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How SpaceX is able to achieve its amazing rocket landing accuracy
After SpaceX’s successful and uniquely exciting launch of Taiwan’s Formosat-5 remote sensing satellite, Elon Musk took to Twitter to reveal some fascinating details about the launch and recovery of the Falcon 9 first stage.
Unabashedly technical, the details Musk revealed demonstrate the truly incredible accuracy of Falcon 9’s recovery, honed over 20 landing attempts and numerous modifications to the launch vehicle. The accuracy is best understood within the context of Falcon 9’s scale and the general scope of orbital rocketry.
Touchdown:
Vertical Velocity (m/s): -1.47
Lateral Velocity (m/s): -0.15
Tilt (deg): 0.40
Lateral position: 0.7m from target center— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2017
The first stage of Falcon 9 Full Thrust, currently the active version of Falcon 9, stands 140 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter. If you can, for a moment, picture a 737 airliner, the plane most people have likely flown aboard on domestic flights. The first stage of Falcon 9 is the same length or greater and the same diameter as Boeing’s workhorse airliner. If you are now imagining a 737 landing on its tail aboard an ocean-going barge, that is a great start. The most common version of the 737, the -800, has an empty weight of 91,000 lb, while Falcon 9’s empty first stage is a bit more than half as heavy. With a full load of fuel, Falcon 9 S1 (first stage) weighs nearly three times as much as the 737-800. A single Merlin 1D engine out of Falcon 9’s namesake nine rocket engines has nearly ten times the thrust of the airliner. In short, Falcon 9’s first stage is massive, both extremely light and extremely heavy, and has a mind-boggling amount of thrust.
Falcon 9’s ability to land as accurately as it does is due to a combination of multiple technologies and vehicle modifications. Most visible are S1’s cold gas maneuvering thrusters and aluminum or titanium grid fins, both of which are designed to provide some level of control authority and maneuverability to the first stage during its trip within and without Earth’s atmosphere. At the peak of its trips, the first stage is often completely outside of the vast majority of the atmosphere, meaning that aerodynamic forces are no longer relevant or useful for the vehicle. This is where the cold gas thrusters come in: by carrying their reaction mass with them (the gas), Falcon 9 can maneuver outside of the atmosphere. Once the stage descends into thicker atmospheric conditions, the grid fins deploy and are used like wings to guide the stage down to its landing location, be that on land or at sea. While the gas thrusters lose a lot of their utility once in the atmosphere, they can still be used to add a small amount of control authority when needed. They were famously seen fighting a futile battle to save a first stage aboard OCISLY in 2015.
With this in mind, we can take a closer look at Musk’s technical details. First off, we have a photo of the landed booster, Falcon 9 1038, clearly almost dead center on the droneship Just Read The Instructions. More specifically, Musk reports that 1038 landed less than a single meter off the center of the target, and it landed with less than a single meter per second of latent velocity. The first stage thus managed both a soft and deadly accurate landing after traveling to a height of 150 miles – well into what is technically “space” – at a maximum speed of 1.5 miles per second. Without delving further into the details, this is best summarized as “insanely fast”, and is a bit faster than the X-15 rocketplane’s fastest recorded speed. To better put this into context, Falcon 9 1038 traveled to an altitude of 240,000 meters at a top speed of 2,400 meters per second, turned around, and landed on an autonomous barge about two feet off of its optimal target. It is truly difficult to describe how impressive that kind of accuracy is.
The hypersonic X-15 and Falcon 9 S1, with a 737-800 on the right. All vehicles are to scale. (Wikipedia, SpaceX)
Mr. Musk nevertheless did not let 1038 steal all the fanfare, and revealed that the first stage responsible for launching BulgariaSat-1, 1029, had the honor of being the fastest first stage yet, clocking in at at a truly staggering Mach 7.9, or 2,700 meters per second. That speedy mission marked the stage’s second flight and was SpaceX’s second successful reuse of a Falcon 9. Indicative of the intense speed and heat the core experienced, one of the vehicle’s grid fins was noted to have almost completely melted through. Aluminum’s melting point begins at 1,221°F.
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- The central aluminum grid fin of 1029 features a dramatic lack of several vanes, likely melted off during the intense heat of reentry. Expending older boosters is likely helping SpaceX learn how to preserve Block 5 rockets for multiple high-energy missions. (Reddit, u/thedubya22)
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- SpaceX will move to titanium grid fins in the future, first trialed during 1036’s launch of Iridium-2. (SpaceX)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
