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SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket completes 50th orbital launch of 2022
SpaceX has successfully launched French satellite communications provider Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13G satellite, chipping away at a jam-packed November manifest and completing Falcon 9’s 50th launch of 2022.
The company’s workhorse rocket lifted off from its Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 pad with the 4.5-ton (~9,900 lb) geostationary communications satellite in tow at 1:22 am EDT on November 3rd – 116 minutes later than originally planned to leave more time “to complete pre-flight checkouts.” But Falcon 9 performed flawlessly, growing a record-breaking streak with its 160th consecutively-successful launch.
Flying for the seventh time since it debuted in June 2021 and just 45 days after its sixth flight, Falcon 9 booster B1067 completed a nominal ascent, separation, descent, reentry, and landing. The booster touched down on SpaceX drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) about nine minutes after liftoff and will be prepared for an eighth launch in the near future – possibly as early as next month. In addition to its well-known booster reuse, SpaceX’s webcast host noted that Falcon 9’s payload fairing – a carbon fiber composite nosecone made up of two separable halves – had halves flying for the fourth and sixth time.
Speaking in 2017, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk once likened each Falcon fairing half to a pallet of $3 million that falls into the ocean after every launch. Around the same time, SpaceX decided to try to recover that pallet of cash, kicking off its fairing recovery and reuse program. Five years later, Falcon fairing reuse – while far less visible and famous than booster reuse – has become extremely reliable. At its current rate of one launch every six days, recovering and reusing fairings likely saves SpaceX tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars annually and limits the need for major manufacturing expansions that would otherwise be necessary.
Even though SpaceX fishes fairing halves out of the ocean before every flight, the company’s cleaning and refurbishment processes have improved to the point that even paying customers have started to accept flight-proven fairings on their launches. Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13G satellite is the first customer payload to use a Falcon fairing half for the sixth time, further raising the bar of acceptance.
About half an hour after liftoff, Falcon 9’s expendable upper stage separated from Hotbird 13G. On October 15th, a different Falcon 9 rocket launched its twin, Hotbird 13F, into a supersynchronous transfer orbit measuring around 400 kilometers (~245 mi) by 56,000 kilometers (~34,800 mi). Launching a satellite to a transfer orbit with an apogee higher than its destination makes reaching a circular orbit at that target altitude (35,800 km, in this case) faster and easier. Having to do less work to raise its orbit will leave Hotbird 13F and 13G with more fuel than they would otherwise have, effectively extending their theoretical lifespans by preserving more propellant for orbit maintenance after it reaches GEO.
Hotbird 13G was SpaceX’s 51st launch of 2022 and 59th launch in 365 days. If SpaceX sustains the average pace it has set in the last ten months through the last two months of 2022, it could end the year having launched more than 60 times. The mission was also Falcon 9’s 50th launch of 2022, solidifying its spot as the most-launched rocket in a calendar year. The record for the most successful launches (61) of the same rocket family in one year, however, was set by the Soviet Union and has stood for more than four decades.
SpaceX has at least five more Falcon 9 launches tentatively scheduled this month. Intelsat Galaxy 31 & 32 satellites are up next and could launch from the same pad as Hotbird 13G as early as November 8th, followed by Eutelsat 10B in mid-November, and Japanese startup ispace’s first Moon lander no earlier than November 22nd. An uncrewed Dragon spacecraft is set to launch NASA cargo to the the International Space Station (ISS) on November 20th. Finally, while tentative and contingent upon three other launches going smoothly, SpaceX could squeeze in Starlink 4-37 in late November.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
Elon Musk teased a glowing new Boring Company merch idea, complete with a Geiger counter.
Elon Musk teased the next piece of Boring Company merchandise on X Saturday, and it is exactly as unserious as fans of the company’s product history have come to expect. “The next @boringcompany merch will put Uranium in Uranus,” Musk wrote in a thread posted early Saturday morning. He followed up by explaining that the item would glow in the dark, “because otherwise how could you find it,” and that a Geiger counter would be sold separately as “an optional strap-on.”
Musk closed the thread with a line that doubles as a mission statement for the tunneling company’s merchandise arm: “It’s not easy coming up with something that is both outrageously unsellable and yet extremely popular.”
