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Kennedy Space Center wants a SpaceX Falcon 9 core for its Rocket Garden
SpaceX continues to make history with nearly every Falcon rocket launch, so it’s only fitting that one of the most well-known places for preserving rocket history, Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, would be interested in adding one of the company’s recovered cores to a display. SpaceX’s ‘flight proven’ collection is, after all, piling up. Even more relevant, however, is that most of those historic launches took place at KSC’s Launch Complex 39A.
After the Mars-bound enterprise successfully launched its third Falcon Heavy rocket this week, including the self-landed recovery of both side boosters, KSC directly voiced its interest in a SpaceX addition to their famous Rocket Garden display.
“Hint: We think a #Falcon9 and/or #FalconHeavy booster would look great in the Rocket Garden. ? We have the space available and the capability to make it happen,” Therrin Protze, COO of KSC’s Visitor Complex, tweeted to Elon Musk.
The request was quickly met with a positive reception by SpaceX’s CEO, confirming to fans and KSC visitors alike that both parties involved in making a display happen were on board with the idea. “Sure, that would be an honor,” Musk later replied after describing his admiration for the display. “I love the KSC rocket garden. Spent many days there looking at rocket design details.”
Sure, that would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 26, 2019
Kennedy Space Center’s Rocket Garden is currently home to a collection of rockets representing NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, including a Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket like the ones that put the first three American into space – Alan Shepard, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and Ham the chimpanzee. Interestingly enough, while the Rocket Garden represents human achievements in space travel, the addition of a recovered Falcon core would represent the only resident to have actually left Earth, a distinction that wasn’t necessary only a few years ago. In effect, SpaceX’s success in recovering as much of each launch vehicle as possible would cast a new light on Rocket Garden tours with a Falcon in its midst, increasing expectations that one-and-done space travel is now largely a thing of the past.
If all goes well and a deal comes out of the SpaceX and KSC affirmations, the rocket will eventually join a few others in line to dot the country with space-faring Falcon cores. Among those planned is a display at Houston Space Center in Texas via a deal inked in May this year. The rocket is initially planned to be on its side and raised off the ground to allow visitors to walk underneath. One of the special aspects of Falcon’s presence in Houston, itself full of incredible spaceflight history, is why the Center chose to include a SpaceX vehicle in its display collection.
“[We want to]… interpret the history of the space program, but also interpret for the public what is currently going on and where we are going moving on into the future,” William Harris, president and CEO of Space Center Houston, said in an interview with collectSPACE. “With the relationship that NASA has with the commercial sector in support of the International Space Station and other missions, I felt we really needed to begin interpreting that as well.”
SpaceX also has plans for its very own rocket garden alongside an expanded presence at its launch facility in Florida. The company aims to build a dedicated facility for storing, refurbishing and decommissioning Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters and payload fairings “immediately” after construction approvals are granted, according to an environmental assessment published in April 2018. Included in the plan are 50 acres of land, a 130,000 square foot facility (with and additional 100,000 square-foot facility option, if needed), and a place to display decommissioned Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, recovered fairings, and its Dragon spacecraft, assuming they won’t be donated to museums instead.
Until the construction for all planned sites are completed, SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters has the only Falcon on display for visitors to admire. The first booster the company recovered in December 2015 stands 156 feet tall on the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Jack Northrop Avenue, and it has since been the site for an untold number of visitors taking selfies, sharing their excitement for SpaceX’s achievements all over social media. Until more flight-proven cores are distributed, fans will have to just make due watching Falcon cores come home after ocean drone ship landings.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s X goes down as users report major outage Friday morning
Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.
Elon Musk’s X experienced an outage Friday morning, leaving large numbers of users unable to access the social media platform.
Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.
Downdetector reports
Users attempting to open X were met with messages such as “Something went wrong. Try reloading,” often followed by an endless spinning icon that prevented access, according to a report from Variety. Downdetector data showed that reports of problems surged rapidly throughout the morning.
As of 10:52 a.m. ET, more than 100,000 users had reported issues with X. The data indicated that 56% of complaints were tied to the mobile app, while 33% were related to the website and roughly 10% cited server connection problems. The disruption appeared to begin around 10:10 a.m. ET, briefly eased around 10:35 a.m., and then returned minutes later.
