Major SpaceX customer Iridium has set an official target date for its eighth and final Iridium NEXT launch, expected to fly on a flight-proven Falcon 9 Block 5 booster as early as December 30th.
With Iridium-8 now tentatively on SpaceX’s launch manifest, the company’s West Coast schedule appears to have stabilized with two more orbital missions before the end of 2018 – Spaceflight Industry’s SSO-A rideshare mission will aim for the second half of November while Iridium-8 will likely be the last global launch of 2018 if it sticks to its December 30 target.
It’s taken awhile, but finally have a schedule for the final launch #8 of Iridium NEXT! 8:38am pst on December 30th – we’ll have the satellites, SpaceX assures us the flight proven rocket will be ready, and VAFB is ready to ring in the New Year with us! #ThePartyWillBeEpic pic.twitter.com/vQPPeSKm0P
— Matt Desch (@IridiumBoss) October 18, 2018
Iridium CEO Matt Desch was happy to offer a few additional details after tweeting Iridium-8’s targeted launch date and confirmed that – despite original estimates to the contrary – the mission would launch on flight-proven Falcon 9 booster B1049.2. He also stated that the booster would attempt to land on SpaceX drone ship Just Read The Instructions after launch, passing up a Return-to-Launch-Site (RTLS) recovery at the freshly-coronated Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4) due to the significant weight and suboptimal trajectory of Iridium’s payload.
Barring unexpectedly heavy payloads, high-energy orbits, or new launch contracts, it’s probable that Iridium-8 will be the company’s last drone ship rocket recovery on the West Coast for at least a year, if not longer. The only unknown is whether SpaceX needs to or is able to launch during harbor seal pupping season, lasting from March to June – if that environmental concern can be sidestepped or altogether avoided, there may be no reason for Just Read The Instructions to remain in California when the drone ship could instead move to Florida and immediately facilitate faster launch cadence or support Falcon Heavy missions that could benefit from multiple booster landings at sea.
- B1048 returns to port on drone ship JRTI after its successful July 2019 launch debut. (Pauline Acalin)
- It’s second landing marked the debut of SpaceX’s LZ-4 landing zone. B1048 may be a prime candidate for SpaceX’s first triple booster reuse. (SpaceX)
According to CEO Elon Musk and other executives, SpaceX is already building a third autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) for the same reasons, to be named A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) upon completion. Earlier this summer, Musk stated that the new vessel could be completed as early as summer of 2019, although he has since also stated that the first full BFR launches may take place on a floating platform somewhere off the coast of the US, increasing the probability of SpaceX delaying ASOG’s construction to allow for future use as both a launch and landing platform.
Probably ships next summer
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2018
Triple booster reuse on the horizon
Returning to SpaceX’s Q4 2018 Vandenberg launch manifest, its launch of Spaceflight Industry’s SSO-A rideshare mission is expected to occur sometime next month and will likely be SpaceX’s second-to-last launch before the year is out. Notably, SpaceX executive Hans Koenigsmann recently suggested that SSO-A may end up playing host to the company’s first attempt to launch the same Falcon 9 booster three times. All previous Falcon 9 reuses have been the rockets’ second launches and typically saw SpaceX expend the booster in the ocean rather than recover it and attempt refurbishment for a third launch.
Falcon 9 Block 5, however, included a huge number of upgrades to the rocket’s overall stamina and reusability, theoretically raising the number of potential flights per booster from 10-100. Examined generally, moving from two to three flights per booster may seem inconsequential. The reality, however, is that the first true confirmation of the success or failure of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Block 5 upgrade will be whether a Block 5 booster is able to safely complete three missions and do so with relative ease.

As SpaceX technicians and engineers gradually gain confidence with the new rocket iteration, debuted less than six months ago, the focus will eventually move from cautiously methodical design validation to rapid booster turnaround, eventually culminating in something approximating the 24-hour first stage reuse Musk challenged his company to achieve before 2019 is out. Ultimately, the third launch of a single Falcon 9 Block 5 booster will be the biggest step yet towards SpaceX’s ultimate goal of rapidly and affordably reusable orbital-class rockets.
For prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet check out our brand new LaunchPad and LandingZone newsletters!
News
SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront
SpaceX now pitches Starfall missions with 1,000 kg payloads, weeks of microgravity, and Starlink connectivity.
