AINEWS
The MRAP, a 600 pound door armored truck, is being replaced by Cybertrucks for pad rescue on Crew 13, and NASA calls the swap routine even though the truck has 11 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recalls.
A Tesla Cybertruck will replace the MRAP. The agency says the trade is not a protection downgrade. The bet: a Cybertruck recalled eleven times for problems including a stuck accelerator will never be needed in a real evacuation.
NASA took that position at an August 3, 2026, press conference covering the Crew-13 launch, which is targeted for no earlier than 12 September 2026. Jones and Joel Montalbano, the agency's deputy associate administrator for the Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, both said they were not aware of any vehicle modifications.
NASA is leaving behind the MRAP, short for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle. In a 2015 NASA post the agency described the rescue truck's doors as weighing 600 pounds and its armor as thick enough that the vehicle "can function as a bunker on its own." That is the baseline a Cybertruck replaces for the first time on a US crewed launch.
The reason is operational. Cybertrucks accelerate faster than MRAPs and are easier to operate in gloves and a pressure suit. A SpacePolicyOnline report on the press conference also tied the swap to a resource-decoupling problem: the February 2026 overlap of Crew-12 and Artemis II ground operations strained MRAP availability, and moving pad rescue to a SpaceX-provided "private rescue capability" stops the cadence conflicts that produced that strain.
Houston Public Media's account of the same press conference made SpaceX's pitch plainer. Pad rescue exists to clear the area near a booster that is not behaving as expected. The faster a vehicle can move suited crew out of the blast danger zone, the less armor that vehicle has to carry to do its job.
The Cybertruck's reliability record is exactly the thing NASA is buying into. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has issued 11 recalls on the vehicle since launch. Two of them speak directly to a pad-escape failure mode: an accelerator pedal that can become trapped in the interior trim and stay partially pressed, and exterior trim panels that can detach while the vehicle is moving. Owners have also reported body rust forming under the stainless-steel skin. None of these are recovery-vehicle-class events on their own, but a stuck accelerator during a real escape run is.
As of the press conference, SpaceX had flown 90 Falcon missions in 2026, all of them reaching orbit. Crew Dragon has not aborted during a launch attempt in operational service. The trade: a Cybertruck has to clear suited crew out of the blast zone faster than the MRAP did, not absorb a direct blast.
Crew-13 is the test. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney will command and pilot, with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov rounding out the crew. They launch on a Falcon 9 aboard Crew Dragon "Grace." Watkins is set to become the first NASA astronaut to fly twice on a Crew Dragon; her 2022 Crew-4 mission flew on Dragon Freedom.
NASA's bet is sound if the use-case math is right and unsound if it is not. The agency has not asked, and the press conference did not produce, a published comparison of a stock Cybertruck's blast and armor survivability against the MRAP it replaces. The comparison is the missing piece, and only an independent armor or blast engineer can supply it.
The recall record exists, and it is not reassuring on the specific failure mode that matters most. A The Register analysis of the same press conference surfaced the 11-recall figure and the stuck-accelerator complaint, and the framing there is what readers without the technical detail will likely encounter first. NASA's case is that the trade is acceptable because the scenario is improbable. Outside scrutiny arrives with Crew-13's 12 September launch.