SpaceX
SpaceX hot-fires Crew Dragon’s Falcon 9 as separate rocket spied in Arizona
A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster has been spotted traveling eastbound through Wilcox, AZ, indicating a shipment from the company’s Hawthorne, CA rocket factory to its McGregor, TX facilities for hot-fire acceptance testing.
Captured by Reddit user codercotton on October 28th, this first stage (S1) is headed to Texas at the same time as SpaceX’s facilities appear to be wrapping up an extended test campaign with the Falcon 9 rocket stages that will launch an uncrewed Crew Dragon on the upgraded spacecraft’s first trip into orbit.
The team at our rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas completed a static fire test last night of the Falcon 9 booster that will launch SpaceX’s first demonstration mission for @NASA’s Commercial Crew Program – one step closer to flying astronauts to the @Space_Station! pic.twitter.com/iDYNoamCvU
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 27, 2018
This duo of Falcon 9 appearances highlights an unusual few months of what is often called “core spotting” by close followers of SpaceX. Typically, SpaceX ships and hot-fire tests a Falcon 9 booster every month, give or take roughly two weeks. It’s clear, however, that the imminent start of Crew Dragon launches under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) has created some unique requirements with respect to both booster, upper stage, and individual engine testing in Texas.
For example, Falcon 9 B1051 – a new booster assigned to Crew Dragon’s first uncrewed demonstration launch (DM-1) – appears to have been testing in McGregor for the better part of three months, apparently including multiple hot-fire tests of the rocket. Prior to Commercial Crew, a nominal round of acceptance testing in McGregor would be expected to last between two and four weeks between arrival and departure. As such, spending three months or more in McGregor is very unusual, particularly for a brand-new booster like B1051.
B1051’s extended period of testing can likely be traced back to two main factors. At a more technical level, B1051 could be the first Falcon 9 Block 5 booster to have SpaceX’s upgraded COPVs (carbon-overwrapped pressure vessels) – bottles designed to hold helium and nitrogen at pressures around 5000 psi (35 MPa) – fully integrated on both the first and second stages. Perhaps not a major technical hurdle for SpaceX, this milestone is undoubtedly one of NASA’s most myopic and obsessive mountains-out-of-molehills in terms of the intense ‘certification’ burdens dumped on SpaceX over the course of CCP. SpaceX has apparently spent at least 1.5 years systematically designing, testing to destruction, and redesigning an in-house COPV, to the extent that CEO Elon Musk described the updated design as “by far the most advanced pressure vessel ever developed by humanity … It’s nuts.”
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- In mid-September, CEO Elon Musk presented an update to BFR in front of Falcon 9 B1054 and at least three other visible boosters. (Eric Ralph)
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- SpaceX’s NASA astronauts pose in front of the main Falcon assembly line, September 2018. (SpaceX)
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- An October 2018 NASA video included this brief glimpse of SpaceX’s assembly line. (SpaceX)
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- Falcon 9 shows off some of its COPVs in a tour of SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory. (SpaceX)
Juggling Falcon 9 tests
Despite the extreme lengths of testing apparently required for the Falcon 9s that will launch Crew Dragon, it can be concluded with some certainty that SpaceX has still managed to fit in normal tests of a number of non-Crew boosters, upper stages, and Merlins. According to the above SpaceX tweet, B1051 is clearly still in Texas and is unlikely to leave for Florida until November (several days are needed to prepare a booster for transport). However, a different booster was spotted heading from California to Texas just this morning.
Further, Falcon 9 booster B1054 – nearly complete and stationed in front of the only real exit route – was spotted in SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory in mid-September, while an unknown first stage was caught departing the factory for Texas roughly two weeks later. Finally, at the same time as the mystery booster was being trucked to Texas, an even more mysterious Falcon 9 – visibly sooty and thus flight-proven – was spotted inside one of SpaceX Hawthorne’s separate refurbishment hangars, with at least three Merlins removed from its octaweb. Perhaps this is somehow related to the Falcon 9 booster (missing four of nine Merlins) headed East on October 28th.
Finally, according to a member of the /r/SpaceX subreddit, a separate Falcon 9 booster apparently arrived at SpaceX’s Vandenberg, CA launch facilities on October 26th, perhaps Falcon 9 B1046.3 preparing to launch for the third time for Spaceflight’s SSO-A rideshare mission, NET November 19.
https://twitter.com/_TomCross_/status/1048483536917823488
As with most things SpaceX, definitive answers are exceedingly rare when it comes to day-to-day operations like Falcon 9 transportation and even official confirmation of the particular boosters involved with any given launch. Understandably, these more esoteric details are probably treated as “need-to-know” only, and while I and many others would love to know, we certainly don’t *need* to know.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
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The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced today that the company will likely attempt to catch the Starship upper stage with its launch tower arms “in a few months.”
In a post on X, Musk wrote, “Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.” He added that the first reflight of a Starship vehicle is expected by the end of 2026 or early 2027, describing it as “a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars.”
Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.
First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the… https://t.co/O5g9pqrzyo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2026
Musk’s prediction comes amid ongoing progress toward full reusability of the Starship system, a two-stage rocket designed for rapid turnaround and dramatically lower launch costs. Catching the upper stage, known simply as “ship,” with the Mechazilla tower’s mechanical arms would mark a major milestone. It would allow both stages to return directly to the launch site for quick refurbishment and reuse, eliminating the need for ocean recovery.
Musk has previously signaled plans for a ship catch. In July, shortly after SpaceX’s wildly successful Starship 13 mission, he stated that the company would attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight unless problems emerged in the mission data review. Earlier comments also outline conditions such as successful soft ocean landings before attempting a land recovery to minimize risk.
SpaceX has solved Starship’s biggest challenge, Elon Musk says
The latest update from Musk adjusts this timeline to a few months, reflecting the iterative nature of the test campaign.
SpaceX has already demonstrated the tower catch technique successfully with the Super Heavy booster on a couple of occasions. The first successful booster catch occurred during Flight 5 in October 2024, when the massive first stage returned to the Starbase pad in Texas and was plucked from the air by the tower arms.
Additional catches followed on later flights, including Flight 7, proving the concept for the booster and building confidence in the system as a whole.
Achieving a similar catch for the upper stage would represent a significant step forward. The ship returns from much higher speeds and greater heat loads after orbital or near-orbital flight. Success would advance SpaceX’s goal of full and rapid reusability, potentially reducing the cost of access to orbit by a factor of 100 or more and supporting ambitions for frequent satellite deployments, lunar missions, and eventual Mars flights.
Musk has long emphasized that true reusability, refueling rather than discarding hardware, is essential for making humanity a multi-planetary species.
As SpaceX continues refining Starship through successive test flights, the coming months will test whether the ambitious catch timeline can be met. The combination of prior booster successes and improving ship landing precision suggests the company is steadily closing in on this historic capability.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
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