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SpaceX almost loses Falcon 9 booster at sea
After more than a week at sea, the SpaceX Falcon 9 booster responsible for the company’s 100th successful landing finally returned to port on Wednesday, revealing that it nearly toppled into the sea during the recovery process.
Falcon 9 B1069 completed its first launch without issue early on December 21st, carrying a reused Cargo Dragon capsule into space and sending it on its way towards orbit and the International Space Station (ISS). Nine minutes after liftoff, it touched down on drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) without any apparent issue, more or less hitting the platform’s painted bullseye. While it’s difficult to determine with certainty, B1069 appeared to be in fine condition after landing, standing roughly straight up with all nine Merlin 1D engines well above the drone ship’s deck.
That was decidedly not the case when the once-flown Falcon 9 booster finally sailed into Port Canaveral eight and a half days later.
There remains plenty of ambiguity about how exactly things transpired after the landing but when B1069 was finally within eyeshot, the booster was significantly damaged, riding low on all four legs, inches away from falling off the drone ship’s deck, and only partially attached to the “Octagrabber” robot tasked with securing it. Based on photos of the damaged rocket taken by Teslarati photographer Richard Angle, most or all of B1069’s nine Merlin 1D (M1D) engines suffered likely irreparable damage to their fragile bell nozzles.
From the ragged nature of the damage to those nozzles, it appears that B1069 somehow fell on top of the drone ship’s Octagrabber robot during or after its recovery attempt, as the creases would be far cleaner if the booster had merely landed hard and pressed its M1D nozzles against the deck. But a very short fall onto Octagrabber still doesn’t quite explain the apparent damage to one of the booster’s landing legs or the fact that it’s sitting lower to the deck than usual – both potentially indicative of a hard landing.
What is clear, though, is that SpaceX struggled to secure the rocket shortly after its first landing. Per the CRS-24 webcast, B1069 landed just shy of dead center. Likely as a result of poor sea conditions, SpaceX was unable to quickly grab the booster with Octagrabber, which uses giant clamps and its own weight to hold Falcon first stages in place. B1069 then clearly slid around drone ship JRTI’s deck at the whim of the ocean. Before SpaceX could secure it, the booster slammed into the side of the drone ship hard enough to partially flatten a steel safety barrier that runs along its port and starboard beams – a barrier specifically put in place to prevent wayward boosters from sliding off the deck.
Thankfully, above all else, there is no obvious reason that SpaceX won’t be able to repair the damage that was wrought. Replacing all nine of B1069’s engines will heavily delay the booster’s return to flight and probably singlehandedly cost SpaceX at least $5-10 million, but that cost is still far less than scrapping it and building a new booster. Aside from that, it’s possible that B1069’s fall will preclude strict customers like NASA or the US military from reusing the booster to launch their payloads, which the booster would have otherwise been a shoo-in for with just a single NASA launch on its record.
While CRS-24 and B1069’s dramatic return was SpaceX’s last launch and booster recovery of the year, the company did safely recovery several other boosters sans damage in the days and weeks prior. On December 14th, Falcon 9 B1061 was spotted being craned onto dry land after its fifth launch – NASA’s tiny IXPE X-ray space telescope.
Falcon 9 booster B1067 arrived at Port Canaveral not long after but spent most of the winter holiday sitting on drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) as many SpaceX employees took a well-deserved break. The thrice-flown booster was ultimately lifted onto the dock and broken over a few days before B1069 finally sailed into port, setting it up for a fourth launch in the very near future.
Ultimately, while the damage B1069 and JRTI’s Octagrabber seemingly suffered are a significant annoyance and will take a good deal of time and money to fix, SpaceX still has ten other operational Falcon 9 boosters ready to support a potentially record-breaking 2022 launch manifest.
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SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
SpaceX filed with the FCC for Starship Flight 14, its first true orbital launch attempt.
SpaceX has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to fly Starlink terminals during Starship’s fourteenth flight test, and the filing lays out a genuine trip to orbit, something the program has never attempted.
Every Starship flight so far, including Flight 13’s successful splashdown in the Indian Ocean on July 24, has flown a suborbital arc that ends with the ship reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launches. The FCC paperwork describes a mission profile built around an actual orbital insertion instead.
The payload is the other half of the story. Flight 13 carried 20 production Starlink V3 satellites, but because that mission never reached orbit, the satellites reentered along with the ship rather than joining the constellation, something Teslarati covered in detail after SpaceX released footage shot from one of those satellites as it drifted away from Starship in space. Flight 14 is designed to close that gap. If the orbital insertion holds, the roughly 20 V3 satellites onboard would separate into an operational orbit and could eventually go into service, each one rated for about 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity by SpaceX’s own account.
SpaceX announces new Starbase for ‘thousands of Starship launches annually’
Elon Musk first flagged the orbital attempt during SpaceX’s August 4 earnings call, the company’s first as a public entity following its June IPO under the ticker SPCX. He also floated catching the ship with the Starbase tower on the same flight, an idea he walked back on August 20, saying the catch attempt would more likely come “in a few months,” as Teslarati reported at the time. Flight 14 will instead target a splashdown for the ship in the Indian Ocean, the same recovery method used since Flight 12.
Hardware has been catching up to the ambition. Booster 21 completed a full 33-engine static fire on August 28, and Ship 41 finished its own six-engine test the week before. An airspace briefing circulated to pilots on August 20 listed September 15 as the target date, later than the end of August window Musk mentioned on the earnings call, though SpaceX has not confirmed a launch date publicly and Starship schedules routinely slip while hardware and FAA paperwork line up.
