News
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket looks no worse for wear after dual launches
SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 Block 5 booster has returned to Port Canaveral, FL once again after the rocket’s second successful launch, likely the first of countless reuses to come over the next months and years. Of note, B1046.2 (Booster 1046, flight 2) was by all appearances in as good of condition as it was when it lifted off from Pad 40 just three days prior.
While it may be difficult to immediately distinguish between B1046’s second launch and recovery and those of previous, older Falcon 9 boosters, Block 5 is a quite simply an entirely different story. Moreover, the fact that SpaceX went from the major upgrade’s launch debut to first booster reflight in barely three months is an extraordinarily good indication that Block 5’s first flightworthy design (especially the parts not visible to the public) is very close to its engineers’ theoretical intentions.
Some additional shots of today's B1046.2 return to port. @SpaceX @SpaceXUpdates @elonmusk @SpaceXFleet #SpaceX pic.twitter.com/d4ivQ8PRuU
— The Aerospace Geek (@ThAerospaceGeek) August 10, 2018
Falcon 9 B1046’s second recovery also happened to be the quickest yet for SpaceX by a healthy margin, taking just 4.5 days to travel 400 miles back to port, be lifted off drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, have its legs removed, and be loaded horizontally onto SpaceX’s dedicated Cape Canaveral booster transporter. Whether or not the rocket itself is ready for another flight with absolutely zero refurbishing in between, this demonstration of just how quickly SpaceX’s infrastructure can operate indicates that much of the framework needed for truly rapid reuse is already largely in place.
Once SpaceX is confident that Block 5 can be reflown with little more than new fuel added and has lined up multiple payloads for launch in just a few days or weeks, it’s clear that the company will already have the ability to launch (and reuse rockets) so quickly that drone ship availability will become the primary bottleneck. For example, if B1046 could have shipped to one of SpaceX’s launch sites moments after it was loaded on its transporter and prepped for the second launch within 24-48 hours of going horizontal, it’s extremely unlikely that OCISLY could be readied for another booster recovery and towed several hundred miles off the coast in time to catch B1046 after its third launch.
- B1046 returned to Port Canaveral shortly after its May 4 debut, and is now being carefully analyzed as pathfinder hardware. (Tom Cross)
- Soon after, B1046 was spotted on its way to a refurbishment facility around a week after its May 11 launch debut. (Instagram /u/tersco)
- It’s currently unclear whether B1046 or B1048 will become the first SpaceX rocket to fly three times. (Tom Cross)
- 60 hours after docking, B1046 was loaded horizontally onto its transporter. (Tom Cross)
- SpaceX’s rocket-securing robot, known as Octagrabber, seen on OCISLY after another successful rocket recovery, August 12th. (Tom Cross)
As such, barring the extremely rapid completion of SpaceX’s third drone ship (named A Shortfall of Gravitas), it can be all but guaranteed that SpaceX will need to use its land-based Landing Zone 1 to accomplish CEO Elon Musk’s challenge of launching, landing, and relaunching the same Falcon 9 booster in less than 24 hours sometime before the end of 2019. Even then, it seems likely that SpaceX would either need to dramatically improve the turnaround capabilities of one of its launch sites or conduct those back-to-back launches using both of the company’s two Florida pads (LC-39A and LC-40).
Regardless, the first reuse of a Falcon 9 Block 5 booster unequivocally marks the beginning of a new era for SpaceX and for orbital rocketry worldwide. According to one of SpaceX’s webcast hosts during the second flight of B1046 (for the launch of Telkom 4/Merah Putih), the rocket’s third launch (a first for SpaceX) is already in planning for an unspecified mission later this year. As SpaceX rockets begin to rack up 3, 5, 10, or more launches apiece and the act of reusing Falcon 9s becomes so routine that it bores all but the most ardent followers, you’ll know that SpaceX has essentially succeeded in the first step of its master plan. Next stop: BFR and Mars.
For prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet (including fairing catcher Mr Steven) check out our brand new LaunchPad and LandingZone newsletters!
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
News
Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.




