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SpaceX launches 52nd Falcon 9 rocket in 52 weeks
SpaceX has completed its 52nd successful Falcon 9 launch in 52 weeks, sustaining an average cadence of one launch per week for a full 12 months.
Simultaneously, the Starlink 4-2 rideshare mission set a new record for Falcon 9 booster reuse, marked SpaceX’s 150th consecutively successful launch, and was one of the most complex commercial launches it has ever performed.
In addition to 34 new Starlink V1.5 satellites that joined almost 3000 other working SpaceX spacecraft in orbit, Starlink 4-2 deployed the company’s largest rideshare payload yet – AST SpaceMobile’s 1.5-ton (~3300 lb) BlueWalker 3 communications satellite.
Falcon 9 lifted off on schedule with the combined 12-ton (~26,500 lb) payload safely secured inside its composite payload fairing at 9:20 pm EDT (01:20 UTC) on Saturday, September 10th. Tasked with lifting the rocket’s expendable upper stage, recoverable fairing, and payload most of the way out of Earth’s atmosphere was Falcon 9 booster B1058, a nine-engine first stage that debuted by launching two NASA astronauts in May 2020.
28 months later, B1058 lifted off with Starlink 4-2 and BlueWalker 3 on its 14th spaceflight and orbital-class launch, breaking Falcon 9’s booster reuse record. The rocket performed no differently than it had every time previously, burning for a bit less than three minutes before deploying the upper stage and returning to Earth. About nine minutes after liftoff, B1058 safely touched down on drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas (ASOG), likely setting the booster up to break its own record before the end of 2022. With 13 launches already under their belts, boosters B1051 and B1060 will likely follow B1058 past the same 14-flight milestone in the near future.
Once free from the booster, Falcon 9’s expendable upper stage kicked off SpaceX’s most complex commercial launch ever. Measuring about six minutes long, the first and longest burn brought the second stage and payload into an elliptical orbit a few hundred kilometers above Earth’s surface. A second burn followed about 45 minutes after liftoff, raising the low end of that ellipse to deploy BlueWalker 3 into a circular orbit around 500 kilometers (~310 mi). Using a massive antenna, AST SpaceMobile’s first large satellite prototype will eventually attempt to directly communicate with mobile phones to provide a level of connectivity equivalent to 5G/LTE – all from space.
Once free of its rideshare payload, the focus shifted to Starlink. In theory, SpaceX could have taken the easy way out and significantly simplified the mission by deploying all 34 satellites at the same altitude as BlueWalker 3, simultaneously allowing them to reach their operational 540-kilometer (~336 mi) orbits in days instead of months. Instead, SpaceX pursued an exceptionally complex mission requiring five burns from Falcon 9’s upper stage.
After deploying BlueWalker 3, Falcon 9 S2 lowered one end of its orbit at around T+67 minutes, followed by a fourth burn to lower the other end almost two hours after liftoff. The upper stage then spun up end over end and eventually released all 34 Starlink satellites at an altitude of ~335 kilometers (~208 mi), where debris and faulty satellites will take days – rather than years – to reenter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.
While SpaceX doesn’t confirm post-payload operations, Falcon 9 S2 was also scheduled to perform a fifth and final burn to quickly deorbit itself, ensuring that the mission only produced five pieces of benign debris. At their very low orbits, those five pieces (four ‘tensioning rods’ and the BlueWalker 3 payload adapter) will pose next to no threat to other spacecraft or rockets and should reenter within a few weeks.
Starlink 4-2 was SpaceX’s 52nd successful Falcon 9 launch since September 14th, 2021, meaning that the company has technically already achieved CEO Elon Musk’s goal of 52 launches in one year – albeit not a calendar year. Perhaps even more impressive, the mission was SpaceX’s 150th consecutively successful Falcon launch. No other single rocket (Falcon 9) or rocket family (Falcon) has launched more times in a row without failure.
Finally, Starlink 4-2 was SpaceX’s 42nd launch of 2022. If the company continues its average cadence over the last three months, it could end 2022 having completed more than 60 Falcon launches in one calendar year.
Elon Musk
Tesla Cybercabs narrowly miss deadly Amazon cargo plane crash
An Amazon cargo plane crash near Miami’s airport stopped feet from dozens of Tesla Cybercabs.
An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo jet overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, killing five people and injuring five more. The jet, operated by North Carolina based carrier 21 Air as Flight 7598, touched down around 2 p.m. after arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, then crossed the airport perimeter, plowed across NW 67th Avenue and struck multiple vehicles before catching fire, according to the Associated Press.
Photos and video from the scene show the aircraft’s nose stopped within meters of a fenced staging lot holding dozens of gold painted Tesla Cybercabs, the steering wheel free robotaxi Tesla began putting on public roads in Austin last week. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has confirmed the plane struck “multiple vehicles” but has not said whether any Cybercabs were among them, and neither Tesla nor airport officials have addressed the fleet directly.
The Cybercabs had not yet entered commercial service in Miami. Tesla’s existing Robotaxi operation there runs on modified Model Y vehicles and has been unsupervised since Ashok Elluswamy confirmed the detail on X in July.
