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Rocket Lab briefly catches Electron booster with a helicopter on first try
In a significant achievement, public launch provider Rocket Lab has – with a few caveats – successfully used a helicopter to catch the booster of its Electron rocket out of mid-air on the very first attempt.
The company began working on ways to recover and reuse the booster of its tiny Electron rocket in 2019, going back on a promise repeatedly made by founder and CEO Peter Beck in the years prior. Due to just how small the Electron rocket is, it was generally assumed that Beck wasn’t wrong to avoid attempting to recover or reuse its parts of it. However, that attitude quickly changed when the need to ramp up launch cadence became a leading priority. Soon after, Beck revealed that Rocket Lab engineers had looked more carefully at the problem and concluded that Electron booster recovery was more feasible than assumed.
Once the problem was no longer deemed insurmountable, the allure of reuse – intrinsically multiplying the effectiveness of any given production line if done right – was irresistible.
While the change in attitude made Rocket Lab the second company after SpaceX to begin seriously developing the ability to recover and reuse orbital-class liquid rocket boosters, the approach it would need to take for a rocket as small as Electron was almost nothing like that used by Falcon boosters. Instead of multiple in-flight engine ignitions, supersonic retropropulsion, steerable fins, and a propulsive landing, Electron would rely on several parachutes to slow itself down, use small thrusters (not unlike Falcon) for attitude control, and be actively captured out of mid-air by a crewed helicopter.
Ironically, demonstrating the sheer size gap between Electron and Falcon 9, Electron booster recovery more closely resembles Falcon 9 fairing recovery. Weighing in at around one ton (~2200 lb) per half, or about as heavy as an entire Electron rocket booster, each fairing half mainly just controls its attitude with cold-gas thrusters while passively reentering Earth’s atmosphere. Fairing halves then deploy a GPS-guided parafoil and gently splash down on the ocean surface before being fished out of the water by a waiting ship.
That is exactly how Rocket Lab trialed Electron recovery on several prior attempts, fishing intact boosters out of the Pacific Ocean after gentle ocean landings. For a while, SpaceX even attempted to catch fairings out of mid-air – albeit with a highly-modified ship and net instead of a helicopter and hook. However, when the company realized it could easily reuse fairing halves that landed in the ocean, it fully abandoned catch attempts.
In Electron’s case, it’s no surprise that Rocket Lab still pursued catch-based recovery while SpaceX was simultaneously giving up on the practice. Put simply, it would be incredibly difficult to reliably and affordably reuse a liquid rocket booster – and liquid rocket engines especially – after dunking them in saltwater.
That’s also why the success of Rocket Lab’s first operational catch attempt has caveats. While the company did successfully catch the booster out of mid-air, the pilot – who holds final authority for the sake of safety – observed unusual behavior not seen during testing after hooking Electron and chose to release the booster early. Thankfully, it still managed a soft landing in the ocean and was recovered by ship, but despite statements from Beck to the contrary, that seawater exposure will almost certainly make it impossible to fully reuse. To call the attempt a total success, the helicopter would have needed to drop the booster off on the recovery ship’s deck, fully avoiding a bath.
Above all else, even if the catch didn’t last, Rocket Lab successfully launched 34 small satellites and payloads into orbit for several paying customers and briefly caught the booster that launched them with a helicopter. The attempt was arguably far more successful than not and likely leaves Rocket Lab just a little more practice and a few small optimizations away from a perfect recovery. Then the company can shift its focus to the next goal: the first Electron booster reuse.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
