News
SpaceX’s drone ships near return-to-action with Block 5 Falcon 9 landings
Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin’s recent trips to drone ship Just Read The Instructions’ berth in Port of San Pedro shows that SpaceX technicians are nearly done preparing the hibernating vessel for a return to Falcon 9 rocket recoveries in the Pacific Ocean, a ten-month drought likely to end for good on July 20th.
Although it’s hard to believe, SpaceX’s West Coast autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) has been effectively marooned at its Port of Los Angeles berth for more than nine full months, with the vessel’s last recovery occurring just after the October 9 launch of ten Iridium NEXT satellites, the fourth of five SpaceX Vandenberg launches in 2017 (and the fourth of four West Coast booster landings).
SpaceX’s West coast drone ship Just Read The Instructions getting some much needed fresh paint in 2017. (Instagram, anonymous)
Three months after that October mission and booster recovery, SpaceX expended their next California launch and marked the beginning of a streak of eight missions where flight-proven Block 3 and 4 boosters could have been recovered but no attempts were made. While intermixed with the spectacle of Falcon Heavy’s dual side booster landings at LZ-1, the debut launch and recovery of Falcon 9 Block 5, and two other Block 4 booster recoveries, the majority of SpaceX’s launches since December 2017 have been treated as expendable – put simply, the company decided that recovering and refurbishing twice-flown boosters of older Falcon 9 blocks was not worth the effort and expense.
Instead, those well-worn boosters were expended in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans after partially supporting a series of experimental tests designed to gather additional data on the recovery envelope of SpaceX’s partially reusable rockets. The rationale makes sense – SpaceX fundamentally sacrificed some of its older, less-reusable Falcon 9 boosters for the sake of knowledge that may allow their highly reusable Falcon 9 Block 5 predecessors a better chance of successfully landing even after exceptionally fast, hot, and high-energy recoveries, a necessity if the upgraded rockets are to be reused 10 to 100 times, as is the goal.
Although Just Read The Instructions spent several months without a full complement of maneuvering thrusters, thanks in part to efforts to keep its besieged East coast sister Of Course I Still Love You operational, photographer Pauline Acalin’s photos over the last several months show that the vessel now has four full thrusters installed and ready to bring it back into rocket recovery action in the Pacific Ocean.
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- SpaceX’s drone ship Just Read The Instructions and fairing catcher Mr Steven at their Port of San Pedro berths, May 2018. Note the four bright blue thrusters visible aboard JRTI, three installed and one on deck. (Pauline Acalin)
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- The aggressive Atlantic Ocean landing of Thaicom-8’s Falcon 9 first stage. (SpaceX)
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- Iridium-1’s successful and scenic landing on Pacific drone ship JRTI, January 2017. This could be an increasingly rare occurrence in the Pacific, thanks to SpaceX’s new land-based landing zone. (SpaceX)
Still, the abrupt return to expendable rocket launches after a year – 2017 – filled to the brim with 18 of 18 successful launches and 14 of 14 successful landings led to a decidedly fascinating vein of disapproval in the SpaceX enthusiast and broader spaceflight fan communities – people had grown accustomed to the adrenaline-soaked thrill of routine Falcon 9 rocket landings. Some expressed worries that regularly and intentionally expending large hunks of metal in the ocean could harm their ecosystems and was tantamount to littering. None the wiser, every other launch provider in the world continues to expend all of their rocket boosters without any attempts at recovery like the nearly all non-Shuttle rocket launches in the past six decades, and their tepidly reusable next-generation rockets are unlikely to even begin attempting hardware recovery until the mid-2020s at the earliest.
Frankly, SpaceX’s abrupt successes with orbital-class rocket recovery struck a chord with observers, demonstrating just how intuitive attempting to recover expensive rocket hardware really is, while also bringing into clear focus the actual insanity of failing to try and of the seemingly ad-hoc rationalization of expendable rocketry. Thankfully, we still have SpaceX, and the company’s spate of rocket booster sacrifices is likely just one expendable launch away from coming to an effective end for the indefinite future, with that particular launch – CRS-15 – scheduled less than two weeks from now, on June 29th.
