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SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 fleet takes shape as rocket booster production ramps

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7 years ago

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Per a source involved in SpaceX’s cross-country rocket transport infrastructure, the company continues to beat the expectations of its closest followers, pointing towards an inflection point in the production and testing of new Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket boosters and upper stages.

Building off of a number of Falcon 9 booster, upper stage, and fairing spottings over the past six weeks, it can reasonably be concluded that SpaceX has completed, shipped, tested (i.e. static fires in Texas), and delivered (to launch sites) as many Falcon 9 rockets in six weeks as were shipped, tested, and launched in the preceding five months – perhaps even 30% more.

This extreme production ramp can be attributed almost entirely to the maturation of Falcon 9 Block 5’s design and manufacturing apparatus, owing to the fact that the rocket’s most recent (and theoretically final) upgrade necessitated significant changes to almost every major aspect of the Falcon family. Meanwhile, a considerable amount of time and effort had to be directed towards the optimization and production of the first Falcon Heavy, to some extent an entirely bespoke rocket built off of much older Falcon 9 cores and a center core design unlikely to be repeated.

With Falcon Heavy completed and launched in February and the last non-Block 5 booster built, launched, and relaunched in the last three months, Falcon 9 Block 5 has for the first time been allowed to become SpaceX’s near-singular focus for manufacturing and testing, both in the Hawthorne factory, the McGregor, TX testing facility, and SpaceX’s three launch pads.

This change in focus likely means that SpaceX was finally able to rid itself of what were effectively multiple SKUs (serial versions) of its workhorse rocket, presumably allowing their supplier and manufacturing apparatus to be significantly streamlined. With low-volume production and limited manufacturing space, multiple SKUs were likely a massive challenge for the Hawthorne factory and the McGregor testing facility, where the stand used to test Falcon 9 boosters likely required significant modifications to support Block 5 static fires. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s three launch pads in Florida and California all needed their own series of upgrades to transfer from Block 4 to Block 5.

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Regardless, SpaceX has clearly gotten its manufacturing feet back under it and has ever-growing confidence in the nascent Block 5 iteration of Falcon 9. COO and President Gwynne Shotwell noted in a May 2018 CNBC interview that she believed the Hawthorne factory was nominally capable of producing one Merlin engine a day and two Block 5 boosters per month, and this recent burst of activity appears to heartily confirm her estimates. What remains to be seen is if what appears to be a six-week sprint (at least relative to the last year or so of rocket building) will instead prove to be the norm for the second half of 2018 and 2019.

If SpaceX can continue to sustain this extraordinarily rapid-fire pace of rocket production for just the next six months, the company could round out 2018 with a strong start to what Shotwell described would be a “sizable fleet” of Falcon boosters. Block 5 boosters B1047, B1048, and B1049 are now finished with static fire testing in McGregor after shipping from Hawthorne and either at launch sites or on their way, while B1050 most likely just arrived at McGregor for its own static fire. The first successfully launched and recovered Block 5 booster (B1046) was said by CEO Elon Musk to be undergoing a thorough teardown analysis – a process that almost certainly has been completed given the burst of Block 5 shipments and testing – and should be free to support additional launches later this year.

If SpaceX continues to produce nearly two boosters per month, the company could round out 2018 with a fleet of nearly 16 Falcon 9 boosters, each of which has been designed to support anywhere from a handful to a hundred reuses.

Follow us for live updates, peeks behind the scenes, and photos from Teslarati’s East and West Coast photographers.

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Tesla gets new insurance program from firm that offered ‘almost free’ FSD rates

Tesla recently was offered “almost free” coverage for Full Self-Driving by Lemonade’s Shai Wininger, President and Co-founder, who said it would be “happy to explore insuring Tesla FSD miles for (almost) free.”

Published

22 minutes ago

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December 11, 2025

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla owners in California, Oregon, and Arizona can now use Lemonade Insurance, the firm that recently said it could cover Full Self-Driving miles for “almost free.”

Lemonade, which offered the new service through its app, has three distinct advantages, it says:

  • Direct Connection for no telematics device needed
  • Better customer service
  • Smarter pricing

The company is known for offering unique, fee-based insurance rates through AI, and instead of keeping unclaimed premiums, it offers coverage through a flat free upfront. The leftover funds are donated to charities by its policyholders.