SpaceX has put up a dedicated commercial page for Starfall, its disk shaped reentry capsule, laying out for the first time what customers actually get when they book a flight. The page, live at spacex.com/starfall, pitches “affordable, routine access to microgravity” and invites companies to get in touch about flying manufacturing, research or testing payloads.
The specs are short and specific. Each Starfall mission carries up to 1,000 kg of payload, supplies 1 kW of power and connects through an Ethernet interface. Mission length is tailored to the customer, and the payload stays online the entire time through Starlink, which means researchers can pull data from an experiment while it is still in orbit instead of waiting for splashdown.
SpaceX is launching a secret spacecraft that could change how things are made in space
SpaceX is aiming the service at three markets. Biomedical customers are told they can grow stem cell organoids, replacement tissue and layered biomaterials. Pharmaceutical companies are pitched on protein and small molecule drug crystals, which form smaller and more uniform shapes without gravity driven convection. Materials science rounds out the list, with semiconductors and other next generation materials grown in vacuum and microgravity.
The page also makes clear which rocket SpaceX is counting on. “By launching on Starship, Starfall brings a reliable and scalable cadence previously unavailable to the market,” the company wrote, contrasting weeks of continuous microgravity with the seconds offered by drop towers and parabolic flights. No price or first operational flight date is listed.
The commercial push is a sharp turn from how Starfall started. SpaceX said almost nothing about the capsule ahead of its first flight in June, and nearly everything known came from FAA and FCC filings describing a disk about 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall that can return 2,200 pounds of cargo. By its second flight on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare in October, Starfall was listed by name on the mission page, though SpaceX still did not say what it carried.
Customers appear to be lining up. SpaceX said in its third quarter results that it signed three commercial Starfall missions during the quarter. On the earnings call, President Gwynne Shotwell described the capsule as providing “routine relatively low cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes,” and said the three new missions would fly on Starship.
The branding effort extends past the website. SpaceX added a Starfall T-shirt to its online store on Monday as part of a batch of new merchandise, giving the program a place next to Starship, Starlink and Starshield in the company’s lineup.
The move also puts SpaceX in more direct competition with companies it launches. Varda Space Industries, which has built much of the in-space manufacturing market so far, flew its W-Series 7 capsule on the same Bandwagon-5 mission as Starfall in October. Varda’s capsules are roughly three times smaller than Starfall, and SpaceX controls the ride to orbit for both.
Starfall’s near term cadence depends on Starship. SpaceX is preparing for Flight 15 after completing static fires of Ship 42 and its Super Heavy booster in late October, and is aiming to catch both stages with the launch tower on that flight.
Elon Musk
Grok Bot users hit with weekly limits early, Elon Musk explains what happened
Elon Musk said weeks ago during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call that the company’s Grok Bot, its autonomous AI Agent platform, was showing “the fastest growth of a product” that he’d ever seen in his life.
Now, SpaceXSI is scaling back Grok Bot users’ weekly limits, much to the surprise of those who have relied on it to take away monotonous tasks in their lives.
Elon Musk’s terse November 1 reply on X captured a sharp tension in the early days of agentic AI. Responding to a user who asked for a Grok Bot usage reset after hitting 100 percent with four days still left on the weekly cycle, Musk wrote: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
@DogecoinNorway The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
The post arrived amid a wave of similar complaints from paying subscribers whose meters had jumped unexpectedly toward or to the limit, sometimes overnight and with little corresponding activity. It also stood in clear contrast to statements Musk had made only days and weeks earlier.
On the SpaceX third-quarter earnings call in mid-to-late October, Musk had described Grok Bot in almost the opposite terms. He called it “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life” and said he had “never seen anything grow this fast.”
Company figures put paid weekly users at roughly 800,000 earlier in the month, more than doubling over the prior period. Daily active users had climbed from under 100,000 in early September to over 600,000 by late October.
Musk emphasized that the product has no free tier and that users appear to be getting real value beyond what they pay. In other remarks, he noted that usage per user was rising rather than declining, the opposite of the usual decay pattern for new software.
Grok Bot, launched around August, functions as an always-available agent with its own persistent cloud computer; it can schedule, research, shop, browse, and execute multi-step workflows even after the user steps away. Access is bundled into X subscription tiers (roughly $30, $100, and $200 per month) and certain Cursor plans, drawing from shared weekly usage pools whose exact sizes have not been publicly detailed.
