SpaceX
SpaceX to launch replacement satellite two years after fateful Falcon 9 failure
On September 1st, 2016, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket suffered a catastrophic anomaly during a static fire test, causing an explosion that completely destroyed the vehicle, the launch pad, and Spacecom’s $200M Amos-6 satellite. This ultimately triggered a months-long investigation into what CEO Elon Musk described as “the most difficult and complex failure [SpaceX has] had in 14 years.”
More than two years and 41 successful consecutive launches later, SpaceX and Israeli satellite operator Spacecom are reportedly aiming to launch Amos-6’s replacement – Amos-17 – as early as the end of May, around three months from now.
Business in Brief: Spacecom says it will launch Amos 17 satellite within four months https://t.co/nkIFd7DzHJ
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) February 25, 2019
Nearly two and a half years distant, the reverberations of SpaceX’s Amos-6 Falcon 9 failure continue to reverberate loudly. Aside from demanding changes to the operational procedures used to launch Falcon 9 and forcing an extensive critical analysis of design, production, and qualification methods, SpaceX has spent countless resources pursuing an extensive redesign of the component pointed at as the primary source of the explosion that destroyed Falcon 9. Known as composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs), SpaceX uses the bottles to store extremely high-pressure helium (5000+ psi, 340+ bar) to pressurize Falcon 9’s RP-1 and oxygen tanks, as well as nitrogen to power its cold-gas maneuvering thrusters.
According to a failure analysis performed by SpaceX with NASA, the USAF, the NTSB, and the FAA, it was concluded that the cause could be traced back to a complex series of events centered around those helium COPVs. Meant to be the first mission to utilize subcooled propellant and oxidizer, the extreme cold in the upper stage LOx tank caused solid oxygen to form on the outside of the COPVs located inside it. While complex, the gist was that liquid (and perhaps solid) oxygen could have formed around the outside of the COPV, potentially finding its way in between the carbon fiber wrappings, creating a buckle in the fibers, and ultimately causing fibers to break. Near the end of this process, those breaking fibers could have created a spark or breached the helium tank, instantaneously overpressurizing the upper stage and causing an explosion.
NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) and NASA itself have aired concerns about those COPVs since 2016, triggering an extraordinarily comprehensive program of testing, characterization, and redesign of the COPVs SpaceX uses. They have now successfully flown on 3-4 Falcon 9 launches under the same expedited propellant loading conditions that an identical rocket will undergo in preparation for Crew Dragon launches. CEO Elon Musk spent several minutes discussing the redesigned COPVs in a May 2018 press conference and did not mince words when he described them as “by far the most advanced pressure vessel[s] ever developed by humanity.”
“The amount of testing and research that’s gone into COPV safety is gigantic. This is by far the most advanced pressure vessel ever developed by humanity. It’s nuts. And I’ve personally gone over the test design, I’ve lost count how many times. But the top engineering minds at SpaceX have agonized over this. We’ve tested the living daylights out of it. We’ve been in deep, deep discussions with NASA about this. And I think we’re in a good situation.” – SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, May 2018
NASA and ASAP concerns have since been alleviated, culminating on February 22nd with an official announcement that NASA was ready for SpaceX to conduct the first uncrewed launch of its Crew Dragon spacecraft on March 2nd. It’s thus almost poetic that customer Spacecom chose the same week to announce a target date for the Falcon 9 launch of a satellite built to replace the destroyed Amos-6, known as Amos-17. Soon after the Amos-6 disaster, Spacecom settled on a free SpaceX launch contract for a future satellite instead of an immediate $50M payout. Procured for around $160M, SpaceX is reportedly targeting the launch of the Boeing-built satellite during the week of May 27th, likely from Launch Complex 40 (LC-40) – the same pad that suffered extensive damage during the September 2016 anomaly.
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- Spacecom’s Boeing-built Amos-17 satellite. (Boeing)
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- Falcon 9 shows off some of its COPVs in a tour of SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory. (SpaceX)
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- An impressive view of Crew Dragon (DM-1), Falcon 9 B1051, and its upper stage. (SpaceX)
Since Amos-6, SpaceX’s record of reliability has been effectively spotless and now stands at an impressive 41 consecutive successful launches, including Falcon Heavy’s February 2018 debut. Aside from the sheer volume of launches SpaceX performed in a little over two years, the company has pushed full speed ahead towards its goal of routinely reusing Falcon 9 boosters. Less than 24 months after the first commercial reuse, SpaceX has landed Falcon 9 boosters 34 times and reused them 20 times, numbers that are only likely to grow in 2019.
Set to occur shortly after the planned launch debuts of Crew Dragon and Falcon Heavy (commercially), SpaceX will hopefully be able to place Amos-17 in a healthy orbit and thus effectively retire the Amos-6 saga before the second half of 2019.
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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.
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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.
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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.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced today that the company will likely attempt to catch the Starship upper stage with its launch tower arms “in a few months.”
In a post on X, Musk wrote, “Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.” He added that the first reflight of a Starship vehicle is expected by the end of 2026 or early 2027, describing it as “a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars.”
Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught.
First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the… https://t.co/O5g9pqrzyo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2026
Musk’s prediction comes amid ongoing progress toward full reusability of the Starship system, a two-stage rocket designed for rapid turnaround and dramatically lower launch costs. Catching the upper stage, known simply as “ship,” with the Mechazilla tower’s mechanical arms would mark a major milestone. It would allow both stages to return directly to the launch site for quick refurbishment and reuse, eliminating the need for ocean recovery.
Musk has previously signaled plans for a ship catch. In July, shortly after SpaceX’s wildly successful Starship 13 mission, he stated that the company would attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight unless problems emerged in the mission data review. Earlier comments also outline conditions such as successful soft ocean landings before attempting a land recovery to minimize risk.
SpaceX has solved Starship’s biggest challenge, Elon Musk says
The latest update from Musk adjusts this timeline to a few months, reflecting the iterative nature of the test campaign.
SpaceX has already demonstrated the tower catch technique successfully with the Super Heavy booster on a couple of occasions. The first successful booster catch occurred during Flight 5 in October 2024, when the massive first stage returned to the Starbase pad in Texas and was plucked from the air by the tower arms.
Additional catches followed on later flights, including Flight 7, proving the concept for the booster and building confidence in the system as a whole.
Achieving a similar catch for the upper stage would represent a significant step forward. The ship returns from much higher speeds and greater heat loads after orbital or near-orbital flight. Success would advance SpaceX’s goal of full and rapid reusability, potentially reducing the cost of access to orbit by a factor of 100 or more and supporting ambitions for frequent satellite deployments, lunar missions, and eventual Mars flights.
Musk has long emphasized that true reusability, refueling rather than discarding hardware, is essential for making humanity a multi-planetary species.
As SpaceX continues refining Starship through successive test flights, the coming months will test whether the ambitious catch timeline can be met. The combination of prior booster successes and improving ship landing precision suggests the company is steadily closing in on this historic capability.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
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