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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.
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’