On Thursday, it announced that cars in three states would be able to be connected directly to the car through its smartphone app, enabling easier access to insurance factors through telematics:

Tesla recently was offered “almost free” coverage for Full Self-Driving by Lemonade’s Shai Wininger, President and Co-founder, who said it would be “happy to explore insuring Tesla FSD miles for (almost) free.”

The strategy would be one of the most unique, as it would provide Tesla drivers with stable, accurate, and consistent insurance rates, while also incentivizing owners to utilize Full Self-Driving for their travel miles.

Tesla Full Self-Driving gets an offer to be insured for ‘almost free’

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This would make FSD more cost-effective for owners and contribute to the company’s data collection efforts.

Data also backs Tesla Full Self-Driving’s advantages as a safety net for drivers. Recent figures indicate it was nine times less likely to be in an accident compared to the national average, registering an accident every 6.36 million miles. The NHTSA says a crash occurs approximately every 702,000 miles.

Tesla also offers its own in-house insurance program, which is currently offered in twelve states so far. The company is attempting to enter more areas of the U.S., with recent filings indicating the company wants to enter Florida and offer insurance to drivers in that state.

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Tesla Model Y gets hefty discounts and more in final sales push

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1 hour ago

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December 11, 2025

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla Model Y configurations are getting hefty discounts and more benefits as the company is in the phase of its final sales push for the year.

Tesla is offering up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard trims that are available in inventory in the United States. Additionally, Tesla is giving up to $2,000 off the Premium trims of the Model Y. There is also one free upgrade included, such as a paint color or interior color, at no additional charge.

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Tesla is hoping to bolster a relatively strong performance through the first three quarters of the year, with over 1.2 million cars delivered through the first three quarters.

This is about four percent under what the company reported through the same time period last year, as it was about 75,000 vehicles ahead in 2024.

However, Q3 was the company’s best quarterly performance of all time, and it surged because of the loss of the $7,500 EV tax credit, which was eliminated in September. The imminent removal of the credit led to many buyers flocking to Tesla showrooms to take advantage of the discount, which led to a strong quarter for the company.

2024 was the first year in the 2020s when Tesla did not experience a year-over-year delivery growth, as it saw a 1 percent slide from 2023. The previous years saw huge growth, with the biggest coming from 2020 to 2021, when Tesla had an 87 percent delivery growth.

This year, it is expected to be a second consecutive slide, with a drop of potentially 8 percent, if it manages to deliver 1.65 million cars, which is where Grok projects the automaker to end up.

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Tesla will likely return to its annual growth rate in the coming years, but the focus is becoming less about delivery figures and more about autonomy, a major contributor to the company’s valuation. As AI continues to become more refined, Tesla will apply these principles to its Full Self-Driving efforts, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot project.

Will Tesla thrive without the EV tax credit? Five reasons why they might

These discounts should help incentivize some buyers to pull the trigger on a vehicle before the year ends. It will also be interesting to see if the adjusted EV tax credit rules, which allowed deliveries to occur after the September 30 cutoff date, along with these discounts, will have a positive impact.

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Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’

“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026.”

Published

10 hours ago

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December 10, 2025

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla Full Self-Driving’s newest model is coming very soon, and from what it sounds like, it could be “the last big piece of the puzzle,” as CEO Elon Musk said in late November.

During the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk was available for a Q&A session, where he revealed some details about Robotaxi and Tesla’s plans for removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors, and some information on a future FSD model.

While he said Full Self-Driving’s unsupervised capability is “pretty much solved,” and confirmed it will remove Safety Monitors in the next three weeks, questions about the company’s ability to give this FSD version to current owners came to mind.

Musk said a new FSD model is coming in about a month or two that will be an order-of-magnitude larger and will include more reasoning and reinforcement learning.

He said:

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“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL (reinforcement learning). To get to serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”

It rings back to late November when Musk said that v14.3 “is where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.”

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With the advancements made through Full Self-Driving v14 and v14.2, there seems to be a greater confidence in solving self-driving completely. Musk has also personally said that driver monitoring has been more relaxed, and looking at your phone won’t prompt as many alerts in the latest v14.2.1.

This is another indication that Tesla is getting closer to allowing people to take their eyes off the road completely.

Along with the Robotaxi program’s success, there is evidence that Tesla could be close to solving FSD. However, it is not perfect. We’ve had our own complaints with FSD, and although we feel it is the best ADAS on the market, it is not, in its current form, able to perform everything needed on roads.

But it is close.

That’s why there is some legitimate belief that Tesla could be releasing a version capable of no supervision in the coming months.

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All we can say is, we’ll see.

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