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- B1045, tasked with launching NASA’s TESS exoplanet observatory, roughly 24 hours before liftoff. (Tom Cross)
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- After launching in April 2018, B1045 landed on OCISLY and is being refurbished for a second launch in just 5 days, on June 29. (Tom Cross)
After CRS-15, which will probably see its twice-flown Block 4 booster expended in the Atlantic, a combination of Block 5 Falcon 9s and Heavies will theoretically bring to an end the practice of expending orbital rocket boosters, at least on SpaceX’s watch. Considering that the upgraded boosters have been designed and built to launch as many as ten times with minimal refurbishment and potentially 100+ times with regular maintenance, the opportunity cost of an expended Block 5 rocket booster is so high that it is difficult to imagine SpaceX will be easily swayed to expend one until it’s flown at least several times prior.
We here at Teslarati eagerly await the imminent demise of expendable rockets, set to begin in earnest – at least for SpaceX – around July 19th and 20th with two Falcon 9 Block 5 launches on two coasts, one with Telstar 19V (Florida) and the other with Iridium-7 (California).
Follow us for live updates, peeks behind the scenes, and photos from Teslarati’s East and West coast photographers.
Teslarati – Instagram – Twitter
Tom Cross – Twitter
Pauline Acalin – Twitter
Eric Ralph – Twitter
Tesla Full Self-Driving is set to receive improvements to address its two biggest issues, according to a company engineer.
Director of Engineering at Tesla AI, Phil Duan, revealed in a post on X that improvements to both pothole avoidance and navigation “are coming,’ something we have heard many times in the past. However, there are a few things that seem to hint that things might be different this time around.
Improvements on both are coming.
— Phil Duan (@pduan) October 1, 2026
Pothole avoidance, navigation, speed control, and left lane camping are some of the most prevalent and frequently mentioned shortcomings of the Full Self-Driving suite. These are a few of the biggest issues that have kept Tesla Full Self-Driving as a Supervised suite, meaning drivers must remain attentive during operation.
Pothole Avoidance
Pothole avoidance was first mentioned as an “Upcoming Improvement” with the Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3 update back in early April of this year. It was listed alongside “Expand reasoning to all behaviors beyond destination handling.”
It’s been six months since we first saw pothole avoidance explicitly mentioned, and it has not moved beyond that and joined the main release notes yet.
Tesla has not shed any light on why pothole avoidance has been such an issue for it to solve, but it also has issues identifying large bumps much of the time, so its modeling of sudden changes in road conditions is likely pretty weak at this particular point. I’ve had more issues with large bumps than potholes, personally, but both are issues that need to be resolved.
This is that big bounce that I mentioned in the quoted post.
It’s just a tad too drastic to take at the speed FSD wants to go over it. You can see me quickly swipe down into Sloth, but I intervened. https://t.co/K20PK9ysBg pic.twitter.com/81Oc82ZJcZ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 2, 2026
It makes sense that things might be pretty close to being released to the public, as we are going on such an extensive period of time between it being mentioned and it actually being deployed.
Navigation
Navigation is likely the most painful part of using Full Self-Driving, as it routinely takes strange routes, has trouble with local rules (like Except Right Turn Stop Signs in Pennsylvania), and sometimes does not realize that maneuvers it is suggesting are against the law. Turning out of my neighborhood, you cannot turn left, yet my Model Y still suggests it roughly 70 percent of the time when I’m leaving.
However, Tesla might be close to a breakthrough on this. With the Summer Update, Tesla added “Preferred Routes” alongside “Automatic Navigation.”
Preferred Routes prioritized roads that the driver had actually taken before, instead of always defaulting to what the vehicle believes is the most efficient path. This has already solved many of my issues. Formerly, I would turn off the Online Routing setting, and that would eliminate most of my complaints with routing, but then you lose out later on the Live Traffic Visualization.
Tesla’s Navigation has improved tremendously thanks to the Preferred Routes release with the Summer Update, but it still could use some polishing, as it still suggests strange routes from time to time, and it also has a lot of issues getting out of a parking lot. I find that those truly confuse FSD sometimes.
News
SpaceX’s midnight spy satellite launch quietly set a new record
Falcon Heavy launched its first NRO mission while SpaceX landed four boosters in one day.
SpaceX closed out one of its busiest days ever with a midnight Falcon Heavy launch from Florida, and the rocket’s two side boosters came home to finish off a landing record the company had never set before.
Falcon Heavy lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 11:54 p.m. ET Thursday carrying NROL-97, a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. It was the first time the NRO has flown on Falcon Heavy after 22 missions on Falcon 9, and the first NRO mission bought through the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 contract awarded in 2025, according to Spaceflight Now.