Footage of the plane crash from earlier today | #ONLYinDADE pic.twitter.com/iGoOtnd6cD
— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) September 6, 2026
Elon Musk offered the briefest of reactions. Replying to a Zero Hedge post about the Cybercabs sitting so close to the wreckage, he wrote a single word: “Weird.” He has not commented further, and Tesla has not issued a statement.
The timing puts Tesla’s newest vehicle near an unrelated but highly visible tragedy just days after its Austin debut, a launch that had already drawn scrutiny from federal regulators. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit how Tesla certified the Cybercab as compliant with federal vehicle safety standards, a process Teslarati covered after the vehicle’s September 3 launch event. That inquiry concerns the car’s lack of a steering wheel and pedals, not the Miami crash.
Investigators from the FAA and NTSB are focused on the plane, not the parking lot beside it. Flight data reviewed by outlets including Simple Flying show the 767 touched down around 170 knots, well above the 135 to 140 knot range typical for the aircraft, though investigators have not determined a cause. Amazon said it is working with authorities and that its priority is the safety of everyone affected.
Whether any Cybercabs were damaged, and what Tesla plans for the fleet parked near one of the country’s busiest airports, remain open questions.
Tesla has reached a notable benchmark in its autonomous driving program after its Robotaxi fleet surpassed one million miles of unsupervised operation. The company made the announcement during its Cybercab event in Austin on September 3.
Tesla Vice President of AI Ashok Elluswamy told attendees he was happy to report the fleet had achieved one million miles of unsupervised Robotaxi operation as a testament to safety.
The new total marked a sharp increase from the 380,000 unsupervised miles Tesla disclosed during its second-quarter 2026 earnings update in late July.
In roughly six weeks, the company added about 620,000 miles. That acceleration followed Tesla’s decision to remove in-vehicle safety monitors from most of its operations outside the San Francisco Bay Area.
Credit: Tesla
Tesla first launched Robotaxi service in Austin in June 2025 with safety drivers present. It later began fully unsupervised rides and expanded into Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. The San Francisco Bay Area remains the exception, where a safety monitor still rides in the vehicle under California permitting rules.
The company has not released a city-by-city breakdown of the one million unsupervised miles.
The milestone arrived as Tesla began offering public Cybercab rides in Austin. The purpose-built vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals and is designed only for autonomous ride-hailing. Production versions joined the existing fleet of modified Tesla vehicles already operating in the service.
Tesla’s unsupervised mileage is growing at a double-digit weekly rate according to earlier company comments, yet its fleet size remains modest compared with established competitors. Waymo has accumulated more than 200 million fully autonomous rider-only miles. Tesla has described its own unsupervised operations as having recorded zero notable incidents in the period leading up to the July update.
The one-million-mile figure reflects Tesla’s shift from supervised testing to broader driverless service in multiple states. It also highlights the company’s strategy of using both existing Model Y vehicles and the new Cybercab to scale its network.
Credit: Tesla
Whether the rapid recent growth continues will depend on further city expansions, regulatory approvals, and the performance of the purpose-built Cybercab in everyday paid rides. Tesla has not specified how many of the latest miles involved the new vehicle versus the rest of the fleet.
The announcement underscores Tesla’s progress toward a larger robotaxi network while illustrating the remaining gap in total autonomous experience relative to longer-operating rivals.
Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy said this week that 24-hour Robotaxi service is close. Replying on X to a rider who wanted Cybercab trips all night, he wrote that the capability would arrive “next month or so” once “the next tech to merge on the v15 plan” is ready.
The comment landed on September 4, one day after Tesla opened public Cybercab rides in Austin. It is the clearest near-term timeline yet for overnight unsupervised operation. Tesla’s paid Robotaxi network currently runs from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week across Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa.
next month or so. the next tech to merge on the v15 plan will enable it.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) September 4, 2026
That 16-hour window is shorter than the 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. schedule the company used for much of the prior year.
Elluswamy did not name the specific feature or say whether the change would apply first to purpose-built Cybercabs, the existing Model Y fleet, or both. He also offered no city-by-city rollout list. The link to Full Self-Driving v15 is nevertheless significant.
Tesla has described v15 as a step-change architecture with seven parallel improvement tracks and roughly ten times more parameters than earlier builds. Early versions of that software already operate on the Robotaxi fleet and contain about 40 percent of the planned gains.
By July 2026, the unsupervised fleet had logged more than 380,000 miles across six cities in two states with what the company called an impeccable safety record and no notable incidents caused by the vehicles themselves. Tesla has repeatedly argued that camera-based end-to-end neural networks, rather than extra sensors, are the core of the solution.
Overnight service would test that claim in lower-light conditions and would also raise vehicle utilization, a key variable for Robotaxi unit economics. The company has already begun using public Superchargers at night and is building dedicated Robotaxi charging sites.
Riders have asked why software must change if the cars already drive in the dark. The practical answer appears to be reliability and scale: Tesla has held back mass expansion until more of the v15 stack is merged, citing the need for higher confidence before putting thousands of unoccupied vehicles on streets around the clock.
If the next module arrives on the timetable Elluswamy sketched, 24-hour service could begin in October 2026 in at least some markets.
That would mark a shift from a daytime-bounded pilot to a service that can run whenever demand exists, including the late-night hours that have so far remained out of reach.
Tesla Cybercabs narrowly miss deadly Amazon cargo plane crash
Tesla crosses major Unsupervised Self-Driving milestone
