News
SpaceX on track for biweekly launch cadence in the remainder of year
Weekly rapid reuse launches expected by 2019
The foggy, atmospheric launch of Iridium-2 just yesterday. (SpaceX)
Following a weekend of extraordinary accomplishments, seeing SpaceX flawlessly execute two missions – one with a reused first stage – in just over 48 hours of each other, the company has capitalized on a uniquely successful weekend and year and offered information about their future plans.
The launch of BulgariaSat-1 and Iridium-2 on Friday and Sunday respectively marked the eight and ninth launches of 2017 for SpaceX, and officials at the company are reportedly expecting to launch approximately 24 missions this year, meaning 15 more to come over the next 6 months. Given the recent demonstration of 48 hour launch cadence and a more regular schedule of biweekly launches in the past few months, an expectation of 15 more launches for 2017 lines up perfectly with a cadence of two launches a month from LC-39A Cape Canaveral and three Iridium launches from Vandenberg, which happens to be exactly what is currently manifested.
Originally manifested for up to 27 launches this year, successfully launching 24 missions, one of which might be the inaugural flight of Falcon Heavy, would be extraordinarily hard to ignore in an industry that has compared the launch industry to manufacturing beverage containers and argued that reuse is only sustainable with more than 20 launches a year on a company’s manifest.
BulgariaSat-1 was successfully launched 48 hours before Iridium-2, and marked the second successful, commercial reuse of an orbital rocket. (SpaceX)
SpaceX is now likely to undertake 24 launches this year, but the company also revealed this weekend that it intends to achieve a regular weekly launch cadence (52 launches per year) as soon as 2019. In a recent article, I speculated that we might begin to see regular weekly launches once both LC-39A and LC-40 were active, and that appears to be nearly correct. If SpaceX is to regularly conduct weekly launches by 2019, it is bound to begin shrinking its two week cadence as soon as is safe and possible. This will likely occur once Falcon Heavy has successfully flown several times from LC-39A, thus freeing SpaceX to deem the vehicle operational and less at risk of destroying one of their two Eastern pads.
There is also a tentative understanding that SpaceX is striving to construct and activate their planned Boca Chica, Texas launch complex by 2019. The successful reactivation of LC-40 and subsequent modification of LC-39A for Falcon Heavy will leave the brunt of SpaceX’s launch complex maintenance and construction teams free to focus entirely on the Texas facility sometime late this year or early next year, meaning that Boca Chica pad activation could certainly occur as early as 2019. This would leave the company with two fully operational all-purpose launch pads dedicated to Falcon 9 launches if they choose to retain LC-39A solely for Falcon Heavy and Commercial Crew launches, allowing them to reach weekly cadences even before the launches of Falcon Heavy, Commercial Crew contracts, and Vandenberg launches are accounted for.
One crucial factor playing into SpaceX’s ability to launch 52 times in a year is of course reusability, as it is hard to imagine SpaceX more than doubling their Falcon manufacturing capabilities in under a year and a half. Likely no coincidence, SpaceX simultaneously offered information to insurance underwriters about the increasing speed of their ability to launch, recover, and reuse first stages. More specifically, a spokesman of the company stated that the reuse of BulgariaSat-1’s Falcon 9 1029 took considerably less than half as long as the inaugural reuse of the stage that launched SES-10 earlier this year, implying that refurbishment and quality assurance checks for 1029 took something like four or five months total.
With SpaceX having debuted new titanium grid fins intended to speed up reuse on the Sunday launch of Iridium-2, the company is well on its way to transferring over to Block 4 (upgraded engine performance) and possibly Block 5 of Falcon 9 later this. Block 5 is expected to introduced major changes meant to replace aspects of the current Falcon 9 that require major refurbishment after recovery. Musk detailed these changes several months ago in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), mentioning that reusable heat shielding around the engines, improved landing legs, and titanium grid fins were the main aspects of a Block 5 of Falcon 9 meant to offer rapid reuse without refurbishment. In June 22nd interview on the Space Show, Gwynne Shotwell reiterated that this “final” version of Falcon 9 is expected to be able to launch, land, and relaunch with barely more than a thorough once-over, and ought to be capable of flying a dozen missions at least.
Falcon 9’s fancy new titanium grid fins. (SpaceX/Instagram)
This final piece of the puzzle of weekly cadence fits in quite nicely. With a possible introduction date for Block 5 of late 2017 or early 2018, SpaceX will likely end production of Block 3 by the end of this year and transfer over entirely to the easily reusable Block 5. Assuming a continuing a trend of increasingly reuse-friendly customers, Hawthorne production capacity of approximately 20 Falcon 9s per year, and a plausibly significant reduction in launch costs due to more rapid and complete reuse, SpaceX could find themselves at the start of 2019 with a dozen or more launch vehicles that are each capable of conducting upwards of 10-12 highly affordable launches each.
Let there be no doubt: these are incredibly optimistic and difficult goals for the company to achieve on the timescale they have provided. However, given the number of beneficial changes likely to soon be made to both the launch vehicles and SpaceX’s manufacturing, launch, and refurbishment facilities in the next 6-12 months, those goals are realistically achievable, albeit with some likely delays. Regardless, things are beginning to get rather intense for SpaceX and for the launch industry in general.
Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming Teslarati coverage of SpaceX’s next July 4th launch and its static fire that is scheduled for as soon as this Thursday.
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Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