The economics of that model are what Musk’s November 1 post put in the spotlight. Agentic systems burn far more compute than ordinary chatbot exchanges. Each task can trigger repeated model calls, tool use, web actions, and sustained background work.
When growth is as rapid as Musk celebrated, the absolute compute bill scales quickly even if average revenue per user stays fixed under flat monthly subscriptions. Industry observers noted the opportunity cost as well: the same GPUs can be rented to other AI labs at higher rates.
A simple back-of-the-envelope comparison circulating after the post illustrated the gap: if every reported daily user paid the top tier, annualized subscription revenue would still be modest relative to the scale of compute infrastructure SpaceX is building and leasing to companies like Anthropic.
Some users also reported possible dashboard anomalies around the same period, though Musk’s framing treated the underlying cost-revenue imbalance as the core issue rather than a pure metering glitch.
The juxtaposition is the core of this exchange. Within roughly two weeks of publicly framing Grok Bot as an unprecedented success with strong unit economics and no free tier, Musk acknowledged that serving the same product had become unsustainable relative to the revenue it generates.
For the broader industry, the episode underscores a structural challenge of the agent era: demand is real and growing faster than many expected, yet the cost of fulfilling that demand through always-on, multi-step agents can outrun subscription pricing before companies can adjust limits, introduce metered billing, or raise prices.
Musk’s reply did not promise an immediate reset or higher allowances; it simply stated the constraint. In doing so, it supplied a rare, explicit public data point on the unit economics of a high-profile AI agent just as adoption numbers were still being celebrated as the fastest in Musk’s experience.
The tension between rapid, paid growth and the compute required to deliver it is now on the record.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk calls Earth’s data centers “peanuts” next to what SpaceX is planning in orbit
Elon Musk says SpaceX capex efficiency is underestimated as orbital data centers loom by 2028.
Elon Musk is pushing back on one of the biggest worries hanging over SpaceX stock. In a reply on X on Sunday, Musk said the company’s capital expenditure efficiency is severely underestimated. He was responding to a Milk Road Stocks post citing analyst Kyle Reidhead, who estimates SpaceX will need to spend roughly $470 billion over the next five quarters.
Reidhead built that figure around the target SpaceX set on its third quarter earnings call: 13 gigawatts or more of compute by the end of 2027. In his breakdown, Nvidia captures 83 to 89 percent of the spending. SpaceX ended the quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute and guided to $35 billion to $40 billion in fourth quarter capex, as Teslarati reported.
Musk did not attach a number to his claim, but the earnings call shows the argument. CFO Bret Johnsen said new compute currently pays for itself in under a year at today’s pricing, and Musk said that window could shrink to six months next year. Using that pace, Reidhead argues about $230 billion of the $470 billion could come from operating cash flow and about $60 billion from SpaceX’s roughly $90 billion cash pile, leaving around $180 billion to borrow. Musk confirmed last week that SpaceX had already closed a new $40 billion debt raise to buy GPUs.
The ground buildout is not the end goal. It is what is meant to pay for the move to orbit. Replying on Friday to charts built from Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire’s SpaceX model, Musk wrote that “Terrestrial compute will be peanuts compared to orbital compute,” adding that orbital compute deployed per month “probably exceeds terrestrial around the end of 2028 and then far exceeds it in 2029.”
Maguire’s model shows how steep that path is. It has capex climbing from $88 billion this year to $290 billion in 2027 and $369 billion in 2028, with SpaceX burning $77.8 billion in cash this year and $122.6 billion next year before turning $114.9 billion cash positive in 2028. Musk’s response to the model was, “I think we can do better.”
The orbital half runs through Starmind. SpaceX plans to operate up to 1 million AI satellites flying in clusters of about 10, linked by roughly 10 terabits of bandwidth, with deployment of thousands of units starting as soon as late 2027 out of its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, according to SpaceX’s space safety page. Musk has said each Starmind spacecraft will carry more than 250 kW of solar power.
Getting there depends on launch volume. Maguire’s model assumes 250 Starship flights in 2028, up from two this year and 38 next year. The nearer test is financial: SpaceX guided to $33 billion to $37 billion in first quarter 2027 revenue, more than double the $14.58 billion it booked in Q3, and Musk reposted that guidance again on Sunday morning.

