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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.
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- B1046 returned to Port Canaveral shortly after its May 4 debut, and is now being carefully analyzed as pathfinder hardware. (Tom Cross)
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- Soon after, B1046 was spotted on its way to a refurbishment facility around a week after its May 11 launch debut. (Instagram /u/tersco)
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- It’s currently unclear whether B1046 or B1048 will become the first SpaceX rocket to fly three times. (Tom Cross)
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- 60 hours after docking, B1046 was loaded horizontally onto its transporter. (Tom Cross)
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- SpaceX’s rocket-securing robot, known as Octagrabber, seen on OCISLY after another successful rocket recovery, August 12th. (Tom Cross)
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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!
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.
SpaceX’s massive investment in AI will make it a big winner, Argus Research said after the company’s successful earnings call last week.
The firm also upgraded shares to a Buy from Hold and set a $160 price target.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) is currently recovering from its heavy AI infrastructure investments, as it spent nearly $16 billion in Q2 alone. The company did this primarily by monetizing high-demand GPU compute capacity at a much faster pace than traditional data center economics would suggest.
Company CFO Bret Johnsen said that SpaceX would be able to pay back anything on new deployments within a year.
There are plenty of ways the company can do this:
Leasing excess compute capacity through contracts
SpaceX has already built Colossus and Colossus II, largely for its own model training. However, much of that capacity is already rented out to third parties. It already has major deals with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI. These partnerships are adding billions per month to SpaceX’s spreadsheet.
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High utilization driven by industry-wide scarcity
The demand for advanced AI training and inference capacity continues to exceed what is available for use. SpaceX can fill new racks quickly after they come online, so the capital deployed converts into revenue with minimal idle time.
Additionally, management and outside observers have described the new compute capital as behaving more like a cost-of-goods-sold than traditional multi-year capex, especially because of this rapid monetization pattern.
Capacity has already scaled from ~0.4 GW a year to 1.4 GW annually by the end of Q2. There are targets of more than 2 GW by year-end.
High incremental margins on the rental business once capacity is online
GPU cloud providers often operate at strong gross margins. SpaceX can monetize capacity that was already partially built or can be added efficiently. This means that incremental EBITDA margins on the rental revenue are usually high. This accelerates cash recovery relative to the gross capital outlay.
Parallel monetization of its own AI software and applications
Beyond pure infrastructure rental, SpaceX also generates revenue from Grok through subscriptions and usage, from X through ads, data, and other related services, enterprise APIs, and the planned integration of the Cursor coding tools acquisition.
These application layers ride on the same compute infrastructure and provide additional high-margin streams that could offset build-out costs. AI-segment revenue overall rose sharply to about $2.6 billion in Q2, according to Motley Fool. This was driven primarily by the infrastructure contracts, but the software side is also partially responsible.
Efficient, large-scale deployment and vertical integration advantages
SpaceX has emphasized the rapid construction of power and cooling infrastructure and favorable cost-per-megawatt economics relative to industry benchmarks in some disclosures.
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Combined with its ability to scale capacity aggressively and the fact that many contracts start generating revenue within months of capacity coming online, the effective payback compresses dramatically compared with more conventional multi-year data-center projects.
SpaceX’s dominant near-term recovery path will turn the AI clusters into a hyperscale-style compute rental business for other leading AI companies while still using a portion for internal models.
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors: Morgan Stanley
