imagined in Science and Invention magazine for 50 years into the future. There were the flying cars of the 1950s, including a prototype that actually flew. And there was good ol' George Jetson in the 1960s, signalling to young baby boomers of the time that a wondrous, shiny future awaited them by the time they got older. The flying car felt inevitable for just about every generation of the 20th century. But nobody could quite pull it off. One of the most infamous flying cars was the flying Pinto of 1973. Two guys founded a company in 1968 called Advanced Vehicle Engineers, abbreviated as AVE, with the dream of mass-producing flying cars in California. The men strapped the wings and rear engine mount of a Cessna plane onto a Ford Pinto, a car that was known to explode even when it stayed safely on the ground. The company founders took off in the vehicle from Ventura County Airport on Sept. 11, 1973, and crashed, killing both men. And yet, flying cars are always just a little beyond the horizon. If you take a close look at the headlines, flying cars are often promised to be just two years away. It's a trend I noted back in 2015 when AeroMobil said their flying car would be released by 2017. I promised at the time that I would literally eat the sun if that car was released to the public. Needless to say, I didn't have to attempt such a feat. It didn't help that AeroMobil crashed during a test flight, though no one died. The company closed down for good in 2023. I'm not going to say that Musk will never create a flying car. They've been built before, and they exist in some form. The thing that doesn't exist is a market for them. People need to get a pilot's license to fly a roadable aircraft. Musk, as the wealthiest person in the history of the world, could easily use some of his $413 billion to build a plane that looks like a Cybertruck. The question is whether he could mass-produce one that people would actually buy. Tesla has sold just 52,000 Cybertrucks since they were released in November 2023, according to CNBC, far short of the 1 million preorders the company got when the truck was first announced in 2019. Part of that might have something to do with the fact that the Cybertruck is much more expensive than what was promised. Or it could be that it doesn't have the range or towing capacity that was initially advertised. Those pathetic sales might also have something to do with those two Nazi-style salutes Musk gave on the day of President Trump's inauguration back in January. Who knows for sure? Whatever it is, building a flying Cybertruck for mass adoption seems extremely unlikely right now or any time in the foreseeable future. Unless Musk was talking less about the flying Cybertruck in that AI-generated video and was referring to the apocalypse part. That seems very doable.
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
3 Serious Tesla Problems Investors Aren't Talking Enough About
Key Points Lawsuits continue to mount for Tesla and Elon Musk. There has been a flurry of executive departures from the company. Losing revenue from zero-emission credit sales is a big blow to EV makers. These 10 stocks could mint the next wave of millionaires › It's been a bumpy ride for Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) investors in 2025. The EV maker is feeling the heat from all angles: media, consumers, analysts, you name it. But for all the consumers leaving the brand, and the media frustrated with Elon Musk's political antics, there are a few problems that have gone unnoticed. Let's take a look at recent lawsuits, the talent exodus, and the loss of valuable zero-emissions credit sales. 1. Lawsuits keep mounting Just earlier this month, Elon Musk and Tesla were sued by shareholders who accused them of securities fraud for hiding the serious risk its self-driving vehicles posed. The proposed class action lawsuit was filed earlier this month and was a black eye after the automaker's first public test of its robotaxis in late June in Austin, Texas. These lawsuits have a wide range of driving forces, many seemingly from the actions of Musk himself. In fact, as of August 2023, Tesla was already party to over 1,750 lawsuits, a big chunk of them in China, where the company is already struggling to protect market share and profits amid a brutal price war and increased competition from domestic Chinese automakers. Also earlier this month, a federal jury found Tesla partly liable in a 2019 car crash that killed a pedestrian and left another badly injured while the automobile was on Autopilot. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $43 million in compensatory damages for pain and suffering, plus another $200 million in punitive damages. These lawsuits are certainly difficult to keep track of, but investors would be wise to remember that these lawsuits are adding up, and some can be very costly in brand image or directly through damages. 2. A concerning talent exodus Amid the flurry of negative news facing Tesla, many investors brushed off the peppering of executive departures throughout the year. But this is a talent exodus that has become, and should be, concerning to investors. Here's a look at key departures, to name a few: Omead Afshar (VP/Head of Sales and Manufacturing, North America/Europe) Milan Kovac (Head of Optimus Humanoid Robot Team) Vineet Mehta (Head of Battery Architecture) Troy Jones (VP of Sales, Service, and Delivery, North America) Pete Bannon (VP of Hardware Engineering, Chip Tech, and Dojo Supercomputer) Piero Landolfi (Director of Service, North America) Those were just a handful of high-profile executives and key personnel departing, and its leaders in key areas such as service, sales, engineering, and even the robotics team. The departures raise concerns about Tesla's leadership, operational challenges, and its current ability to remain competitive. 3. Companies in this space are losing valuable revenue To say that Tesla and some of its EV competitors are about to lose a significant revenue source is putting it lightly. That's right: Tesla, Lucid, and Rivian, among others, are about to see billions of dollars in revenue disappear seemingly overnight as U.S. policy essentially ends the zero-emission credit market. Essentially, the government formerly penalized automakers with lower average fuel economy, or those that produced more gasoline-guzzling vehicles and fewer EVs, but that is no longer. Without penalties being enforced, those companies failing to meet emissions standards are no longer incentivized to purchase zero-emission credits from EV makers to meet standards. And as the market for those zero-emission credits dried up, so too did a significant chunk of revenue for EV makers with a surplus of such credits. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has already stopped issuing compliance letters to automakers that violate the fuel economy standards. What it all means When it rains, it pours -- at least that's how it seemed for most of Tesla's developments this year. But savvy investors would be wise to keep abreast of developments with Tesla lawsuits and its massive talent exodus, in addition to losing valuable revenue from zero-emission credits. These haven't been covered enough and raise uncertainty surrounding the EV maker. Long-term investors should try and weather the storm and stay focused on the company's business long term. But it's also fair to say Tesla is at a crossroads with its future strategy, and investors will have to revisit their investment thesis to see if they are still aligned. Don't miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you'll want to hear this. On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a 'Double Down' stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you're worried you've already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it's too late. And the numbers speak for themselves: Nvidia: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2009, you'd have $472,031!* Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you'd have $43,882!* Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you'd have $671,466!* Right now, we're issuing 'Double Down' alerts for three incredible companies, available when you join , and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon.*Stock Advisor returns as of August 18, 2025 Daniel Miller has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 3 Serious Tesla Problems Investors Aren't Talking Enough About was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
