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SpaceX ships Falcon 9 booster west for second California launch of 2019
A local resident spotted a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster heading west out of Florida, likely bound for the company’s SLC-4E Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) launch pad and second California launch of 2019.
Barring a surprise reassignment, the booster Joshuah Murrah caught is Falcon 9 B1051, on its way west some 50 days after successfully supporting Crew Dragon’s March 2nd launch debut. Despite the availability of B1046, B1047, and B1049, B1051 was assigned to the Canadian Space Agency’s (CSA) Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) shortly after landing aboard OCISLY, triggering major launch delays. The most logical explanation for customer CSA’s and satellite contractor Maxar Technologies’ curious decision is that they must believe that Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters with more than one launch in their past add more risk than those that do not.
According to an April 16th update from CSA, RCM’s launch was scheduled for no earlier than (NET) late May or early June, although word on the ground is that mid-to-late June is now a more likely target. Contrary to rumors of delays, B1051’s shipment west indicates that SpaceX has more or less completed the booster’s refurbishment, likely the easiest Falcon 9 Block 5 refurbishment yet thanks to its relatively slow and cool reentry after launching Crew Dragon.
B1051 returned to Pad 39A’s integration hangar around March 7th, where it spent approximately 50 days being inspected, refurbished, and prepared for cross-country transport. The booster departed Florida on April 26th and will likely arrive at VAFB around May 2nd. Even assuming a slow trip west and buggy preflight preparations, Falcon 9 should theoretically be ready to launch RCM no later than the third or fourth week of May, barring issues or production delays with the mission’s fairing or Falcon upper stage.
Given that Maxar/CSA chose B1051 at a cost of months of launch delays, they may have needs that far outstretch the normal demands of SpaceX’s private (non-government) customers, not out of the question given that CSA is a national space agency and RCM is a high-value (~$1B) science mission. Short of flying on a new Falcon 9 booster, B1051 does theoretically seem to offer the least risk of failure insofar as one can claim that boosters that have completed more launches are more likely to fail.
SpaceX would likely vehemently deny such a claim given their position that highly reusable rockets – much like aircraft – will actually become more reliable and trustworthy the more they launch. Both positions make sense in theory but theory falls flat in the face of actual data, of which only SpaceX and certain customers have access to.
As an external observer, the best data available is a binary public record of Falcon 9 launch success, as well as the degree to which missions are delayed beyond their scheduled launch targets. Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters have launched 16 times in 11 months, six of which used a flight-proven first stage. Flight-proven boosters appear to be a bit more finicky than unflown rockets in terms of late-stage launch delays, but the data is inconsistent and the sample size statistically insignificant. More generally, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have launched 72 times in nine years and suffered two total failures, both caused by unflown upper stages. In 72 launches, including 20 missions with flight-proven boosters, a Falcon 9/Heavy first stage has never caused a total mission failure.
In short, it’s impossible to intuit any clear performance or reliability advantage without the sort of granular per-mission data that only SpaceX and privileged customers have access to. In general, Falcon 9 – reused or not – has consecutively completed 41 successful launches since its second and last mission failure in September 2016, half (49%) of which used flight-proven boosters. Of course, customers have every right to their own standards and expectations of quality and risk-reduction, but Falcon 9’s performance largely speaks for itself at this point – anything beyond its default record of mission assurance is just icing on the proverbial spaceflight cake.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
