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SpaceX’s third Block 5 rocket heads to Texas test site as launch marathon nears

What is likely B1048 spotted heading to McGregor, Texas for static fire testing, June 11. (TeslaMotorsClub /u/nwdiver)

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 – almost certainly the third Block 5 booster to leave the company’s factory – was spotted passing through New Mexico on the last leg of its trip from California to Texas. Although the shipment is a great sign, it begs the question of how exactly SpaceX plans to launch its next six launches penciled in for July and August.

Bear with me, as this post will dive into the specifics of orchestrating launches – namely having rocket boosters, upper stages, and fairings all ready at the same place and time. Fundamentally, the analysis that follows suggests two main possibilities: 1) two or three of those July/August launches will have to be delayed for booster availability or 2) the first (and perhaps second) truly rapid reuseΒ of Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters will occur before summer’s end.

The first Block 5 Falcon 9 lifts off on May 4, 2018. The upgrade’s rapid reusability optimizations could be crucial for SpaceX’s summer manifest. (Tom Cross)

After conducting routine static fire testing in McGregor, the booster spotted on Monday – B1048 – will likely be shipped West to Vandenberg Air Force Base for the first West coast Block 5 launch in mid-July. B1047, the second Block 5 booster to leave SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory, was spotted miles from Cape Canaveral, FL near the end of May, while B1046‘s early May launch marked the debut of Falcon 9 Block 5 and was expected to undergo several months of disassembly and analysis to ensure the rocket upgrade was functioning as intended. Based on previous patterns, the fourth Block 5 Falcon 9 booster – B1049 – should not be expected to ship from the factory to McGregor until late June or early July. Finally, the last orbital Block 4 booster (B1045) will conduct its second and final launch in the last few days of June, currently NET June 29.

Put simply, B1049 is unlikely to arrive at its first launch site until mid or late July and can thus be taken out of the July running. B1045 will be (presumably) expended after launch, also taking it out of the running for future launches. B1048 will almost certainly travel to Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) for its first launch in July, effectively ruling out its availability for other July and August launches. Furthermore, Iridium’sΒ CEO Matt Desch has stated that both Iridium-7 and Iridium-8 are expected to launch on unflown boosters.Β Fundamentally, this leaves two Block 5 boosters readily available for four loosely scheduled July and August launches on the East Coast.

Focusing on July’s schedule as it currently stands, B1047 would be required to launch two high-energy geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) missions in as few as two weeks. The nature of drone ship recoveries would cut the time available between the booster’s return to port and its second static fire to perhaps 5-10 days. In other words, there would be almost no time whatsoever for refurbishment, at least compared to the current prospective record of B1045, roughly 70 days between launches.

All things considered, two launches of the same booster in well under a month would be an act of heroics given that B1047’s first launch will be the second or third-ever flight of Falcon 9 Block 5. An extensive upgrade to the venerable rocket intended to make it highly reusable and equally reliable, Block 5 is the culmination of more than half a decade of experience launching a wide array of Falcon 9 versions and 56 total launches. While I would place the odds of a sub-30 day back-to-back reflight happening less than two months from now at maybe 10%, my odds for the next six to nine months are closer to 95% – remember, Musk set SpaceX the goal of two flights of the same booster inΒ 24 hours by the end of 2019. It may sound insane, but it quite literally was what Block 5 was designed to enable.

Although delays are more probable here, the alternative is a truly wild roller coaster of launches and historic reusable rocket milestones. Fingers crossed!

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Tom Cross – Twitter

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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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Energy

Tesla Model 3 and Model Y can now do what only Cybertruck could

Tesla Model 3 and Model Y can power your home with Powerwall 3 during outages.

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Tesla has turned its two top sellers into backup batteries for the house.

Tesla Energy announced on Tuesday that Powershare Home Backup is now available for new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles paired with a Powerwall 3, saying the car can β€œextend your home backup by over 2 days.” Minutes later, Tesla’s main account quoted the post with a broader pitch: β€œWith Powerwall 3, every Tesla can now serve as your home’s backup battery.”

Until this week, the Cybertruck was the only Tesla that could send power back into a home, and that capability only began working alongside Powerwall 3 last month, after years of ambitious targets.

Tesla’s updated Powershare page says every Model 3 and Model Y ordered in the U.S. or Puerto Rico on or after October 1, 2026 can use the feature. Some, but not all, earlier cars also qualify. Owners can check on the touchscreen under Software, then Additional Vehicle Information, where a capable car shows β€œPowershare Support: Enabled.” As Electrek reported, bidirectional power on the two cars runs through an inverter Tesla calls PCS2 Lite, and the company has not said when that part entered production on each trim.

The home side is simpler. A house that already has a Powerwall 3 and either a Wall Connector 3 or Universal Wall Connector needs no additional equipment, and Tesla says compatibility is enabled through a software update. When the grid drops, the Powerwall and the car work together, with up to 11.52 kW of continuous power available. Tesla’s β€œover two days” estimate assumes a home using 30 kWh per day and a car starting at a 90 percent charge. Standard trims are rated for up to two days, while the Cybertruck adds more than three.

There are limits. Powerwall 2 and Powerwall+ support is listed as β€œcoming soon.” Model S and Model X are not included, and Grid Support, the program that lets Cybertruck owners in Texas send power back to the grid during demand spikes for bill credits, is not available for Model 3 or Model Y.

