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SpaceX pushes boundaries of fairing recovery with breathtaking sunrise launch [photos]
SpaceX has soared past the halfway point of completion for Iridium’s next-generation NEXT constellation with the successful launch of satellites 41-50 earlier this morning. SpaceX has three additional launches contracted with Iridium for a total of eight. Despite intentionally ditching the flight-proven first stage booster in the Pacific Ocean, SpaceX attempted to recover one half of the payload fairing; an effort acknowledged to be predominately experimental at this point.
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- F9 B1041 gives one final swan song with the successful launch of 10 more Iridium NEXT satellites. (Pauline Acalin)
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- Although fog and camera difficulties slightly marred the shot, note the details in Falcon 9’s normally white-hot exhaust. (Pauline Acalin)
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- Falcon 9 1041 rises above a sea of fog for one last mission to orbit. Half of its fairing made a surprise appearance in port on Saturday. (Pauline Acalin)
Iridium-5 continues a recent trend of monthly launches out of SpaceX’s Vandenberg Air Force Base launch facilities – the company’s SLC-4E pad is known to take a bit longer than its East coast brethren for refurbishment and repairs between launches, typically maxing out approximately one launch per month. This launch also marks another flight-proven booster intentionally expended, likely in part because the West Coast drone ship Just Read The Instructions is currently out of commission, awaiting the delivery of critical subsystems stripped to repair the Eastern OCISLY.
As of posting, all 10 Iridium NEXT satellites have been successfully deployed into low Earth orbit, marking the successful completion of this mission. On the recovery side of the mission, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had initially teased Mr Steven’s upcoming fairing catch attempt – his silence since providing a T-0 around 7:44 am PST presumably speaks to the experimental nature of these fairing recovery efforts, and hints that this attempt may not have been successful.
GPS guided parafoil twisted, so fairing impacted water at high speed. Air wake from fairing messing w parafoil steering. Doing helo drop tests in next few weeks to solve.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2018
A couple hours after launch, Musk took to Twitter to confirm that this fairing recovery effort had failed, largely due to the complexity of safely parafoiling such a large, fast, and ungainly object. “[Helicopter] drop tests” are planned for coming weeks in order to put to bed the problems ailing fairing recovery. As SpaceX announcer and materials engineer Michael Hammersley noted, “the ultimate goal is full recovery and reuse of the entire vehicle,” and experimental fairing recovery efforts push SpaceX one step closer to that ambition.
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- F9 B1041 arrives in port after its first successful mission, Iridium-3, in October 2017. (Pauline Acalin)
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- 1041 flew for its second and final time earlier this morning, sans any landing aboard JRTI. (Pauline Acalin)
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- B1041 presumably soft-landed in the Pacific, as did its fairing. (Pauline Acalin)
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- RIP. (Pauline Acalin)
Space (regulation) oddity
Perhaps the most unusual feature of this launch was an announcement soon after the webcast began that NOAA (the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration) apparently restricted SpaceX’s ability to provide live coverage of Falcon 9’s upper stage once in orbit, and the webcast thus ended moments after the second stage Merlin Vacuum engine shut off. By all appearances, this is fairly unprecedented: NOAA is tasked with “licensing…operations of private space-based remote sensing systems” with their Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) branch, but they’ve been quite inept and heavy-handed in their implementation of Earth imaging regulation. Nominally, the purpose of that regulation is to protect sensitive US security facilities and activities from the unblinking eyes of private, orbital imaging satellites, but NOAA has quite transparently exploited its power in ways that create extreme uncertainty and near-insurmountable barriers to entry for prospective commercial Earth-imaging enterprises.
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What an absolutely beautiful launch at Vandenberg this morning. Congratulations to SpaceX on another successful mission accomplished! #SpaceX #Iridium5 @Teslarati pic.twitter.com/hsp7H5bv8J
— Pauline Acalin (@w00ki33) March 30, 2018
Presumably, this protects their (and their prime contractors’) vested interest in NOAA’s continuing quasi-monopoly over Earth sciences and weather-related satellite production and operations, a segment of the agency’s budget known to aggressively devour as much of NOAA’s budget as practicable. In this sense, something as arbitrary as preventing a launch provider like SpaceX from showing live, low-resolution (functionally useless) video feeds from orbit would be thoroughly disappointing, but in no way surprising. In this case, the restriction is comically transparent in its blatant inconsistency: SpaceX has flown more than 50 launches over more than a decade, all of which featured some form of live coverage of the upper stage once in orbit, and none of which NOAA objected to. Fingers crossed that this absurd restriction can be lifted sooner than later.
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- No fairing snack for Mr Steven this time around. (Pauline Acalin)
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- PAZ’s recovered fairing half sadly cracked beyond repair while being hauled aboard Mr Steven. (Pauline Acalin)
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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Pauline Acalin – Twitter
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
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.
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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.
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The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
