SpaceX has completed its 60th operational Starlink satellite launch after a rare string of scrubs.
Flying for the 6th time just 66 days after its 5th launch, Falcon 9 booster B1067 lifted off with 54 Starlink satellites on SpaceX’s Starlink 4-34 mission at 8:18 pm EDT, Sunday, September 18th. Five days prior, after unknown issues triggered a delay from a planned September 11th launch attempt, SpaceX attempted to launch the mission for the first time on September 13th.
About an hour before liftoff, lightning conditions forced the company to call off the attempt. On September 14th, also about an hour before liftoff, weather forced SpaceX to call off the second attempt. On September 15th, the third attempt was aborted (by weather) just 29 seconds before liftoff, followed by a fourth weather-related scrub about a minute before liftoff on September 16th. Only after a fifth attempt on September 17th was preempted by a delay to September 18th did SpaceX finally find a gap between Florida’s summer weather.
With dozens of Starlink launches beginning to blur together and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 continuing a relentless and potentially record-breaking streak of successes at a pace that could soon make it the fastest launching rocket in history, it’s hard to be surprised that Starlink 4-34 was completed without issue. Falcon 9 B1067 ascended under power for about three minutes, sent the rest of the rocket on the way to orbit, coasted into space, and returned to Earth with SpaceX’s 68th consecutively successful booster landing.
Falcon 9’s underappreciated upper stage continued into an orbit around 300 kilometers (~190 mi) up, spun itself up end over end, and deployed a 16.7-ton (~36,900 lb) stack of 54 Starlink V1.5 satellites all at once. Following the quick deployment, the rocket’s pair of reusable fairing halves were likely still 10 or 20 minutes away from touching down on the Atlantic Ocean under their GPS-guided parafoils, where they will eventually be scooped out of the water for future flights.
Starlink 4-34 was SpaceX’s 42nd launch of 2022, maintaining an average of one launch every 6.2 days since the year began. It leaves more than 3000 working Starlink satellites in Earth orbit, likely meaning that a majority of all working satellites are owned and operated by SpaceX less than three full years after the company began operational launches.
Up next, Next Spaceflight and Spaceflight Now report that SpaceX has two more Starlink launches (4-35 and 4-36) tentatively scheduled before the end of September. As of September 15th, both reported that those missions were working towards launches on September 19th and September 26th – nothing unusual for SpaceX in 2022.
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What was unusual, however, was both unofficial manifests’ agreement that SpaceX intended to use the same pad – Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s LC-40 – to launch Starlink 4-34, 4-35, and 4-36. Even assuming that those schedules were predicated upon Starlink 4-34 launching on September 13th, before all of its weather delays, SpaceX would have had to break LC-40’s 7.7-day turnaround record by around ~25% and complete a second launch just seven days after that.
Starlink 4-34’s delays have thrown that plan into question, but the fact that SpaceX thought it was possible in the first place suggests that the company has plans to squeeze even more performance out of LC-40 – already its most important pad from the perspective of launch cadence. Launch photographer Ben Cooper now reports that Starlink 4-36 could launch in late September or October. If it slips into October, SpaceX has a rapid-fire pair of customer satellite launches scheduled on October 5th and 13th that will probably take precedent over any internal Starlink mission.
With only 16 days left before LC-40’s next commercial launch and NASA’s Crew-5 launch taking over SpaceX’s other East Coast pad until October 3rd, SpaceX would have to launch Starlink 4-35 and 4-36 just four or five days apart (and one just 4-5 days after Starlink 4-34) to avoid delaying one of the Starlink missions well into October, avoid unnecessarily delaying commercial launches for paying customers, and ensure that those customers don’t have abruptly agree to be commercial guinea pigs for extra quick LC-40 turnarounds.
Starlink 4-35 is now tentatively scheduled for September 23rd, making a Starlink 4-36 delay more likely but not fully ruling out a launch attempt before the end of the month.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
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Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
SpaceX’s massive investment in AI will make it a big winner, Argus Research said after the company’s successful earnings call last week.
The firm also upgraded shares to a Buy from Hold and set a $160 price target.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) is currently recovering from its heavy AI infrastructure investments, as it spent nearly $16 billion in Q2 alone. The company did this primarily by monetizing high-demand GPU compute capacity at a much faster pace than traditional data center economics would suggest.
Company CFO Bret Johnsen said that SpaceX would be able to pay back anything on new deployments within a year.
There are plenty of ways the company can do this:
Leasing excess compute capacity through contracts
SpaceX has already built Colossus and Colossus II, largely for its own model training. However, much of that capacity is already rented out to third parties. It already has major deals with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI. These partnerships are adding billions per month to SpaceX’s spreadsheet.
High utilization driven by industry-wide scarcity
The demand for advanced AI training and inference capacity continues to exceed what is available for use. SpaceX can fill new racks quickly after they come online, so the capital deployed converts into revenue with minimal idle time.
Additionally, management and outside observers have described the new compute capital as behaving more like a cost-of-goods-sold than traditional multi-year capex, especially because of this rapid monetization pattern.
Capacity has already scaled from ~0.4 GW a year to 1.4 GW annually by the end of Q2. There are targets of more than 2 GW by year-end.
High incremental margins on the rental business once capacity is online
GPU cloud providers often operate at strong gross margins. SpaceX can monetize capacity that was already partially built or can be added efficiently. This means that incremental EBITDA margins on the rental revenue are usually high. This accelerates cash recovery relative to the gross capital outlay.
Parallel monetization of its own AI software and applications
Beyond pure infrastructure rental, SpaceX also generates revenue from Grok through subscriptions and usage, from X through ads, data, and other related services, enterprise APIs, and the planned integration of the Cursor coding tools acquisition.
These application layers ride on the same compute infrastructure and provide additional high-margin streams that could offset build-out costs. AI-segment revenue overall rose sharply to about $2.6 billion in Q2, according to Motley Fool. This was driven primarily by the infrastructure contracts, but the software side is also partially responsible.
Efficient, large-scale deployment and vertical integration advantages
SpaceX has emphasized the rapid construction of power and cooling infrastructure and favorable cost-per-megawatt economics relative to industry benchmarks in some disclosures.
Combined with its ability to scale capacity aggressively and the fact that many contracts start generating revenue within months of capacity coming online, the effective payback compresses dramatically compared with more conventional multi-year data-center projects.
SpaceX’s dominant near-term recovery path will turn the AI clusters into a hyperscale-style compute rental business for other leading AI companies while still using a portion for internal models.
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors: Morgan Stanley
