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SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 fleet takes shape as rocket booster production ramps
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.
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- Falcon 9 B1047 spotted in Florida just a short trip away from Cape Canaveral, where it will likely launch Telsat 19V in mid-July. (Reddit /u/fatherofzeuss)
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- What was likely B1049 spotted heading to McGregor, Texas for static fire testing, June 11. (TeslaMotorsClub /u/nwdiver)
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- What has to be B1050 on its way to McGregor for static fire testing, July 6. (anonymous)
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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- B1047 captured testing in McGregor, Texas, April 2018. (Teslarati/Aero Photo)
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- Falcon 9 B1049 spotted on stand in McGregor, TX on June 15.
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.
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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.
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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
