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SpaceX team spotted removing Block 5 landing legs prior to teardown analysis
Teslarati photographer Tom Cross has captured SpaceX technicians removing the landing legs from the first Falcon 9 Block 5 booster, signaling that the end of recovery operations are near.
Of note, it appears that SpaceX chose to conduct this recovery much like previous ones by removing the rocket’s legs instead of retracting them, a feature of the Block 5 upgrade prominently noted by CEO Elon Musk and other company officials. A brief time-lapse shows workers carefully removing the legs in a well-worn ballet of heavy machinery, skirting around the massive rocket with expertise developed over the better part of two years of sea and land recoveries of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters.
There are a number of possible reasons for SpaceX choosing to remove B1046’s landing legs the ‘old-fashioned’ way, most relating to the fact that this particular booster is a critical pathfinder for the entire future of Falcon 9 Block 5. Musk described this attitude in a lengthy and detailed prelaunch briefing:
We are going to be very rigorous in taking this rocket apart and confirming our design assumptions to be confident that it is indeed able to be reused without being taken apart. Ironically, we need to take it apart to confirm that it does not need to be taken apart.
Both COO Shotwell and Musk have briefly discussed the new functionality of the upgraded legs in the past few weeks, indicating that they are capable of being rapidly and repeatedly stowed without being removed from the rocket, whereas all past booster reuse has required the slow removable and equally slow reattachment of landing legs, assuming Block 3 and 4 boosters even reuse their same landing legs. At a minimum, Musk’s above comment already makes it clear that SpaceX has no plans to reuse this booster immediately, instead conducting an extremely thorough teardown analysis to verify that wear and tear from high-speed atmospheric reentry is within an acceptable range.
SpaceX technicians busy themselves removing Falcon 9 Block 5’s massive recovery hardware. (Tom Cross)
Equally plausible, choosing to remove B1046’s landing legs instead of testing the new retraction mechanisms may better preserve the leg hardware in its post-landing state, providing engineers and technicians cleaner and more representative data. One final obvious possibility is that the process of flight-testing new Block 5 leg hardware caused damage or led to some off-nominal telemetry and other visible faults, thus preventing them from retracting.
Because the next Block 5 booster (B1047) is likely nearing its own debut after a thorough round of testing in Texas, captured by an aerial photographer, SpaceX may be pushing hard to complete its post-landing analysis of B1046 as quickly as possible to make way for the imminent launches of several new boosters. If the company hopes to maintain its impressive 2018 flight rate of one launch every two weeks throughout the rest of the year, they will need to refly Block 5 boosters at least 10 times – the last flight-proven commercial Block 4 launch (CRS-15) is currently scheduled for early July, leaving roughly half of all 2018’s upcoming launches manifested on Block 5 Falcon 9/Heavy rockets. Falcon Heavy’s second launch has in fact been pushed back by several months per The Planetary Society, indicating that the construction of the first Block 5 center booster has taken a back seat to the more pressing concerns of Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters, upper stages, and fairings needed to avoid additional customer launch delays.
B1046’s final landing leg is removed and carried off with a forklift, presumably for teardown analysis at a SpaceX facility. (Tom Cross)
Regardless, the first successful and nearly-complete recovery of a Falcon 9 Block 5 booster marks a huge milestone for SpaceX. So long as the imminent teardown analysis does not reveal anything especially unexpected, the rocket company is quickly closing in on true rapid reuse with Octagrabber/Roomba’s steady routinization of robotic rocket saving, yet another intact fairing half recovery, and the good condition of B1046 after a relatively hot reentry and landing.
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- Just boopin’ an orbital-class rocket with a huge metal component, NBD. (Tom Cross)
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- (Tom Cross)
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- A toasty Block 5 landing leg shows off a new patina for SpaceX’s upgraded thermal protection material.
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- (Tom Cross)
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
