News
SpaceX restores a Falcon 1 rocket for 10th anniversary of first launch success
With plans to give the historic rocket its own place on display inside the company’s Hawthorne factory, SpaceX has refurbished the last remaining Falcon 1 rocket booster and an old Merlin 1C engine to create a model representative of the same Falcon 1 that saved SpaceX and made history on September 28th, 2008, becoming the first privately-developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach Earth orbit.
In the process of celebrating the tenth anniversary of that crowning achievement, one is reminded just how meteoric SpaceX’s rise has been over the course of that decade, marked by relentless progress with Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon, and even the early phases of BFR construction.
https://twitter.com/SpaceXJobs/status/1045832573471969281
On that September afternoon ten years ago, SpaceX may well have saved itself from extinction. Running on funding fumes, CEO and founder Elon Musk has long held that the company would have been forced to effectively cease activity and disband after six years of work and three consecutive Falcon 1 failures had drained almost all of the $100 million he had dedicated in 2002.
Reaching orbit is undoubtedly one of the most technologically challenging feats there is and SpaceX’s merciless failures drove that reality home, ranging from a burst propellant line on the first stage Merlin, liquid propellant sloshing problems on the second stage, and overperformance on the first stage engine causing the two stages to impact after separation, among myriad other problems faced outside of actual launch attempts. Thankfully, thanks to the extraordinary group of several hundred early employees that fixed those problems and pushed onwards, Falcon 1’s fourth attempt was almost flawless and successfully placed a boilerplate mass simulator into a roughly circular ~650km orbit.
-
- Falcon 1 Flight 4 seen shortly after liftoff from SpaceX’s Kwaj Atoll island pad. (SpaceX)
-
- Earlier this summer, /r/SpaceX member MarsOrBust101 was lucky enough to spot an old Falcon 1 – long sat at one of SpaceX’s several junkyards – being transferred to its Hawthorne factory. (Reddit /u/MarsOrBust101)
-
- It’s impossible to know for sure, but that hardware was almost certainly SpaceX’s first Falcon 1 recovery test article in a previous life. (SpaceX)
-
- SpaceX has restored the last remaining Falcon 1 structures into a display model. The small, unassuming rocket was showcased in front of the company’s Hawthorne factory on September 28th. (Pauline Acalin)
A bit more than nine months later, SpaceX completed the first and last operational launch of Falcon 1, retired to allow the company to focus fully on Falcon 5 (cancelled a few years later), Falcon 9, and Cargo Dragon. Eleven months after that July 2009 mission, SpaceX successfully launched Falcon 9 for the first time and followed it up with the first launch of a functioning Cargo Dragon spacecraft, which spent several hours testing systems in orbit before reentering Earth’s atmosphere and landing in the Pacific Ocean. Two years later in 2012, SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft in history to dock with the International Space Station, with operational NASA Commercial Resupply Services launches beginning just six months after.
With three years and five successful launches under its belt, Falcon 9 v1.0 was retired and made way for the first of many upgraded Falcon 9 variants, known as Falcon 9 v1.1, featuring 60% greater thrust and mass at liftoff, a new octaweb layout for its nine new Merlin 1D engines, and a range of structural changes that set the stage for future attempts at booster recovery. Two and a half years after Falcon 9 v1.1’s debut and a little over five years since the first successful launch of Falcon 1, SpaceX accomplished the first successful landing of a Falcon 9’s first stage, and that booster now stands proudly outside of the company’s Hawthorne, CA headquarters.
To mark that 10th anniversary, SpaceX apparently decided to salvage a mothballed Falcon 1 stored in a junkyard, refurbishing it into something closer to its former self. Although just the first stage and a Merlin 1C engine were present, the company stationed the refurbished Falcon 1 in front the first recovered Falcon 9 booster and gave all employees an opportunity to see the duo over the course of September 28th.
-
- Roughly a third of the SpaceX employees present for the company’s Falcon 1 Flight 4 success still remain. (SpaceX)
-
- Falcon 9 and Falcon 1. (Pauline Acalin)
-
- SpaceX’s first successful Falcon 9 landing. Booster B1019 now stands in front of SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory. (SpaceX)
-
- Falcon Heavy successfully clears the tower after its maiden launch, February 6, 2018. (Tom Cross)
The sheer size differential is undeniably impressive. However, a more gobsmacking statistic can be found still. Falcon 1 stands roughly 22 meters tall and would weigh around 39,000 kilograms with a full load of liquid oxygen and kerosene. While the Falcon family’s current payload fairing isn’t nearly tall enough to squeeze in a full Falcon 1 first stage, Falcon Heavy could easily place a fully-loaded Falcon 1 into Low Earth Orbit and still recovery all three of its first stage boosters.
In other words, SpaceX went from launching the first commercial liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit to launching a super-heavy rocket that could put that entire first rocket into orbit in less than ten years. Not too shabby.
For prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet check out our brand new LaunchPad and LandingZone newsletters!
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
