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SpaceX’s drone ship fleet spied prepping for future rocket recoveries
Just shy of three weeks since SpaceX’s last launch and the better part of half a year since the last successful ocean recovery, both of the company’s drone ships have been spotted in recent weeks being refurbished, refitted, and prepared for a return to the ocean.
The unusual drought of drone ship landings was nearly brought to an end in early March, but that recovery attempt – following the successful launch of Hispasat 30W-6 – was precluded by extreme weather in the landing zone, forcing booster 1044 to soft-land in the Atlantic with a swan call of landing legs and titanium grid fins. Several weeks before 1044’s demise, the inaugural launch of Falcon Heavy also saw the first failed booster recovery attempt since June 2016, ending a successful streak of 17 flawless Falcon 9 recoveries – though both side boosters did manage a spectacular, synchronized landing at LZs 1 and 2.
Before the Falcon Heavy attempt, East coast drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) successfully recovered a Falcon 9 booster for the last time in late October 2017, a handful of weeks after the successful recovery of SES-11 – the source of a small fire that famously destroyed SpaceX’s robotic stage securer, nicknamed Roomba or Octagrabber. Over the several months, since it was damaged, Octagrabber has gradually undergone refurbishment at SpaceX’s Port Canaveral berth, most recently appearing back on OCISLY for post-refurb testing.
With the introduction of Falcon 9 Block 5 presumably a month or less away, the days of expending once flight-proven boosters will almost certainly be over, aside from missions that truly require the booster’s full performance. As discussed yesterday, regardless of whether Block 5 is truly ready for the limelight, SpaceX is no more than two months away from effectively running out of all older boosters: the once-flown B1045 (TESS) will likely be the only flight-worthy heritage booster remaining by early May. In other words, every single SpaceX launch in the second half of 2018 is all but guaranteed to attempt recovery, either by land or sea.
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- OCISLY as seen by Tom Cross on March 5, readying for a busy future of rocket recoveries. (Tom Cross)
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- Roomba was spied aboard OCISLY for the first time in months earlier this month. (Instagram /u/grimlok77)
OCISLY is effectively prepared to support these upcoming recovery attempts, and its Octagrabber may be as well. However, OCISLY was reportedly damaged by Falcon Heavy’s center core, despite the fact that it quite visibly missed the drone ship. Presumably, the forlorn booster acted as a sort of depth charge, thus damaging beyond repair the drone ship’s sensitive maneuvering and station-keeping thrusters. Before Falcon Heavy, it’s likely that the same fire that burned Octagrabber also damaged the hydraulic systems of one or several of OCISLY’s thrusters. These conclusions are supported by the fact that SpaceX’s West coast drone ship, Just Read The Instructions (JRTI), has visibly been stripped of its functional thrusters, presumably used to keep OCISLY operational in anticipation of Falcon Heavy and later Hispasat 30W-6.
Mr Steven, SpaceX’s only current fairing recovery vessel, has also been spotted conducting some sort of sea trials just off the shore of Port of San Pedro and LA, presumably honing recovery operations and giving its pilots time to practice catching fairings. Following the launch of PAZ and SpaceX’s own prototype Starlink satellites, the company managed its first-ever intact fairing recovery, although it missed Mr Steven’s net by a few hundred feet. As stated by Musk, it should be relatively easy to go from missing by a few hundred feet to successfully catching the fairing, and it’s likely that the imminent launch of Iridium-5 (7:19 am PDT, March 29) will attempt to close that gap and actually catch a fairing halve. On the other hand, the booster – flight-proven during the October 2017 launch of Iridium-3 – will likely soft-land in the Pacific Ocean because JRTI is currently unable to support ocean recoveries, lacking two of its four thrusters.
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- Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin took a trip down to Port of San Pedro to check up on JRTI, March 25. (Pauline Acalin)
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- Note one of JRTI’s thrusters here, quite clearly not installed. A second one sits just out of sight on the right. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX’s West coast drone ship Just Read The Instructions getting some much needed fresh paint. (Instagram, anonymous)
Follow us for live updates, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks, and a sea of beautiful photos from our East and West coast photographers.
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Teslarati – Instagram – Twitter
Tom Cross – Twitter
Pauline Acalin – Twitter
Eric Ralph – Twitter
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.
SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.
The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.
The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.
View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13.
This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to… pic.twitter.com/sNTHHz5vLr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 31, 2026
Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.
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Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.
Tesla flexed the new features of the Model Y L with a dedicated media event at the company’s Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The Model Y L is the extended-wheelbase version of the all-electric crossover, which has been voted the best-selling car in the world on three occasions. The vehicle is already rolling off production lines at Gigafactory Texas, and first deliveries are slated to take place later this year.
Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990
Teslarati was invited to the event, but due to some scheduling conflicts, we could not make it to Los Angeles. Instead, we will have our hands on a media unit sometime in August, so we’ll be able to spend some more extended time with the Model Y L.
However, plenty of those who made it to LA shared some cool features that set the Model Y L apart from the Model Y.
Multi-Row Climate Control
Tesla fitted the Model Y L with full climate control on all three rows on the front screen. It can be adjusted by selecting which row you’d like to modify on the right-hand side of the touch screen:
The Model Y L has a little row of icons on the right side of the climate screen so the front passenger can more quickly jump to whatever row they want to control. pic.twitter.com/uJS44mgCvk
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 30, 2026
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Better Rear Window Visibility
One of the strangest things about the Model Y, especially the Juniper iteration, is the rear window has extremely limited visibility when looking into the rearview mirror.
Tesla has improved upon this with the Model Y L:
This is a drastic difference. https://t.co/wTdhitD5aA pic.twitter.com/z6hFs0Jkss
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 30, 2026
PowerShare will be included
Model Y L will come with PowerShare in North America, with an 11.5kW output to your home. Tesla said it would require Powerwall 3 for operation.
Wireless Charging Pad
There has been some speculation that Tesla would upgrade the wireless charging pads in the United States, but this is not the case.
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Tesla owner fixes common feature complaint with crafty DIY retrofit
Tesla confirmed that it does not come with the cooled pads as the Y L in China does. This is because North America has not adopted Qi charging yet.
Thermal Management Improvements
These improvements in the Model Y L were seen with thermal management:
- Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
- +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather, 7 miles of real-world range gained
- 8x more solar energy reflection off of glass roof
- 30% reduction in solar energy entering the cabin
Some of the thermal management improvements in the new Model Y L Premium:
• Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
• Up to 15 min faster cabin cooling in sunny conditions
• +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather +7 miles of real-world range gained
• +10 miles recovered after… pic.twitter.com/jZirFWFdtO— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 31, 2026
Demand
Tesla said the Model Y L is almost sold out in the U.S. It comes with
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- 1 year of FSD Supervised
- 1 year of Supercharging
- 1 year of Premium Connectivity
- Free exterior paint color, interior, and wheel option at no additional cost
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
