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Watch SpaceX’s last launch and landing of 2020 live [webcast]
Update: Despite no plans for a preflight static fire, SpaceX remains on track to attempt its last launch and landing of 2020 as early as 9 am EST (14:00 UTC), Thursday, December 17th.
After performing a routine preflight wet dress rehearsal (WDR) and booster static fire prior to every launch since September 2016, SpaceX has gradually begun to loosen the requirement for flight-proven rockets in 2020. Instead, if a prior flight or post-flight inspection reveal issues, static fires will serve more as a data-driven diagnostic tool. For flight-proven boosters with a clean bill of health, so to speak, SpaceX appears to be confident enough to skip the procedure on a few internal Starlink launches and the odd customer mission.
Now, despite NROL-108 begin the NRO’s first direct launch contract with SpaceX and first flight on a flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket of any kind, let alone the four-flight booster assigned to support it, the espionage agency apparently has equal faith in SpaceX. Falcon 9 B1059, a new upper stage and payload fairing, and the unspecified NROL-108 payload(s) went vertical at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A on December 16th – far too late for any WDR or static fire testing prior to an early December 17th launch attempt.
The mission will be SpaceX’s 26th and final launch of 2020 and – barring a major surprise – the last orbital US launch of the year. As usual, SpaceX will broadcast the launch live, with coverage beginning around 15 minutes prior to liftoff (8:45 am EST/UTC-5).
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) says that SpaceX remains on track to attempt its last Falcon 9 launch and landing of the year after an almost two-month delay.
Originally scheduled to launch as early as October, the secretive orbital espionage agency’s NROL-108 launch plans were quietly revealed in routine communication permission requests filed by SpaceX with the FCC. Unfortunately, those plans came around the same time as a Falcon 9 booster engine issue aborted a SpaceX launch at the last second and forced the company to undergo a quick but extensive anomaly investigation. As it turns out, the Falcon 9 booster assigned to support NROL-108 (B1059) was practically siblings with the three new boosters affected by the investigation.
SpaceX may have had to swap some of the nine Merlin 1D engines on B1059, although a far less likely outcome given that B1059 had successfully completed four launches and landings at that point. Ultimately, while nothing is known for sure, payload-side issues with the NROL-108 satellite(s) are the most likely cause of most of the eight-week delay that followed. Now, confirmed by the NRO on December 14th, SpaceX is scheduled to launch its second mission for the spy agency no earlier than (NET) 9 am to 12 pm EST (14:00-17:00 UTC) on Thursday, December 17th.
For SpaceX, this will be the third time in a single month that a customer has effectively leapfrogged several Falcon 9 booster reuse milestones, once again exhibiting an extreme amount of confidence in the company’s expertise with flight-proven rockets. On December 6th, Falcon 9 booster B1058 lifted off for the fourth time in support of SpaceX’s CRS-21 space station resupply mission for NASA, marking the space agency’s first launch on a twice- or thrice-flown booster.
On December 13th, carrying a large communications satellite for Sirius XM, another Falcon 9 booster lifted off for the seventh time, becoming the first private customer to launch on a five-flight or six-flight SpaceX rocket.
As few as four days after SXM-7, SpaceX is now scheduled to launch the mysterious NROL-108 mission. It will be the first time the NRO has launched a payload on a flight-proven commercial rocket of any kind, as well as its first launch on a two-flight, three-flight, or four-flight booster – by far the biggest numerical leap a SpaceX customer has ever taken. NRO’s first and only SpaceX launch – technically contracted by spacecraft provider Bell Aerospace, not NRO itself – was completed in May 2017.
While less significant, NROL-108 will also be SpaceX’s first US government launch on a four-flight Falcon 9 booster, yet another indication that even its most conservative customers have fully bought into the value and technical viability of reusable rockets.
After launch, Falcon 9 B1059 will flip around and head back towards the Florida coast for a landing at one of SpaceX’s two East Coast Landing Zones. Deploying a minute or so after booster separation, Falcon 9’s two payload fairing halves are expected to splash down some 330 km (~205 mi) downrange, where SpaceX recovery ships GO Search and GO Ms Tree will attempt recovery.
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.
Investor's Corner
Tesla and SpaceX take “Terafab” Trademark fight to Federal Court
Tesla and SpaceX sue a small Illinois firm after cease and desist letters over Terafab.
Tesla and SpaceX are asking a federal judge to rule that their planned Terafab chip factory does not infringe a small Illinois company’s trademark, a request that arrives only after months of quiet negotiation broke down this summer.
