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SpaceX to ring in Falcon 9 Block 5 future with record-speed Block 4 reuse
SpaceX is days away from effectively bringing to a close an era of moderately reusable Falcon 9s that paved the way for the company’s Block 5 rocket upgrade, designed to dramatically improve reliability and reusability. As if foreshadowing the future its culmination will ring in, the CRS-15 mission will beat SpaceX’s previous record for back-to-back Falcon 9 booster launches by nearly a factor of two.
Scheduled to launch at 5:42 am EDT June 29, the CRS-15 Cargo Dragon mission will be SpaceX’s fourth launch of an orbital, flight-proven spacecraft, and will also cut almost two months off of the Falcon 9 booster refurbishment process. The particular booster, number B1045, launched just two months ago on April 18 before landing aboard SpaceX’s Atlantic drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY). After returning to shore, the rocket was transported by road the short few miles from Port Canaveral to Kennedy Space Center and SpaceX’s LC-39A integration facilities, where it is believed to have spent the last nine weeks undergoing moderate repairs, part replacements, and checkouts. Just yesterday, the once-flown booster took to Launch Complex 40 (LC-40) for the second time to complete a preflight static fire, intended to ensure that the rocket is healthy before launch.
Rocket and spacecraft for CRS-15 are flight-proven. Falcon 9’s first stage previously launched @NASA_TESS two months ago, and Dragon flew to the @Space_Station in support of our ninth resupply mission in 2016.
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 23, 2018
In reality, the actual time available for B1045’s refurbishment was thus several days less than two months – the only other routinely reusable rocket, the Space Shuttle, lays claim to a fairly staggering record of just 26 days of actual refurbishment, although it’s worth considering the fact that a single one of the Shuttle’s 3 RS-25 rocket engines have been estimated to cost as much as $60 million, considerably more than two thirds of the price of an entire SpaceX mission for NASA.
The first Block 5 Falcon 9 lifts off on May 4, 2018. (Tom Cross)
Although CRS-15 will likely see its venerable Block 4 Falcon 9 booster expended in the ocean without a recovery attempt, the speed of Falcon 9 B1045’s refurbishment is thrilling for another, more abstract reason: if the design functions largely as intended, a Falcon 9 Block 5 booster should be able to handily crush that already impressive record with ease, and one will perhaps do just that within a handful of months of this launch.
Currently scheduled for no earlier than (NET) July 19 and late July to early August, the Telstar 19V and 18V communications satellites will require their own Block 5 launches roughly a month from today, and July 20’s Iridium NEXT-7 mission will further require its own Falcon 9 Block 5 booster for a mission from California. It remains to be seen what boosters will launch those three missions, as well as an additional two SpaceX missions tentatively scheduled for August and September.
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- After launching in April 2018, B1045 landed on OCISLY and is being refurbished for a second launch in just 5 days, on June 29. (Tom Cross)
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- Falcon 9 B1045 spied in transport from Port Canaveral to LC-39A, April 24. (Instagram /u/xxxtreme81)
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- B1045 enters SpaceX’s 39A integration and refurbishment facilities, April 24. (Reddit /u/NewRage)
Of note, those upcoming July launches will see both of SpaceX’s drone ships – Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) on the Pacific, OCISLY in the Atlantic – return to action, with JRTI’s return bringing to an end nearly a full year of inactivity. With a heavy summer and fall manifest of all Block 5 Falcon 9s just around the corner, both drone ships are likely to be busier than ever before. Teslarati photographers Tom Cross (Florida) and Pauline Acalin (California) will be there to document the flurry of launches and recoveries on both coasts over the busy second half of 2018.
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The drone ship Of Course I Still Love You spotted in Port Canaveral, FL last December. (Instagram /u/ johnabc123)
Follow us for live updates, peeks behind the scenes, and photos from Teslarati’s East and West Coast photographers.
Teslarati – Instagram – Twitter
Tom Cross – Twitter
Pauline Acalin – Twitter
Eric Ralph – Twitter
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.
Tesla headlights have caused a recall of over 20,000 of the company’s two most popular vehicles, the Model 3 and Model Y, due to the low-beam bulb exceeding the maximum allowed intensity according to federal standards.
Tesla initiated the recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) this morning, stating that the low-beam output “exceeds the maximum allowed intensity in the outer upper-right and outer upper-left areas of the 10U and 90U zone, as prescribed in FMVSS No. 108.”
Tesla sourced the impacted headlights from Marelli Automotive Lighting, a Mexico-based company. The recall impacts 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles and 2017-2023 Model 3 vehicles. It is estimated that every VIN in this recall is impacted by the defect.
🚨 Tesla is recalling 20,349 2020-23 Model Y vehicles and 2017-23 Model 3 vehicles due to an excessively bright headlamp low beam.
Currently, there is no remedy plan in place, as it is still being developed. pic.twitter.com/y34cIO2U0B
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 11, 2026
Typically, Tesla would remedy recalls of this nature through an Over-the-Air software update, which has been a major focus of criticism by the company and its supporters because the NHTSA still refers to it as a “recall,” even though it requires no action by the vehicle owner. The fix is shipped over the internet and downloaded to the car.
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However, there appears to be a potentially different solution for this problem. Tesla has not developed a remedy for this issue, so it could potentially be on the way. The big issue appears to be the fact that these recalled lamps are out of production, and this is an old body style for both vehicles. The headlights and front-end designs are completely different.
Tesla switched to another supplier when the affected headlight design was discontinued. It plans to begin notifying owners of their remedy options by September 15.
Tesla filed a petition protesting the recall to fix the vehicles’ headlight issue, but the NHTSA denied it. Now, Tesla will come up with a solution to fix it.
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 AI investment gamble will make it a big winner, firm says
Tesla headlights cause recall of over 20,000 Model 3 and Model Y
