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SpaceX nails first rocket landing by sea in half a year, sends exoplanet probe beyond the Moon

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8 years ago

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SpaceX has successfully completed the first drone ship recovery of a Falcon 9 booster in nearly six months, bringing to an end a what will likely be the final drought of by-sea rocket landings in the company’s history.

B1045’s landing was a particularly stunning example of just how far SpaceX has come. By all appearances, the recovery was easily the smoothest yet achieved by the company, with nary a hint of reentry heating visible in the near-flawless live coverage from a camera aboard the booster. Perhaps of even more interest, the landing itself appeared to be exceptionally luxurious, with the booster gently floating down to its final resting perch aboard the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.

Falcon 9 1045 soars to the sky, the final new Block 4 flight ever. (Tom Cross)

This return-to-landing, so to speak, is SpaceX’s 24th successful Falcon booster recovery in just over three years of true recovery efforts. The last several months have featured an unfamiliar number of intentionally expendable launches, in which SpaceX chose to preclude any attempt at recovery, instead typically gently landing the boosters in the ocean to gather additional flight-test data and to explore the envelope of Falcon 9’s recovery capabilities. In all cases but one (Hispasat 30W-6), these intentionally expended boosters were older, flight-proven versions of the rocket, versions that hadn’t been designed to economically fly more than once or twice.

B1045, however, has just one flight under its belt, and is already pegged for a second launch with CRS-15, giving the booster as few as 50 days to be refurbished and prepped for its second pre-launch static fire (likely the first week of June). This would be an exceptionally fitting case of foreshadowing for SpaceX’s upcoming Block 5 iteration of Falcon 9. If a Block 4 booster can be launched, landed, and refurbished in well under two months, one can only imagine what a Falcon 9 explicitly upgraded for ease of reuse will be capable of.

Over the past six months, SpaceX has aggressively expanded their program of orbital rocket reuse, leaping from just three operational reflights of Falcon 9 boosters in the process’ first half-year (Mar-Oct ’17) to seven operational reflights between the following months of December and April. Today, April 18, the successful launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) marks the final launch of a new Block 4 Falcon 9 booster (B1045) – although we can expect as many as three additional reflights of recovery Block 4 boosters in 2018, all new Falcon 9 boosters from here on out will be Block 5s, a final upgrade to the rocket designed to significantly optimize reliability and reusability. The first Falcon 9 Block 5 is expected to debut sometime in May, currently No Earlier Than (NET) May 4.

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Impressively, despite the fairly extensive modifications and upgrades – both for reliability and reusability – included in Falcon 9 Block 5, SpaceX’s Hans Koenigsmann stated that the lengthy test campaign in Texas went well and was in fact “faster than we’ve ever had on new Block upgrades [of Falcon 9].” SpaceX themselves have not yet given a specific date for the debut of Block 5, but Hans did partially confirm recent reports that it is now targeting a debut in “early May” with the launch of Bangabandhu-1. Put simply, so long as things go more or less according to plan, 2018 will in every conceivable way usher in the real future of orbital-class reusable rockets – perhaps enabling the sort of responsive, cheap, and reliable access to space long ago promised by CEO Elon Musk.

Science galore

Despite its diminutive size and 350 kg mass, TESS is expected to dramatically expand the number of detected exoplanets in the universe, and is tasked with surveying the remaining 95% of the sky left unscanned after Kepler’s famous mission. Ultimately, conservative estimates from astronomers expect TESS to add thousands of new exoplanets to humanity’s current catalog, with perhaps as many as 10% of those discovered likely to be Earth-sized, and thus potential candidates for the first habitable planets to be observed beyond the cozy bounds of our own Solar System.

To give a sense of just how far electronics and satellite technology have improved in the decade since the Kepler observatory was launched (2009), that 1050kg spacecraft was designed to stare specifically at one small segment of the sky (0.25%), scanning it ceaselessly for exoplanets. Despite complex technical difficulties, Kepler managed to discover nearly 1100 confirmed exoplanets, with more than 3000 additional candidates waiting to be confirmed by other spacecraft or telescopes.

On the other hand, the 350kg TESS, has been designed to sca the entire sky and may well double, triple, or quadruple the number of known exoplanets in the universe. Falcon 9 may undoubtedly be a bit like using a dump truck when a shovel would do, but the tiny size of the payload can be thanked for the exceptionally gentle booster recovery and the equally (relatively) easy refurbishment soon to follow.

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Tom Cross – Twitter

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Eric Ralph – Twitter

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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 confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story

Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.

Published

10 hours ago

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April 22, 2026

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tesla autopilot

Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.

The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.

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The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.

For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.

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Elon Musk

Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go

Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.

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11 hours ago

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April 22, 2026

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Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”

Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.

Credit: TESLA

Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.

As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla (TSLA) Q1 2026 earnings results: beat on EPS and revenues

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14 hours ago

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April 22, 2026

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.

The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.

As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.

Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.

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Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results

Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:

  • Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
  • Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
  • Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
  • Profit – $4.72 billion

Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.

On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.

Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.

You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.

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