Italians Do it Better…… @KikoMilanoINT @KikoMilanoIT 💜 Makeup: #marcelogutierrez# Hair: #eugenesouleiman# Photography: #rafaelpavarotti# Stylist: #sadie_davies# Sound Design: #stuartpriceofficial# Set design: #maryhoward# Nails: #Naomiyasuda#

Elon Musk posted one word. Grok. He was quoting SpaceX's vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, on a job most people will never think about. An inspector slides a tiny camera down a tube inside a rocket part and searches for anything that does not belong there, a metal shaving or a loose fastener. They call it foreign object debris. One missed piece can destroy an engine. Dontchev described what happens next. "We'll have an inspector go in and borescope a tube, and we find that humans are about 94 percent perfect at finding a piece of it. Grok analyzing the same video is 99.9 percent perfect." The technician still holds the camera. Grok never looks away. Dontchev has spent 16 years at SpaceX. He said the acceleration in engineering this year is unlike anything he has seen in all that time. Work that used to take hours or days now takes seconds or minutes. They have automated visual inspections of Starlink terminals as well, with a similar jump in accuracy. If you only meet AI in a chat window, this can sound like a factory footnote, easy to scroll past. Sit with the numbers. Dontchev talked about a future of thousands of flights a year. At that cadence, leaving a few percent of debris undetected is a mountain of hidden risk. 99.9 percent is a different kind of machine. The obvious place to show off Grok at a rocket company would have been a launch broadcast. They pointed it at the inside of a tube. That is how Elon Musk uses intelligence. He puts it where a mistake is expensive. Dontchev also described what SpaceX has become. Yes, a rocket company. Fundamentally, an infrastructure company, on the ground and in low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon and eventually on Mars. He believes they would have reached the Moon and Mars anyway. Then he added what AI changes: "We're going to get there so much faster." The destination was set long ago. Super intelligence is how the work on the factory floor starts moving at the speed of that plan, and Grok is already watching the footage that used to depend on a tired pair of eyes.

Starship is getting ready to make history in Florida, and SpaceX is preparing for an entirely new era of launch operations SpaceX is entering a six-week gap between Falcon 9 launches from Cape Canaveral as teams focus on preparing Starship for its first launch from Kennedy Space Center SpaceX VP of Launch Kiko Dontchev put it perfectly: "If you haven't seen a signal that it's 'game time' on Starship, that's it" And Starship's launch infrastructure at Pad 39A is now effectively complete, with Gigabay getting its doors next Here's what SpaceX is planning for its first Florida mission: • Starship launches from Pad 39A, the same historic launchpad that sent Apollo 11 to the Moon • Super Heavy returns to Pad 39A for an attempted catch by the launch tower's giant chopstick arms • Starship spends approximately 8–9 hours in orbit, circling Earth about six times while deploying payloads • The spacecraft then returns to Earth, targeting a landing at Starbase, Texas • Boosters and ships will be manufactured in Texas, transported by barge to Florida, and prepared for launch at SpaceX's massive Gigabay facility A gigantic fully reusable rocket launches from Florida, its booster returns directly to the launch tower, and the spacecraft flies around Earth multiple times before landing all the way back in Texas All 14 Starship flights so far have launched from Starbase, Texas Now SpaceX is preparing to expand Starship operations to an entirely new coast, with the first Florida launch targeted by the end of the year Starship's next chapter is going to be even more extraordinary

Falcon 9 just closed a massive chapter of Starlink history in Florida Starlink 10-49 was the last planned Falcon 9 Starlink launch from Florida SpaceX VP of Launch Kiko Dontchev: “From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship” Now the next phase begins • California → Falcon 9 • Florida → Starship Falcon 9 will keep launching Starlink from California But Starlink launches from Florida now transition to Starship Over the last seven years, Falcon 9 flew roughly 260 Starlink missions from Florida’s Space Coast and helped build the largest satellite constellation ever created Falcon 9 built Starlink at massive scale Starship is being built to take that scale far beyond anything Falcon 9 can carry