Previous disruptions
Friday’s outage was not an isolated incident. X has experienced multiple high-profile service interruptions over the past two years. In November, tens of thousands of users reported widespread errors, including “Internal server error / Error code 500” messages. Cloudflare-related error messages were also reported.
In March 2025, the platform endured several brief outages spanning roughly 45 minutes, with more than 21,000 reports in the U.S. and 10,800 in the U.K., according to Downdetector. Earlier disruptions included an outage in August 2024 and impairments to key platform features in July 2023.
News
Tesla wins top loyalty and conquest honors in S&P Global Mobility 2025 awards
The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.
Tesla emerged as one of the standout winners in the 2025 S&P Global Mobility Automotive Loyalty Awards, capturing top honors for customer retention and market conquest.
The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.
Tesla claims loyalty crown
According to S&P Global Mobility, Tesla secured its 2025 “Overall Loyalty to Make” award following a late-year shift in consumer buying patterns. This marked the fourth consecutive year Tesla has received the honor. S&P Global Mobility’s annual analysis reviewed 13.6 million new retail vehicle registrations in the U.S. from October 2024 through September 2025, as noted in a press release.
In addition to overall loyalty, Tesla also earned the “Highest Conquest Percentage” award for the sixth consecutive year, highlighting the company’s continued ability to attract customers away from competing brands. This achievement is particularly notable given Tesla’s relatively small vehicle lineup, which is largely dominated by just two models: the Model 3 and Model Y.
Ethnic market strength and conquest
Tesla also captured top honors for “Ethnic Market Loyalty to Make,” a category that highlighted especially strong retention among Asian and Hispanic households. According to the analysis, Tesla achieved loyalty rates of 63.6% among Asian households and 61.9% among Hispanic households. These figures exceeded national averages.
S&P Global Mobility executives noted that loyalty margins across categories were exceptionally narrow in 2025, underscoring the significance of Tesla’s wins in an increasingly competitive market. Joe LaFeir, President of Mobility Business Solutions at S&P Global Mobility, shared his perspective on this year’s results.
“For 30 years, this analysis has provided a fact-based measure of brand health, and this year’s results are particularly telling. The data shows the market is not rewarding just one type of strategy. Instead, we see sustained, high-level performance from manufacturers with broad portfolios. In the current market, retaining customers remains a critical performance indicator for the industry,” LaFeir said.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft is heading to jury trial
The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.
OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft will face a jury trial this spring after a federal judge rejected their efforts to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit, which accuses the artificial intelligence startup of abandoning its original nonprofit mission. The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.
As noted in a report from Bloomberg News, a federal judge in Oakland, California, ruled that OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft failed to show that Musk’s claims should be dismissed. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated that while the evidence remains unclear, Musk has maintained that OpenAI “had a specific charitable purpose and that he attached two fundamental terms to it: that OpenAI be open source and that it would remain a nonprofit — purposes consistent with OpenAI’s charter and mission.”
Judge Gonzalez Rogers also rejected an argument by OpenAI suggesting that Musk’s use of an intermediary to donate $38 million in seed money to the company stripped him of legal standing. “Holding otherwise would significantly reduce the enforcement of a large swath of charitable trusts, contrary to the modern trend,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
The judge also declined to dismiss Musk’s fraud allegations, citing internal OpenAI communications from 2017 involving co-founder Greg Brockman. In an email cited by the judge, fellow OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis informed Musk that Brockman would “like to continue with the non-profit structure.”
Just two months later, however, Brockman wrote in a private note that he “cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit. don’t want to say that we’re committed. if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”
Marc Toberoff, a member of Musk’s legal team, said Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling confirms that “there is substantial evidence that OpenAI’s leadership made knowingly false assurances to Mr. Musk about its charitable mission that they never honored in favor of their personal self-enrichment.”
OpenAI, for its part, maintained that Musk’s legal efforts are baseless. In a statement, the AI startup said it is looking forward to the upcoming trial. “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial. We remain focused on empowering the OpenAI Foundation, which is already one of the best-resourced nonprofits ever,” OpenAI stated.
Elon Musk’s X goes down as users report major outage Friday morning
Tesla wins top loyalty and conquest honors in S&P Global Mobility 2025 awards