Falcon Heavy lifts off from pad 39A in Florida for the 14th time! pic.twitter.com/uuZLKNTdD7
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 2, 2026
Roughly eight minutes after liftoff, side boosters B1104 and B1072 touched down at Landing Zones 1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, setting off double sonic booms across Brevard County. B1104 was flying for the second time and B1072 for the fourth. Both last flew on August 30 on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, making NROL-97 the quickest turnaround between Falcon Heavy missions to date. The brand new center core, B1106, was expended in the Atlantic so the payload could reach its high energy orbit, and SpaceX’s mission page noted the fairing had previously flown on the NROL-95 mission in July.
The two landings capped a record for SpaceX. Earlier Thursday, Falcon 9 booster B1101 returned to Landing Zone 40 after sending the Crew-13 astronauts to the International Space Station, and another Falcon 9 launched the Transporter-18 rideshare with 130 payloads from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Spaceflight Now reported it was the first time SpaceX has landed four boosters in a single day, wrapping up the triple header Teslarati previewed on Wednesday.
Falcon Heavy’s side boosters land on LZ-1 and LZ-2 pic.twitter.com/dBPcNeggFx
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 2, 2026
The mission also brought Landing Zone 1 back for what may be its final landing. SpaceX first landed an orbital class booster there in December 2015, but its lease on the former Launch Complex 13 site ended in 2025 as the company moved Florida landings to new pads at its own launch complexes. With LZ-40 already holding the Crew-13 booster, SpaceX brought LZ-1 back into service for one more night. Launch tracker Next Spaceflight listed NROL-97 as the final expected landing at the site.
NROL-97 adds to a fast growing stack of national security work for SpaceX. The company has flown four Space Force missions from Vandenberg since mid August, several believed to carry Starshield satellites, pushing its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion. Elon Musk was also named this week to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
The Florida doubleheader stood out for another reason. The Space Coast saw only one launch in all of September as SpaceX shifts more of its East Coast infrastructure toward Starship, which reached orbit for the first time on Flight 14 just three days earlier.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported strong delivery figures that beat Wall Street guesses, and they were revealed alongside the company’s second-best quarter in terms of energy deployments ever.
Tesla announced this morning that it delivered 486,532 cars in Q3, while producing 464,391, exceeding analyst consensus, which sat around 462,000 units.
Meanwhile, Tesla reported 13.7 GWh of energy storage deployed for the quarter. That’s the second-best quarter Tesla has ever reported on that side of things.
🚨 Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating expectations at 464,391.
Big Q from the Tesla team, also 13.7 GWh of energy was deployed. pic.twitter.com/olioLWgG7a
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 2, 2026
Vehicle Deliveries
Deliveries were strong, and it was another quarter when Tesla had the opportunity to outshine the Wall Street pundits who are quick to criticize and slow to give credit. Tesla saw a slight decrease in deliveries compared to Q3 2025, but Tesla still had the $7,500 EV Tax Credit to use to help incentivize consumers to pick an EV.
A small decrease of 2.1 percent is pretty telling because it shows Tesla does not need massive federal credits to convince consumers to purchase its vehicles.
It was also the company’s third-best performance all-time in terms of deliveries, trailing that of Q3 2025 with 497,099 deliveries and Q4 2024, when the company handed over 495,570 cars.
We reported several days ago that Tesla Showrooms across the United States were completely bare of inventory or unclaimed units. Many locations also removed Demo Drive units, which had been bought by customers looking to take delivery sooner.
Tesla showrooms picked clean ahead of Q3 end as demand looks strong
Energy Generation
Tesla’s Energy Generation performance in Q3 was also very strong, as the company deployed 13.7 GWh of energy storage over the past three months. The only quarter when Tesla reported stronger energy deployment figures was Q4 2025, when 14.2 GWh of energy storage was deployed.
Tesla’s Q3 performance in energy generation has continued to grow each quarter, with the company increasing its deployments by ten-fold since Q3 2021, when just 1.3 GWh was deployed.
It is also nearly double what it was in Q3 2024, when the company reported 6.9 GWh. This is one of Tesla’s quickest-growing divisions, and it flies under the radar with fans and analysts, as many are focused on self-driving or the vehicles themselves.
Tesla Stock
Shares rose 5.07 percent to $372.06 at just after 10 a.m. on the East Coast. This is a rarity for Tesla after a strong delivery report, as positive news usually brings the stock down. Many quarters with extremely robust delivery reports have not been as kind to the Teslanaires of the world.
Tesla says fixes on Full Self-Driving’s two biggest issues are on the way
SpaceX’s midnight spy satellite launch quietly set a new record
