SpaceX
SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 booster preps for next launch as fairing fragments surface
As part of a recent 10-year anniversary celebration of SpaceX’s first successful launch to reach orbit, Falcon 9 B1047 was spotted undergoing inspections and refurbishment after the Block 5 booster’s launch debut, placing the 7-ton Telstar 19V communications satellite in orbit on July 22nd.
Meanwhile, a bit north of B1047’s cozy Cape Canaveral refurbishment hangar, battered fragments of a Falcon 9 payload fairing half – part of the very same Telstar 19V mission – were discovered by a fisherman off the coast of South Carolina.
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A tale of two halves
Around nine minutes after lifting off from SpaceX’s LC-40 pad, Falcon 9 B1047 gracefully landed on drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY), followed soon after by confirmation of Falcon 9 Block 5’s second launch success. Perhaps a tad toasty after what one might call a ‘medium-well’ reentry, the upgraded booster was otherwise perfectly intact. A minute after B1047 separated from Falcon 9’s upper stage and Telstar 19V payload, the fairing – tasked with protecting the satellite from the stresses of high-speed atmospheric flight – was jettisoned from the second stage, splitting into two halves and falling away from the rocket in order to save precious mass on S2’s push towards orbit.
Falcon 9’s first stage separates from the upper stage for quite different reasons, cued quite literally by its propellant tanks essentially reaching “empty” – albeit an “empty” that typically includes some fumes for the booster’s safe recovery. The payload fairing, on the other hand, is detached from the second stage the moment that Falcon rises above a particular point in Earth’s atmosphere, only exposing its sensitive satellite(s) to the elements once in near-vacuum conditions. Ultimately, fairing halves separate from Falcon 9 at velocities significantly higher than that of the booster but are subjected to far more forgiving reentry conditions, requiring just a minimal of thermal protection to make it to (or just above…) the ground/ocean unscathed.
Detailed images of GO Pursuit returning to Port Canaveral this afternoon with a partial fairing half following Sunday’s launch of Falcon 9 and Telstar 19V. Damage is no surprise, as these east coast fairings — for now — land in the water. pic.twitter.com/AxkwUQH67b
— John Kraus (@johnkrausphotos) July 24, 2018
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SpaceX recently began seriously attempting to recover Falcon 9 payload fairings, albeit almost exclusively during West Coast launches in order to let Mr. Steven attempt to catch the parasailing halves in the Pacific Ocean. Thus far, SpaceX engineers and technicians have not yet solved the challenging problems, although fairing halves have reportedly landed as few as 50 meters from Mr. Steven’s grasp and at least five have been recovered intact after landing gently on the ocean surface. On the East Coast, Falcon fairings are not nearly as lucky, typically alternating between smashing directly into the ocean and landing gently upon it, depending SpaceX’s need for experimental recovery data.
By all appearances, B1047’s fairing halves both plummeted – unarrested – into the Atlantic, shattering into pieces of fragile carbon fiber-aluminum honeycomb. Thanks to the extremely lightweight nature of their composition, even waterlogged fairing fragments tend to float almost indefinitely, winding up in far-flung places many hundreds or thousands of miles from the point of impact. A particularly large fairing fragment from Telstar 19V clearly survived its greater halve’s violent ends, floating its way 600-800 miles northwest to the coast of South Carolina. After taking photos, the fisherman rather poetically let it float away, permitting it several more weeks of freedom before washing up on some shoreline and making its way onto eBay.
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- A Falcon 9 fairing fragment was discovered floating off the coast of South Carolina two months after launching with Telstar 19V. (TheHullTruth /u/gofish)
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- Telstar 19V’s Falcon fairing artwork, a dead-ringer for the fairing flotsam. (SpaceX)
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- B1047 returned safe and sound to Pad 39A for refurbishment less than a week after launching and landing. (Instagram /u/d_lo_ags)
Ultimately, SpaceX engineers and technicians will continue to work towards successful, reliable, and routine fairing recoveries, inevitably experiencing many failures before a functional solution is found and optimized, just like the teams that brought Falcon 9 first stage recovery from blueprint to reality. In the meantime, serendipitous events like this will continue to serve as both stark reminders of the unforgiving hurdles along the path to orbital-class rocket hardware recovery and the undeniable fact that it already can and has been done before.
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.
Elon Musk
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
Elon Musk again denies a Tesla China split as new SpaceX merger speculation resurfaces quickly.
Elon Musk restated that Tesla has no plans to separate its China business from the rest of the company, responding to a new round of merger speculation from ARK Invest.
On the firm’s “Brainstorm” podcast, Cathie Wood’s team, including chief futurist Brett Winton and research director Nick Grous, argued a Tesla and SpaceX combination remains likely, with an announcement possible before the end of the year even if the deal itself would not close that quickly. Winton called Tesla’s Shanghai operations a “small ish wrinkle” for a merger rather than a real obstacle, since SpaceX’s national security work with the U.S. government sits uneasily next to Tesla’s manufacturing base in China.
Musk pushed back on the framing directly. “China is awesome. I strongly encourage people to visit,” he wrote on X. He also repeated language he first used in late July, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla executives had been told to prepare for a possible spinoff, sale, or closure of the China business ahead of a SpaceX tie up. Musk called that report “absurdly fake news” at the time, adding that a separation had “never even come up in a discussion ever,” a line he echoed again this week.
The repeated denial has not settled the underlying question, because Shanghai’s role in Tesla’s business is exactly what makes a merger complicated. Gigafactory Shanghai still ships more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries and functions as the company’s main export hub for Europe and Asia. Teslarati previously reported on Musk’s initial denial, and the merger conversation itself has been building since SpaceX’s IPO gave it public shares to use as acquisition currency.
Wedbush’s Dan Ives has pegged the odds of a Tesla SpaceX merger at 80 to 90 percent by early 2027, and ARK’s prediction of a year end announcement adds another data point to that timeline, even as Musk keeps rejecting the specific mechanics reporters have described. Neither position rules out the other. Musk can deny a China spinoff was ever discussed while analysts still expect some form of combination to move forward, since ARK and Ives are both describing convergence at the corporate level, not necessarily the internal restructuring the Journal described in July.
For now, Tesla’s China business remains intact, and Musk’s comments this week make clear he has no interest in publicly walking that position back, no matter how often the merger question resurfaces.
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SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors: Morgan Stanley
SpaceX AI investment gamble will make it a big winner, firm says
