SpaceX has set a new record for the heaviest payload launched on a Falcon 9 rocket as part of a routine Starlink satellite launch.
Simultaneously, the rocket responsible for setting that new record launched with a reusable booster that was last spotted clinging to life – engines heavily damaged – on the deck of a SpaceX drone ship eight months prior. At the time, it wasn’t clear if the Falcon 9 booster – theoretically capable of supporting at least 12-14 more launches – would be able to recover from the damage and fly again.
It’s now clear that the booster suffered no major invisible damage, ultimately allowing SpaceX to complete repairs and return the rocket to service at the cost of a lengthy delay.
According to spaceflight writer Alejandro Alcantarilla Romero, one additional cost – at minimum – was a full set of new Merlin 1D engines. Sometime shortly after Falcon 9 B1069’s flawless December 2021 launch and landing debut, a robotic helper known as Octagrabber most likely lost its grip on the booster while attempting to secure it. Likely already in high seas, the conditions prevented SpaceX workers from safely boarding the ship and manually securing the booster, which was then free to slide about its tilting deck.
Alternatively, it’s possible that Octagrabber successfully secured the booster but was then subjected to truly awful sea conditions. Designed to passively hold boosters to the deck with its sheer weight, even the tank-like robot wouldn’t be able to save a booster if a storm caught the drone ship off guard and the waves were high enough.
Either way, B1069 returned to port pressed against the lip of drone ship Just Read The Instructions’ (JRTI) deck, leaning hard to port. Worse, each of its nine fragile Merlin 1D engine nozzles had been crushed like tinfoil against Octagrabber, damaging them well beyond repair. While there’s a chance that SpaceX was or will be able to salvage the parts of B1069’s original M1D engines above their bell nozzles, it’s little surprise that the company had to fully replace those engines before the booster could fly again.
The damage B1069 suffered on its first launch makes it even more impressive that SpaceX attempted to break Falcon 9’s payload record with its return to flight, suggesting that the company was extremely confident in its repairs.
SpaceX confirmed that Falcon 9 broke the record with its launch of 54 Starlink V1.5 satellites at the end of its hosted webcast, revealing that the rocket launched 16.7 metric tons (~36,800 lb) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The last confirmed record – claimed by CEO Elon Musk – was 16.25 tons spread over 53 Starlink V1.5 satellites, which doesn’t entirely add up unless SpaceX added several kilograms to the mass of each satellite between March and August 2022.
Assuming that both numbers are comparable, a roughly 3% improvement is far from an earth-shaking or surprising step forward for SpaceX, a company, renowned for relentless iterative improvement. What is impressive, however, is that SpaceX pushed the envelope while Falcon 9 is both fast approaching its 150th consecutively successful launch and the only rocket currently certified to launch multiple NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s fifth operational NASA astronaut launch (Crew-5) is scheduled as early as October 3rd. If SpaceX pushing the envelope on Starlink 4-23 had somehow caused the launch to fail, all Falcon 9 rockets would have likely been grounded for months, almost certainly delaying Crew-5 and throwing NASA’s ISS program into chaos.
Given how successful and reliable Falcon 9 already is, it would be hard to blame SpaceX if it decided to freeze the program and avoid additional changes, even if those changes could slightly improve the rocket’s performance. Instead, the company somehow manages to continue upgrading Falcon 9’s performance without obviously impacting its reliability or incurring the wrath of its strictest US government customers. Even Falcon landings, once considered a secondary objective that could be allowed to fail, haven’t suffered. Starlink 4-23 marked SpaceX’s 64th consecutively successful booster landing.
Up next, SpaceX is scheduled to launch Starlink 3-4 no earlier than (NET) August 31st, Starlink 4-20 NET September 4th, and Starlink 4-2 NET September 7th.
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SpaceX just locked up a NASA record no other U.S. spacecraft can touch
SpaceX’s Crew-13 Dragon reached the ISS in under eight hours, and NASA confirmed a record.
SpaceX now owns every spot on the list of the five fastest trips a U.S. spacecraft has ever made to the International Space Station, and its newest entry beat the old mark by more than four hours.
Crew Dragon Grace docked to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:05 p.m. ET on October 1, just 7 hours and 55 minutes after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. NASA confirmed the milestone in a space station blog update, writing that the flight “marked the fastest launch‑to‑docking of a U.S. spacecraft in the history of the International Space Station.”
The previous U.S. record also belonged to Dragon. SpaceX’s uncrewed CRS-31 cargo mission reached the station in a little over 12 hours in November 2024. The fastest crewed trip before last week was Crew-11, which took 14 hours and 43 minutes in August 2025, according to Space.com.
A post that Elon Musk reposted on Monday filled out the rest of the ranking. Behind Crew-13, CRS-31 and Crew-11 sit Axiom’s Ax-2 mission at 15 hours and 35 minutes and NASA’s Crew-4 at 15 hours and 44 minutes. All five flew on Dragon.