The Boring Company has built a small but consistent side business out of novelty items that start as jokes and end up selling out. The company’s Not-a-Flamethrower raised roughly $10 million in a few days back in 2018, moving all 20,000 units it produced. Its Burnt Hair perfume, priced around $100 a bottle, sold out fast enough that scalpers were flipping units on eBay for ten times the retail price. Boring Bricks, made from tunneling spoil, followed the same playbook of teasing a product on X months before it became real.
Musk has not said what the actual item will be, only that it involves uranium and glows in the dark. Given the pattern, that vagueness is probably intentional. Past merch announcements have started as one-line jokes and taken weeks or months to turn into an actual product listing on the company’s site, and there is no guarantee this one follows through at all.
The timing lines up with a period of real momentum for the Boring Company outside of the joke merchandise. The company said last week it plans to double the number of operational stations on its Vegas Loop by the end of the year, a target tied to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers. Prufrock-5, one of the company’s tunnel boring machines, also just wrapped a test tunnel in Bastrop, Texas, and is expected to relaunch on its next assignment in November.
Whether the uranium joke turns into an actual product remains to be seen. Musk’s post did not include a price, a shipping date, or even a name for the item, which has historically meant a Boring Company website page goes up quietly, password protected, sometime before an announcement.
News
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
NASA just gave SpaceX a $946 million contract for three more astronaut missions through 2030.
NASA has awarded SpaceX a $946 million contract modification covering three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station, according to an announcement the agency published Friday. The award adds Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract, bringing the agreement’s total value to $5.92 billion across 17 flights.
SpaceX confirmed the award on X, writing that it was excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the Space Station from Florida. The new missions cover ground, launch, in orbit, and return operations, along with cargo transport and a lifeboat capability while docked at the station, and the period of performance runs through 2030.
We’re excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch @NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the @Space_Station from Florida https://t.co/Qm16vVK9F3 pic.twitter.com/drg3s7GtuM
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 18, 2026
The award follows a notice of intent NASA issued in May, when the agency first signaled it would purchase up to six additional post certification missions from SpaceX. Teslarati covered that filing at the time, noting NASA cited technical issues and schedule delays encountered by Boeing as a driving factor. Friday’s contract modification locks in three of those six missions, with the remaining three left open for NASA to award later, potentially to Boeing if Starliner clears certification.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has still not flown an operational crew rotation mission for NASA. The spacecraft’s most recent crewed test flight in 2024 ended without the astronauts returning aboard Starliner, and the company has spent the time since working through thruster problems. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said this week that SpaceX is not retiring Crew Dragon today, for sure, while stopping short of committing to fly it past 2030.
Crew-12 is currently docked at the space station, and NASA has said Crew-13 is targeting a launch in the coming weeks. The newly awarded Crew-15 through Crew-17 missions extend SpaceX’s role as NASA’s primary way of getting astronauts to and from orbit well into the back half of the decade, regardless of what happens with Starliner or Starship in the meantime.
Investor's Corner
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
New drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame nearing completion at Giga Texas.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is closing in on a finished steel frame, according to drone footage posted Thursday afternoon by longtime site observer Joe Tegtmeyer. In the video, Tegtmeyer said structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam, putting the primary skeleton in its final stretch roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
Tegtmeyer’s footage shows concrete already going in on three upper floors while crews continue laying rebar and pouring grade beam footings at ground level. That kind of parallel work, steel rising at one end of the site while concrete sets at the other, is a scheduling approach Tesla used at the original Giga Texas building and appears to be repeating here to save time before the plant’s targeted 2027 production start.
Teslarati has tracked the building’s progress since Tesla confirmed construction was officially underway in May, when the first steel structure went up on what was then bare, reclaimed land. The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus that Tesla has said will eventually run nearly the length of the existing vehicle factory, over 4,000 feet, while sitting somewhat narrower. Musk has pegged the long term output target at 10 million Optimus units a year once the line is running at full capacity, a volume that would dwarf the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at its Fremont, California factory.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The Texas facility sits alongside another major buildout on the same campus. Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant that will eventually supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Housing robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate supply chain decision, cutting down on the shipping and lead time that would otherwise sit between the two.
Tesla has not given an updated timeline beyond its previously stated goal of bringing high volume Optimus production online at the site in the summer of 2027. Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January, with that plant expected to build tens of thousands of units this year primarily to generate the real world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up. Six months of visible construction progress, tracked almost entirely through Tegtmeyer’s recurring drone flights, gives the clearest outside look yet at how seriously Tesla is treating that 2027 deadline.
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