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The rollout also lines up with something Elon Musk said more than three years ago. At Tesla’s March 2023 Investor Day, Musk said, β€œI don’t think very many people are going to want to use bidirectional charging, unless you have a Powerwall.” Tesla has now shipped the feature for its volume cars with exactly that requirement attached.

The Powerwall pairing was the hard part on Cybertruck. Tesla told owners in December 2025 that Powershare with Powerwall had been pushed to mid 2026, and lead engineer Wes Morrill explained that two devices capable of forming a home’s grid have to negotiate which one leads during an outage, across multiple generations of hardware. With that work done for the truck, Tesla was able to extend it to the Model 3 and Model Y within a month.

Ford and GM have offered home backup from their EVs for several years, but both require a separate inverter and backup hardware. Tesla’s version leans on equipment many Powerwall 3 owners already have on the wall. Powershare for the two cars also ships as part of software update 2026.38.3, the same release that began delivering Halloween Mode on Tuesday.

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Tesla ships ‘spooky’ Halloween Mode with creepy and fun features

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla is now starting to ship a “Halloween Mode” that is filled with some creepy and fun features; the company says, “This spooky update turns your Tesla into a haunted house on wheels.”

The update is just the latest in a series of updates that Tesla typically ships out in a seasonal fashion. The Spring and Summer Updates provided some fun novelty items while also packing some cool features that are actually useful for the ownership experience.

This one seems to be more fun-forward, and there are not any updates to the Full Self-Driving suite or overall operation of the vehicle. Instead, these novelty features are geared toward getting you in the mood for the Fall and Halloween.

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New Ghost Costume on Car Avatar

Driver Visualization will now show your vehicle as a ghost, as an all-white sheet is draped over the vehicle. Pedestrians are turned into mummies or skeletons, and other vehicles are all a spooky green:

Credit: Tesla

Additionally, the Park Scene with your Tesla now displays that ghost costume draped over your vehicle in the foreground of a scary backdrop with Jack-o-Lanterns and a haunted house:

Credit: Tesla

Trick or Treat Mode

Trick or Treat Mode will enable the vehicle to play spooky sounds and flicker the lights as visitors approach. This might be a nice touch for when you’re handing out candy to kids on Halloween Night.

Other Features

Tesla is also adding a new Light Show, new Wrap Options, and a new Lock Sound with this update.

Credit: Tesla

Additionally, Photobooth has a new Halloween option:

Credit: Tesla

You will also be able to speak remotely through the app and transmit your voice to people outside, which is not a new feature, but the car will say it in a voice of its own, which is a new feature with that bullhorn-like feature.

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Investor's Corner

SpaceX reveals how its 1 Million AI satellite network will work and prevent space collisions

SpaceX reveals plans for one million Starmind AI satellites and calls out operators hiding maneuvers.

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Concept rendering of SpaceX Starmind constellation via Grok
Concept rendering of SpaceX Starmind constellation via Grok

SpaceX has put the largest satellite count it has ever published into writing, and it says that plan only works if every other operator in orbit starts sharing what it knows.

In a new Space Safety page highlighted Tuesday morning by Sawyer Merritt on X, SpaceX said it “plans to operate up to 100,000 Starlink satellites and up to 1 million Starmind AI satellites to meet the growing demand for broadband and supercompute.” Starlink has a little over 11,000 satellites in orbit today, so the target alone implies roughly a ninefold expansion of the broadband network.

Starmind is SpaceX’s orbital AI compute constellation. Elon Musk confirmed the Starmind name in June after an xAI trademark filing surfaced, and in August SpaceX said it was working with Nvidia on the compute payload. The FCC accepted the filing for up to one million satellites back in February.

FCC accepts SpaceX filing for 1 million orbital data center plan

SpaceX also released a new render of what a full Starmind constellation could look like. Alongside it, SpaceX VP Michael Nicolls explained why the satellites will not operate on their own. “We need to operate clusters of satellites in tight formation to get enough coherent compute to run AI models efficiently,” Nicolls said. “A cluster will be 10-ish satellites connected with 10 terabits or so of bandwidth between them, and interconnected to the broader constellation.”

That is the most specific detail SpaceX has given on how Starmind will be built. Instead of a million independent servers, the network would work as tightly packed groups of about 10 satellites acting as one compute unit, with Starlink’s laser links carrying results back to Earth.

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Packing satellites that close together, at that scale, makes collision avoidance the central problem, and most of the Space Safety page is aimed at other operators. SpaceX said Starlink encountered collision risks with about 650 unique maneuvering third party satellites in 2026, and only about half of them shared data. Over six months, Starlink recorded roughly 164,000 more collision risks where the closest approach came within four hours of an unannounced maneuver.

Some operators keep maneuver plans private over proprietary concerns, while others cannot get government permission to share them. SpaceX called those policies “counterproductive,” saying they “largely only serve to create preventable collision risk between satellites.” Starlink is also offering a free ephemeris sharing and screening platform that returns risk results within a minute, backed by its Stargaze network of 30,000 optical sensors.

The push comes as the Starmind application draws opposition from astronomers and environmental groups. In a September filing with the FCC, SpaceX said each Starmind satellite could weigh up to 4,000 kg, nearly seven times the mass of a Starlink V2 Mini. Musk has brushed off crowding concerns before, telling viewers in June that “space is enormous” and that SpaceX already knows how to run very large constellations safely.

SpaceX’s Starmind page says its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, is designed to produce AI satellites at scale, with deployment of thousands of units starting as soon as late 2027.

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