The FCC filing itself does not guarantee a launch date. It covers communications authority, and not flight readiness, considering SpaceX still needs Ship 41 fully stacked and cleared by the FAA before Flight 14 can fly. But the filing is a real marker of intent and it puts a specific regulatory process behind what had so far only been Musk’s word on the earnings call.
Tesla is set to launch Cybercab on Thursday at an event in Austin, Texas, which will officially bring the company’s first steering wheel-less and pedal-less vehicle to a limited number of consumers for the first time.
The event, which is invite-only, is still thin on details: we’ll be there, and it seems the event will be held at Gigafactory Texas, but the launch of this vehicle truly relies on it being operational outside of the factory and on public roads.
🚨 Close-Up look at Tesla Cybercab without steering wheel: pic.twitter.com/9TXCDeDCz7
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 3, 2026
Nevertheless, there are some big things to expect, and other things to temper expectations on. For what it’s worth, we believe this event could be perhaps the biggest indication that Tesla is ready to truly enter a new phase and chapter in its historic story.
Tesla Cybercab’s First Foray into the Public with Real-World Riders
Cybercab will likely hit the streets of Austin and the surrounding areas, likely in the established geofence that Tesla has expanded on for the past 14 months. Just yesterday, Tesla expanded it once again by 9 percent.
Tesla will put, for the first time, a vehicle without any manual controls on public roads, likely without any help from teleoperators. This is a truly groundbreaking development if it comes through in this fashion: it would be groundbreaking for Tesla to roll out a truly driverless ride-hailing vehicle.
Cybercab Has Already Been Unveiled
This is not an unveiling event. Cybercab has been released for nearly two years, as Tesla first showed it to the public on October 10, 2024.
FIRST LOOK: Tesla ‘Cybercab’ Robotaxi makes its global debut
While there is some small speculation that Tesla could release the Roadster at the event as a surprise, it seems more likely the focus will be on the Cybercab and the huge accomplishment that will come with releasing a vehicle with no manual controls.
There Will Be a Lot of Hype
What’s important to remember about the Cybercab event is that Tesla will continue to prioritize safety and the rollout will likely be slow, just as it has been with Robotaxi.
One of the biggest complaints about Robotaxi is vehicle population, and the fact that the wait for a ride, at least in some instances, has been longer than most want to admit.
It will take time for this project to truly scale. It will take time for Tesla to roll this out in a large fashion. The important thing to note is that they are doing it, and they’re doing it with a vehicle that is completely engineered and built internally. That’s something no other ride-hailing service can say.
Elon Musk recently restated a fact that still defines SpaceX’s origin story: if Falcon 1’s fourth launch had failed, the company would not exist. The comment answered a reminder that after three consecutive losses, SpaceX had money for only one more attempt.
On X, Peter Diamandis said that the present-day acknowledgement of SpaceX’s success does not discount the rough start the company had. “Almost nobody remembers that Elon’s first rocket failed three times, and there was money for exactly only one more attempt.”
Musk said, “If the 4th launch had failed, SpaceX would not exist.”
If the 4th launch had failed, SpaceX would not exist
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
In late 2008, the firm was nearly out of cash. Another failure would have ended payroll, closed the Hawthorne factory, and left the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs as unfinished drawings.
The first flight lifted off from Omelek Island on 24 March 2006. Thirty-three seconds later, a corroded aluminum fitting on a fuel line leaked. Kerosene ignited around the Merlin engine, control was lost, and the vehicle came apart. The small DARPA payload, FalconSAT-2, survived the short flight only to land on a storage shed near the pad. Investigators later traced the fitting to a materials mix-up that should never have reached the rocket.
Flight 2, on 21 March 2007, looked far better at first. The first stage burned cleanly and handed off to the Kestrel-powered upper stage. The vehicle crossed 100 kilometers and reached a peak of about 289 kilometers. Then propellant slosh in the second-stage tank started a circular coning motion that grew until the engine shut down. Telemetry faded as the stage tumbled, and SpaceX had reached space but not orbit. Over the next year, the team redesigned everything from the ground up, including tanks, baffles, and the new regeneratively cooled Merlin 1C.
That engine flew on Flight 3 on 2 August 2008. The first stage performed almost perfectly and reached 217 kilometers. After main-engine cutoff, leftover fuel in the cooling channels produced a faint residual thrust, roughly 10 pounds per square inch of chamber pressure. On a Texas test stand, the effect was invisible beneath ambient air pressure. In vacuum it was enough to push the spent first stage back into the second stage after separation. The stages collided, the upper stage spun, and the mission was lost. Musk later said a slightly longer delay before staging would have saved the flight.
Six weeks later, the team assembled Flight 4 from remaining parts and flew it on 28 September 2008 at 23:15 UTC. The payload was Ratsat, a 165-kilogram aluminum mass simulator built in-house. Staging was delayed so residual thrust could decay. The Kestrel ignited, the fairing split away, and nine and a half minutes after liftoff the vehicle was in orbit. After a coast, the second stage restarted, settling into a 621-by-643-kilometer path at 9.35 degrees inclination. Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach Earth orbit. Musk called the insertion “middle of the bull’s-eye.”
SpaceX restores a Falcon 1 rocket for 10th anniversary of first launch success
That success unlocked NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services award later that year. Without it, there would have been no Falcon 9, no reusable first stages, and no Dragon cargo or crew flights to the International Space Station. Launch prices would have remained far higher. Starlink’s constellation would not exist; broadband from low Earth orbit would still be a paper concept.
Ride-share markets, high launch cadence, and the current pace of lunar and Mars hardware would be years behind. Communications, Earth observation, and the cost of putting anything into space would look more like the 2000s than the 2020s.
One extra second of residual thrust in August 2008 would have written a different decade.
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
Tesla Cybercab Event: what to expect from Austin
