Tomorrow is a big day for Elon Musk: his company SpaceX will be launching the new Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, seven years after the vehicle was first announced. It will be a demonstration mission, meant to test if the rocket can send a payload into orbit. And that payload will be Musk’s red Tesla Roadster... driven by a dummy, perhaps.

Musk, being the teasing entrepreneur that he is, just posted three photos to Instagram showing that very Roadster with a noteworthy passenger behind the wheel: a dummy wearing the new SpaceX space suit. The images show the dummy sitting in the car that’s mounted on a dome structure with what looks like cameras attached to the front section. 

It’s not clear if the dummy is actually going up inside the car on Tuesday, but seeing as how SpaceX is launching a car in the first place, anything seems possible. Musk initially teased photos of those space suits last year. They’re designed for people traveling inside the Crew Dragon, a vehicle SpaceX is building to transport NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. If the spacecraft experiences sudden depressurizing, the suits will keep the astronauts alive until they’re able to reach safety.

We’ll be covering the Falcon Heavy launch and posting a piece about what you need to know shortly, so make sure you check back here for all of our updates.

 

 

The latest research note from KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, as obtained and reported on by MacRumors and 9to5Mac, indicates that Apple’s next iteration of the iPhone will have Intel as its sole supplier of cellular modems. This would eliminate Apple’s longstanding reliance on Qualcomm modems for the iPhone, and it’s likely to escalate tensions in the ongoing dispute between Apple and Qualcomm. One of the lawsuits between the two companies, launched by Qualcomm, alleges that Apple improperly shared proprietary code with Intel, and Kuo’s present expectations would align with this idea of Apple and Intel being extremely fond of one another.

Intel’s anticipated exclusivity might be short-lived, however, as Apple could still send some orders Qualcomm’s way as a negotiating concession in trying to end the legal quarrel between the two. Apple is also famously reluctant to rely on any individual supplier too heavily, with its history showing a diversified supply chain for displays and other components. Where it can, the company also prefers to build and design its own parts, as it most recently did by switching to making its own GPU.

As to what all of this behind-the-scenes jockeying means to the end user of Apple’s iPhone X successor family, the answer is “not much.” We can anticipate faster LTE in the next iPhone, no matter if the chip supplier is Intel or Qualcomm. That will be a necessary step to keep pace with the upcoming Galaxy S9 and its Exynos 9 chip, which also promises accelerated cellular connectivity.