SpaceX
SpaceX fairing catcher Mr. Steven heads for Panama Canal after one last drop test
Iconic fairing recovery vessel Mr. Steven appears to have quietly departed for SpaceX’s Florida launch facilities a few days after completing (successfully or not) one final controlled fairing catch test in the Pacific Ocean.
While bittersweet for those that have closely followed the vessel’s development and many attempted Falcon fairing recoveries, this move should ultimately give Mr. Steven around three times as many opportunities to attempt fairing recoveries thanks to SpaceX’s significantly higher East Coast launch cadence.
Mr Steven docking last night after another helicopter drop test, fairing half aboard. #spacex @Teslarati pic.twitter.com/1uMm8ktzWY
— Pauline Acalin (@w00ki33) January 26, 2019
Under SpaceX lease since late 2017, the company moved the vessel to California and modified it with its first net and set of arms around December 2017. Mr. Steven attempted his first Falcon fairing catch – each half worth more than $3M – in February 2018 after the launch of Earth imaging satellite PAZ and two SpaceX Starlink prototypes, thus beginning a string of five unsuccessful recovery attempts for West Coast Falcon 9 launches. The lack of success has most certainly not been for a lack of trying, exemplified in large part by Mr. Steven’s frequent net and arm upgrades over the last year, culminating in the installation of four massive arms, a vast primary net, and a smaller secondary net below it.
Recent fairing recovery test with Mr. Steven. So close! pic.twitter.com/DFSCfBnM0Y
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 8, 2019
-
SpaceX engineers and technicians repeatedly managed to get Falcon fairing halves – autonomously guided by GPS after deploying parafoils – within 50 to a few hundred feet during several of those five post-launch attempts. In the last few months of 2018, SpaceX also began a program of controlled fairing drop tests, where a helicopter would lift a fairing half 5,000-10,000 feet up before releasing it for Mr. Steven. A recent drop test organized in either late-December or early-January saw the parasailing fairing half get so close to a successful catch that its parafoil rigging actually appeared to get tangled on (or at least bump) the edge of Mr. Steven’s net, spanning an area of around 3000 square meters (~30,000 sq ft).
Barring a continuation of SpaceX’s helicopter drop test program on the East Coast, Mr. Steven’s final controlled fairing recovery attempt occurred on January 25th, perhaps less than four days before the ship departed for Florida. After maneuvering wildly and reaching 28 mph (45 km/h) – the fastest speed yet clocked – on his trip back to port, Mr. Steven arrived with a fairing half tantalizingly cradled in the ship’s new secondary net, a perfectly ambiguous state that could indicate a successful catch and net transfer or a missed catch and ocean retrieval, with the smaller net used as an ad-hoc shock absorber during his sprint to port.
-
- The apparent fairing-grabbing mechanism or robot spotted aboard the SpaceX-leased vessel Mr. Steven. (Reddit /u/ vshie)
-
- Not nearly enough net, as it turned out. (Pauline Acalin, May 2018)
-
- Mr Steven testing his new net in a series of sea trials, July 11
-
- Mr. Steven returned to Port of San Pedro around on October 8th after a day spent at sea, apparently with a Falcon fairing half in tow. This is the second known time that a fairing has been in Mr. Steven’s net. The fairing was eventually lifted off around noon the following day. (Pauline Acalin)
-
- Mr. Steven was captured performing tests with a duo of fairings and nets at its Port of LA berth, January 22nd. (Pauline Acalin)
-
- Prior to his Panama Canal exit, Mr. Steven barely missed 2-3 successful Falcon fairing catches during several controlled drop tests. (SpaceX)
Back to Port Canaveral
Prior to Mr. Steven’s California station and arm/net upgrade, the vessel was introduced to SpaceX in Florida as a sort of faster version of the slower service vessels already used to support drone ship deployments and recover fairing halves (or shards) out of the ocean. Although it remains entirely possible that Mr. Steven’s abrupt journey towards southern Mexico is a false alarm, it appears quite likely that the vessel will ultimately end up back where it started its SpaceX journey. After returning to Port Canaveral, Mr. Steven should be able to support a range of post-launch fairing recovery attempts thanks to SpaceX’s consistently-busy East Coast launch schedule.
At his current cruising speed of ~18 knots (21 mph/35 km/h), Mr. Steven will take at least 9-10 days (~220-240 hours) to travel the ~7500 km (4600 mi) of ocean separating Port of LA and Port Canaveral. Even assuming many lengthy stops for fuel and supplies, the vessel should easily arrive in time to attempt its first East Coast fairing catch in support of SpaceX’s next launch, NET February 18th. After that, Crew Dragon’s inaugural orbital launch (DM-1) is targeted for late February, followed by Cargo Dragon’s 17th operational mission (NET March 16th) and the second-ever launch of Falcon Heavy, absolutely no earlier than March 7th.
Mr. Steven appears to have quietly departed Port of Los Angeles for Manzanillo, a port on the southwest coast of Mexico. This is likely Leg #1 of a voyage to Port Canaveral, where he can support #SpaceX's more frequent Florida launches. He'll be missed on the West Coast 🙁 pic.twitter.com/Jb5cOA2Cda
— Eric Ralph (@13ericralph31) January 29, 2019
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
-
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3.7 early review: FSD saved me from an accident
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
