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SpaceX Falcon 9 booster returns to port on upgraded drone ship

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Upgraded SpaceX drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas (ASOG) returned to Port Canaveral on Tuesday, August 31st after a flawless inaugural Falcon 9 booster landing.

In a pleasant coincidence, the brand new drone ship was greeted by an even newer member of SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet, which had arrived just hours before after bidding farewell to the Louisiana port it was upgraded at the week prior. Named after Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, the NASA astronauts that helmed Crew Dragon on its crewed orbital launch debut, Doug was the first to arrive and reached its Port Canaveral berth around 9pm EDT on August 30th. Returning to port with a rocket on board for the first time, drone ship ASOG berthed beside Doug just 12 hours later.

Side by side, ASOG and Doug effectively represent the next evolution of at-sea recovery for SpaceX, a company famous for continuously striving for improvement and optimization.

SpaceX’s newest fleet member (right) was joined by its newest drone ship (left) after successfully recovering a rocket booster for the first time. (Richard Angle)

Notably, confirmed unequivocally by a SpaceX engineer during NASA’s CRS-23 pre-launch briefing, a mission that was also ASOG’s very first, the drone ship has been designed to navigate to the correct position, precisely station-keep during landing, secure the landed booster, and transport that booster back to port “completely autonomously.” Up to now, every one of SpaceX’s 76 at-sea landing attempts to date has required a tugboat to tow the drone ship to the recovery zone and a second ship (usually GO Quest or NRC Quest) to support the crew of SpaceX technicians that maintain the drone ship, fix problems, and secure landed boosters.

Most of SpaceX’s East Coast recovery fleet, from left to right: drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI), drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) and B1061, Doug, and GO Navigator. (Richard Angle)

In 2017, SpaceX improved those procedures to a degree and debuted a robot known as Octagrabber on drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY). Designed to remotely grab the same Falcon booster ‘hold-down’ hardpoints used by the launch pad, Octagrabber allows SpaceX’s recovery team to remain safe aboard their support ship, avoiding the undeniable danger of working in close proximity to a sliding 25 ton (~50,000 lb) object in all but the worst conditions.

Falcon 9 booster B1061 returns to port on drone ship ASOG. (Richard Angle)

While Octagrabber has undeniably been a boon for the recovery crew, all SpaceX ocean recoveries since have still required tugboats and a crew support ship. Now, thanks to unspecified upgrades, SpaceX believes that A Shortfall of Gravitas will be able to recover Falcon boosters with zero human intervention. It’s likely that SpaceX will still need to arrange a tugboat and pilot to take ASOG to and from the mouth of Port Canaveral and humans will certainly still be involved in the process of retracting landing legs and lifting boosters off the drone ship, but what SpaceX proposes would still be a major upgrade.

However, perhaps the biggest hurdle for SpaceX to operate truly autonomous drone ships will be securing regulatory approval to do so. Perhaps anticipating that gap between technical and legal readiness, SpaceX has bought two new support ships – Bob and Doug – outright. Set to be the largest traditional ships in SpaceX’s fleet, Bob and Doug appear to be designed to do it all. Each outfitted with a large crane and winch, both ships should be able to recover Falcon fairings, tow drone ships, and host crews of technicians (if needed). Additionally, they appear to have space for a helipad and could potentially be modified to triple as Dragon recovery assets.

Doug is far larger than Dragon recovery ship GO Navigator. (Richard Angle)

In other words, even if it takes a while before ASOG and Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) are able to operate autonomously, Bob and Doug should feasibly allow SpaceX to save money on recovery operations by combining fairing recovery, tugboat, and crew support roles into one vessel.

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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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming

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Credit: Grok Imagine

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.

Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”

The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.

However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.

Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package

But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.

In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:

“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?'”

However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.

Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:

“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”

Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors: Morgan Stanley

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Credit: Tesla

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.”

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.

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