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SpaceX drone ship dodges high seas en route to first rocket landing of 2020
SpaceX has delayed the first orbital launch of the new year by a handful of days to allow both Falcon 9 and the drone ship it’s scheduled to land on the opportunity to dodge bad weather on the Florida coast and out in the Atlantic Ocean.
Originally scheduled to launch no earlier than December 30th, SpaceX delayed its next mission – Starlink-2 – to January 3rd for unknown reasons. Weather on the new date was unfortunately forecast to be terrible at SpaceX’s LC-40 launch pad and had a 60% chance of scrubbing the mission. SpaceX must have been at least as concerned about conditions for drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) in the Atlantic Ocean, as the company ultimately skipped over a 90%-GO backup window on January 4th for the latest launch target – January 6th.
Historically, only a few Falcon launches have been delayed for booster recovery purposes, but it’s been apparent that – while incredibly sturdy – some of the tacked-on equipment installed on SpaceX’s drone ships (modified barges) can be easily damaged by high seas. Perhaps more importantly, high seas (and thus a pitching drone ship deck) can make booster landings much riskier. Bad luck could easily cause a booster to cut off its landing burn at exactly sea level but still be a dozen or more feet above the drone ship’s deck if it’s coincidentally in the trough of a big swell, potentially destroying or damaging the rocket.
Ultimately, on missions where SpaceX has nothing to lose by delaying the launch, the company now puts a successful booster recovery much higher on its list of priorities. As recently as March 2018, SpaceX intentionally expended a new Falcon 9 booster because ocean conditions would have been extremely risky to OCISLY and crew and the company (or customer) had no interest in delaying the launch further to wait for calmer seas.
By all appearances, that is – for the most part – no longer the case. SpaceX would likely expend a rocket for a few days of schedule for high-priority customers like the USAF and especially NASA, where even a few days of delays could trigger several years of delays to quite literally wait for the planets to realign. It has and will continue to require a significant culture shift in the market for launch but SpaceX is clearly changing those norms and expectations bit by bit, to the point that the company was recently willing to delay Cargo Dragon launches for NASA to ensure that the mission’s Falcon 9 booster the best possible chance of recovery.
For an internal Starlink launch, delaying the mission to prevent drone ship damage and ensure Falcon 9 recovery is thus an absolute no-brainer. Starlink-2 is also partially unique because it will mark the second time a Falcon 9 booster launches for the fourth time, following on the footsteps of B1048 after it became the first booster to launch four times during SpaceX’s November 2019 Starlink-1 mission.
B1048 thus became SpaceX’s lone pathfinder for Falcon 9 booster reusability, hopefully providing excellent insight and some unequivocal physical data to determine the rocket’s health and readiness for a 5th launch. Still, even though the sample sizes available to even the most prolific orbital launch vehicles would make any statistician cringe, it’s safe to say that two data points are better than one, and B1049 – scheduled to launch for the fourth time on Starlink-2 – would thus be quite valuable to SpaceX’s recovery engineers and technicians.
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Only one additional Falcon 9 booster – B1056 – has already flown three missions, meaning that SpaceX will – at best – likely have to suffice with three data points (B1048, B1049, B1056) before moving onto the next reusability milestone – launching the same booster five times. Ultimately, every time SpaceX pushes that envelope and demonstrates that Falcon boosters can be definitively reused 3 or 4 or 5 times, the company multiplies the number of launches its fleet of booster can perform by a factor of two.
For, say, the eight flightworthy boosters in SpaceX’s existing fleet, proving that a 4th reuse is possible will ultimately allow the company to squeeze an additional seven launches from existing hardware with almost zero capital investment. For now, the fourth flight of Falcon 9 boosters will remain cutting edge, but with more than three-dozen launches planned in 2020, it’s all but guaranteed that SpaceX will push the envelope of reusability like never before in the coming months.
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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.
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.
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.
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