The dispute traces to May 18, when Tesla filed three U.S. trademark applications for “Terafab” and “Tesla Terafab,” covering semiconductor chips and related chip making services. TERA-print LLC, a nanotechnology company that has held a federal trademark for “Tera-Fab” since 2021, responded five days later with a cease and desist letter. According to the lawsuit, first reported by Reuters, TERA-print argued that Tesla and SpaceX’s use of “Terafab” would confuse consumers familiar with its own trademark, which covers a desktop photolithography printer sold to researchers for sensor and bioengineering work.
What stands out in the filing is the timing of TERA-print’s own paperwork. One day before sending that cease and desist letter, on May 22, TERA-print applied to expand its existing registration to cover semiconductor materials, silicon chips, nanoelectronic devices and AI design services, categories it had not previously claimed. Tesla and SpaceX call that filing opportunistic in their complaint, noting it arrived two months after Tesla’s public Terafab announcement and just days after Tesla’s own trademark applications went in.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
By June 10, TERA-print was threatening to sue for federal trademark infringement, false designation of origin and unfair competition, the complaint states. Rather than wait to be sued, Tesla, SpaceX and SpaceXAI met with TERA-print six separate times between June and August trying to resolve the dispute directly. Those talks collapsed, and the companies filed for declaratory judgment this week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, asking a judge to find that “Terafab” does not infringe TERA-print’s mark before TERA-print can file a claim of its own.
TERA-print isn’t backing down. The company told PCMag it discussed a settlement with Tesla as recently as September 2 and feels misled by what it called Tesla’s professed interest in settling. Its CTO, Andrey Ivankin, said TERA-print holds a Defense Department contract to fabricate semiconductors and partially owns Mattiq Inc., an AI company built on TERA-print’s products, and that the company will vigorously defend its rights.
Tesla and SpaceX argue the overlap is superficial. Terafab is planned as a $16.8 billion complex spanning roughly 100 million square feet at the Grimes County site SpaceX confirmed last month, built to produce chips for Optimus robots, Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s orbital data center ambitions, a scale and purpose the companies say no reasonable consumer would confuse with a tabletop lab printer. TERA-print’s product line has stayed focused on lithography tools for biological and sensor research since it registered its mark in 2021.
The trademark fight is the second legal dispute tied to the Terafab project in the past week, following a separate SpaceX suit aimed at keeping company records about the facility out of public view, as KBTX reported. Whether construction proceeds under the Terafab name now depends on a federal judge in Austin.
News
NHTSA just escalated its Tesla Cybercab investigation in a big way
NHTSA escalated its Cybercab audit into a sworn Special Order with a September 30 deadline.
Federal regulators have moved from asking Tesla questions about its Cybercab to demanding sworn answers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a Special Order that requires a Tesla officer to sign an affidavit attesting to the completeness of the company’s responses, with a deadline of September 30.
The order builds on Audit Query AQ26002, which NHTSA opened on September 3, the same day Tesla began commercial Cybercab service in Austin. Teslarati covered that initial inquiry when it surfaced, noting the agency wanted to understand how Tesla certified a vehicle with no permanently attached steering wheel, pedals, or mirrors as compliant with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. A Special Order is a different tool and converts a fact finding review into a legally enforceable demand, the same mechanism NHTSA used against Tesla in 2023 during its Autopilot investigation.
Several of the 21 requests target a specific gap in Cybercab’s design. One asks whether Tesla used temporarily attached human controls at any point to help certify the vehicle, and if so, which standards depended on that equipment being present. Another quotes an existing rule directly: “The service brakes shall be activated by means of a foot control.” Cybercab has no foot pedal. NHTSA wants a detailed explanation of how the vehicle satisfies that requirement, and how it complies without the kind of exemption granted to Zoox in July under Part 555, the regulatory pathway built for steering wheel free vehicles.
The order does not claim Cybercab is unsafe or that Tesla broke a rule. It requires Tesla to explain, under oath, the reasoning behind decisions the company already made when it self-certified the vehicle. That distinction matters, but so does the exposure. Motor1’s reporting, summarized here, put potential civil penalty exposure as high as $139 million if NHTSA later finds the certification was flawed, on top of whatever criminal risk comes with a false sworn statement.
Tesla has not said publicly how it plans to respond. Cybercab is still carrying passengers in Austin through the Robotaxi app while the September 30 deadline approaches, and the company has continued expanding the vehicle’s footprint even as the regulatory question remains open. The Special Order does not pause any of that and just sets a date by which Tesla has to put its certification logic on the record, with a company officer’s name attached to it.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Tesla and SpaceX take “Terafab” Trademark fight to Federal Court
