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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.

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

Pauline Acalin – Twitter

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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Elon Musk

Elon Musk shuts down talk of TSMC taking over Terafab

Musk says Tesla and SpaceX will build and run Terafab, with TSMC limited to renting.

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6 hours ago

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October 7, 2026

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SpaceX Terafab rendering

Elon Musk has drawn a firm line around who will be in charge of Terafab, the giant chip factory Tesla and SpaceX are planning in Texas.

Musk replied to a post on X arguing that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) would most likely end up owning and operating the plant. “No, we will build and run the fab. Let there be ZERO doubt about that,” Musk wrote. “Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that.”

In plain terms, a sublease means TSMC could rent a section of the complex to make chips, similar to a tenant renting one floor of an office tower. The building, the equipment decisions and the daily operation would stay with Tesla and SpaceX.

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The comment shuts down speculation that started last week. On October 2, tech journalist Tim Culpan reported that TSMC was exploring ways to help run Terafab’s factories. Musk responded the next day that it was “just discussions, but something may come of it,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That left room for a scenario where the world’s largest contract chipmaker took the wheel. Musk’s latest post closes that door.

Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner

Some background helps explain why this matters. Tesla designs its own AI chips today but pays outside companies like TSMC and Samsung to manufacture them. Musk unveiled Terafab in March as a joint project between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, arguing that existing suppliers cannot expand fast enough to meet his companies’ future demand. The goal is to produce enough chips each year to supply one terawatt of computing power, roughly 50 times what the entire global AI chip industry produces now.

Those chips are meant for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, the Cybercab and Full Self-Driving computers, along with chips for SpaceX’s planned data centers in orbit. Owning the factory means Musk’s companies would not have to compete with every other chip customer for time on someone else’s production lines.

Intel is still part of the picture. The company signed on in April to help design, build and package chips for the project, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan told Bloomberg this week that Intel will keep working on Terafab despite the TSMC chatter.

The project moved from concept to construction planning over the summer. In August, SpaceX confirmed the Grimes County site about an hour from Houston, sent the county a $10 million payment under its tax abatement deal and said civil work would begin shortly. The first phase carries a $16.8 billion price tag, and total spending across all phases could reach as much as $119 billion.

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TSMC chairman C.C. Wei has said a new fab typically takes two to three years to build and another one to two years to reach full output. Tesla and SpaceX have never run one, which is why TSMC’s expertise drew so much attention. Musk’s answer suggests he would rather learn that process in house than hand control of a project this central to Tesla’s robotics and autonomy plans to an outside company.

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Elon Musk

Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK

Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at Thursday’s White House summit.

Published

13 hours ago

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October 7, 2026

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elon musk and donald trump in front of a tesla cybertruck at the white house

Elon Musk is set to receive the highest honor the U.S. government gives to scientists and engineers.

President Donald Trump will present Musk with the National Medal of Science on Thursday at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit, Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday. Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su will receive the same medal, while Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A White House official later confirmed the list to Reuters.

“The Trump administration is grateful for the contributions of these incredible leaders in science and technology. These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News.

It will be the first time Trump has presented either medal in his two terms. Congress created the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation, which administers it, says 529 scientists and engineers have received it since. A presidential committee reviews nominees, but the president makes the final call.

Thursday’s group of medalists run or founded companies, and three of them sit at the center of the Super Intelligence hardware race that Musk competes in. Huang’s Nvidia supplies the GB300 chips filling SpaceX’s Colossus 2 cluster, while Su’s AMD is Nvidia’s biggest rival in data center GPUs.

Worth noting that Trump’s uncle, MIT physicist John G. Trump, received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan for his work on ionizing radiation and its uses in medicine and industry.

The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future

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For Musk, the medal is the latest sign of how far his relationship with Trump has come since their 2025 split over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and his exit from DOGE. Last week, he sat at Trump’s left during a White House lunch where AI executives signed a voluntary safety accord, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named him to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare. Musk has also adopted the administration’s new vocabulary, saying on Sunday that SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump ordered federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.”

Musk has collected science honors before, including the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2019.

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Lifestyle

Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life

Tesla shares dashcam footage of FSD Supervised stopping mid intersection to avoid a T-bone crash.

Published

18 hours ago

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October 7, 2026

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Credit: @BLKMDL3/X

Tesla is putting another Full Self-Driving save in front of its 24.8 million followers on X.

On Tuesday morning, Tesla’s main account shared a dashcam clip with the caption “FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash.” The footage came from an owner posting as TheNewGrid, who described what happened at a stop sign: “I looked at the car coming to the stop sign figured they would stop, my car went, then came to a stop mid intersection as they flew by. Had I been manually driving this would have resulted in a crash.”

The sequence is the notable part. FSD had already started crossing when the other driver ran the stop sign. Instead of pressing on, the car braked hard in the middle of the intersection and let the crossing vehicle pass in front of it. By the owner’s own account, they had made the same assumption the software initially made, that the other car would stop, and would not have corrected in time.

The clip is the latest in a run of safety posts Tesla has amplified over the past several days. On Saturday, the company shared a video from Selling Sunset star Jason Oppenheim, who sold his Bentley for a Model Y and said he was buying Teslas with FSD for 10 of his employees. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla AI, followed up by writing that Tesla self-driving “reacts to other people cutting into your path with super-human response times.” On Monday, a Cybertruck owner posted footage of FSD moving across three lanes from a red light to clear a path for an ambulance approaching from behind.

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This recent clip also lands a few weeks after Tesla began shipping Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD v14.3.9, a feature that can activate FSD on the driver’s behalf when a frontal collision is imminent or the driver appears distracted. Elluswamy said in September that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” are coming with v15, the release Tesla has tied to round the clock Robotaxi operation.

The safety messaging matters beyond social media. Tesla has said FSD Supervised was 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on European roads, and it has been putting those figures in front of regulators. Eight EU countries have now approved FSD Supervised, with Croatia the most recent, but the EU’s bloc-wide vote originally set for October 6 has been pushed to December at the earliest.

FSD Supervised is still a Level 2 system, and the driver remains responsible at all times. Even heavy users find reasons to step in. Teslarati’s Joey Klender, who uses FSD for about 76 percent of his driving, laid out five recurring issues on Tuesday that still prompt him to intervene. Clips like this one show the other column of that ledger: moments where the software caught a mistake a human was about to make.

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