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SpaceX expends Falcon 9 booster for the first time in almost three years
For the first time since January 2020, SpaceX has intentionally expended a Falcon 9 booster instead of attempting to recover the rocket at sea or on land.
Weighing around 6.6 tons (~14,600 lb) at liftoff, the rare mission sent Intelsat’s twin Maxar-built Galaxy 31 and 32 communications satellites to a high geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) that will allow them to start operating more quickly than a standard GTO would. To launch such a heavy payload to such a high ‘supersynchronous’ transfer orbit, SpaceX – at Intelsat’s request and for a fee – removed all landing-related hardware from Falcon 9 and did not attempt to recover the first stage.
Instead, the rocket put all the propellant that would have otherwise been saved for recovery into its first and only burn, reaching as high a speed as possible before separating from the second stage. Flying for the 14th time since its March 2019 debut, Falcon 9 booster B1051 didn’t perform a controlled flip or attempt to land on a SpaceX drone ship. It’s more likely that the few-dozen-ton rocket – now drained of propellant – reentered Earth’s atmosphere with no control at a speed of roughly 2.7 kilometers per second (~6000 mph), broke apart when it slammed into that atmospheric ‘wall,’ and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean as a cloud of debris.
Having already flown 13 times before its 14th and final mission, it’s safe to say that booster B1051 earned its permanent retirement as an artificial reef. The mission marked the first time a Falcon 9 booster was intentionally discarded since January 2020, when the first Falcon 9 Block 5 booster – B1046 – was destroyed as part of an intentional In-Flight Abort test of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Like B1046, B1051 was another fairly new Falcon 9 Block 5 booster. It’s no coincidence that most of the first five or so boosters have been or will be intentionally expended. B1047 was first in August 2019, followed by B1046 five months later, and B1051 in November 2022. B1048 and B1050 both suffered in-flight anomalies that – while they didn’t impact the success of their primary missions – resulted in failed landing attempts. After B1051’s demise, only B1049 remains. Next Spaceflight reports that SpaceX will also intentionally expend that booster after its 11th launch, which will send the Eutelsat 10B communications satellite to a different geostationary transfer orbit as early as this month..
While SpaceX likely charged its customers a healthy fee to expend B1049 and B1051, the company is likely not complaining about an opportunity to refine its fleet of Falcon boosters. Though no new variant has been officially introduced, SpaceX has learned more about the design over the years, and newer Falcon Block 5 boosters include improvements that make them easier and cheaper to operate and reuse. It’s also added four new Falcon 9 boosters to the fleet in less than a year, easing the burden created by expending two older but flightworthy boosters weeks apart.
Once B1049 is gone, that fleet will still have one unflown Falcon 9 booster, four unflown Falcon Heavy boosters, ten flown Falcon 9 boosters, and four flown Falcon Heavy side boosters – the latter of which can potentially be converted into Falcon 9 boosters during Falcon Heavy lulls. B1051 was the third Falcon 9 booster to complete 14 launches, meaning that SpaceX has gotten so good at routine reusability that it can safely assume that each new Falcon 9 Falcon Heavy side booster can fulfill the roles of more than a dozen expendable boosters.
Ultimately, B1051’s sacrifice left Falcon 9’s expendable upper stage with enough performance to boost Galaxy 31 and 32 into a supersynchronous orbit with an apogee more than 58,400 kilometers (~36,300 miles) above Earth’s surface – almost 1.5 times its circumference. Just last month, two recoverable Falcon 9 boosters helped launch a pair of smaller 4.5-ton (~10,000 lb) satellites to almost identical orbits (~57,500 km vs. ~58,400 km). Expending Falcon 9’s booster thus allowed SpaceX to launch almost 50% more payload to a similar supersynchronous GTO, demonstrating the substantial toll booster reuse incurs on launches to higher orbits.
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Galaxy 31/32 was SpaceX’s 52nd launch this year and hit a target set by CEO Elon Musk in January. Musk later raised his goal to 60 launches, but SpaceX has managed an average of one Falcon launch every six days for nearly 12 months and has a strong shot at completing another eight launches before the end of the year.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?'”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
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.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
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.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