SpaceX turned a heralding moment for Starship into its greatest
Crew-13 carried NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. NASA had projected a docking around 8 p.m. ET, as Teslarati reported the day before launch, and Dragon arrived nearly an hour early. Our launch day coverage noted that the flight was lined up to be the quickest Crew Dragon transit yet.
The speed came from timing more than hardware. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman said the station “was in an opportune spot in space,” which let Dragon start closing the gap almost immediately after reaching orbit. “This is close to the fastest it could be,” she added. Most Crew Dragon flights still take close to a day, using a series of Draco thruster burns to raise and phase their orbit before arrival.
Dragon’s next job at the station is a departure. NASA said Monday it is targeting 8:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, October 7, for Crew-12 to undock, setting up a splashdown off the coast of California around 11:34 a.m. on Thursday. Clearing that port makes room for CRS-35, a cargo Dragon carrying the final set of iROSA solar arrays.
Dragon remains NASA’s only operational ride to the station while Boeing’s Starliner stays grounded, and the agency recently added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s contract in a $946 million modification.
Elon Musk has acknowledged that early discussions with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could bring the company into his ambitious Terafab semiconductor project, signaling a possible partnership with the world’s leading contract chipmaker.
Musk confirmed that early talks are underway, but as of right now, they are “just discussions.” There is no confirmation of a deal nor dismissal of the possibility of one, leaving open the prospect of one of the largest advanced-chip collaborations under discussion in the U.S.
@wholemars Just discussions, but something may come of it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The report that speculated on potential discussions between Terafab and TSMC comes from Tim Culpan, who outlined a few ways the collaboration could operate. One is TSMC using the project as an “anchor customer” for future facilities in Texas, potentially contributing process expertise, operational know-how, or capacity while Terafab provides capital, long-term purchase commitments, or both.
Tesla and SpaceX jointly developed the Terafab project, with Intel already participating on the tech side. Elon Musk announced the project in March, and it intends to produce more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity annually once fully built.
Company statements place the first phase at approximately $16.8 billion in cost, with later filings pointing to a total that could reach well into the tens of billions across multiple stages.
Intel joined the effort in April 2026 and is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process for the full-scale plant.
Musk has said existing suppliers, including Samsung and TSMC, remain important for near-term needs; Tesla already has production arrangements with Samsung for AI5 and AI6 chips, but that future demand from Optimus robots, Cybercab vehicles, and planned space-based data centers will eventually exceed what the global industry can currently deliver.
Terafab is positioned as the long-term answer to that projected shortfall, and Tesla did something similar during COVID to avoid a chip shortage. This is just a much larger-scale solution.
If the partnership were to materialize, it would add TSMC’s industry-leading strategies to a project that already combines Tesla’s and SpaceX’s capital and offtake with Intel’s process technology. For now, the only public confirmation is Musk’s brief acknowledgement that conversations are occurring.
Tesla’s early strategy for charging units operating within its Robotaxi fleet reveals that the company surely has not lost any of that scrappy DNA that took it from an unlikely success story to the most valuable carmaker in the world.
An observer at a Tesla Supercharger in Austin spotted ten total Robotaxi vehicles arrive: one Cybercab and nine Model Y units. A Tesla employee was waiting at the lot and allowed each unit to park itself; every car that arrived had nobody in it.
Tesla wins FCC approval for wireless Cybercab charging system
The Tesla employee would walk around and plug each car in, adjusting the parking if needed:
So look at what I found. This is how Tesla charges unsupervised robotaxis at a public supercharger. Here is a driverless Cybercab showing up with no one in it. There are 9 other Model Ys that showed up too. A Tesla employee is walking around and plugging each of them in. She also moves the cars if they are not positioned well enough to charge. I love this process. One person charges multiple robotaxis at once
— Abhimanyu Yadav (@WorldlyReviewer) October 3, 2026
It’s a very interesting strategy, but extremely understandable at this early point in the Robotaxi program. It’s only been out for about 15 months, and Cybercab just entered the fleet in early September.
On top of that, Tesla is still working tirelessly on its wireless charging apparatus, and a new patent was just published regarding that product last week.
However, this is just another example of how Tesla still has plenty of that scrappy DNA leftover from the “production hell” days, when CEO Elon Musk slept on the floor of the factory, employees were working crazy hours, Tesla was building Sprung Structures to build cars in, and the company was tiptoeing on the brink of bankruptcy.
@Teslarati Sheer magnitude of the entire production system is hard to appreciate. Almost every element of production is >75% automated. Only wire harnesses & general assembly, which are <10% of production costs, are primarily manual.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
For now, Tesla is utilizing a simple system for recharging its ride-hailing vehicles, and that is a Tesla employee doing it manually until another solution presents itself. Sure, it’s not the most high-tech thing, and it certainly is not what people might have expected at this point in time, but it works, and it’s keeping the entire suite running.
SpaceX just locked up a NASA record no other U.S. spacecraft can touch
Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner
